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wmf 21 hours ago [-]
Systems are absolutely not ready. Leap seconds are a bad idea and negative leap seconds are worse. Just don't do it and let the drift cancel out.
Bender 21 hours ago [-]
Google's proposal is a smear. [1] Most time servers do not use smear. No idea what behavior it may introduce in places where sub-second time is important. Curious if all these bugs [2] were fixed specifically to deal with going backwards.
The brilliant thing about the smear is that it distributes the new second across each second of the day, so that each second differed by 1/86400 seconds, well within the margin of error for NTP.
As far as the computers were concerned, nothing was different.
d00d0ff000 21 hours ago [-]
NTP.
By any other standard, most manually set clocks are up to a full minute off all the time.
subscribed 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but we're thinking of systems where nanoseconds matter.
MiFID 2 alone forces sub-μs precision. Million times less than the leap 1 second.
NTP minute away is good for displaying date on the workstation, not for many of the devices that are critical to the modern world.
cyanydeez 18 hours ago [-]
dont most systems that rely on sharp timing simply manage it themselves.
subscribed 18 hours ago [-]
Yesno.
Sure they have their own time servers fed from the GPS, but they need to be _accurate_ in relation to the world.
But timestamps used by companies forced to use very accurate timing must be synchronised to UTC.
al_borland 14 hours ago [-]
If we have positive and negative leap seconds, why are we doing anything at all? 1 second forward, just to go 1 second back 10 years later…
yen223 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think we can predict ahead of time whether we'll need a leap second or not
If the question is "why bother syncing time to Earth's orbit around the sun at all", I don't have a good answer for that except at this point, it's tradition.
[1] - https://developers.google.com/time/smear
[2] - https://rivassec.com/leap-second-chaos-2012.html
As far as the computers were concerned, nothing was different.
By any other standard, most manually set clocks are up to a full minute off all the time.
MiFID 2 alone forces sub-μs precision. Million times less than the leap 1 second.
NTP minute away is good for displaying date on the workstation, not for many of the devices that are critical to the modern world.
Sure they have their own time servers fed from the GPS, but they need to be _accurate_ in relation to the world.
But timestamps used by companies forced to use very accurate timing must be synchronised to UTC.
If the question is "why bother syncing time to Earth's orbit around the sun at all", I don't have a good answer for that except at this point, it's tradition.