[smallpoxgirl]

Leap seconds are, I think, a fairly well recognized phenomenon. I would assume that anyone writing software that needed to track time that closely would take them into account.

[bodigami]

In Unix, we count time in "seconds after Unix" (standarized as 1st of January, 1970 Common Era)... there's the "2048 bug" which is solvable with simply upping the bits in the time variable to a 64 int... or something like that.

I have wondered, why not adopt the superior Mayan Calendar with some variations and make a "Galactic Calendar"? Seconds have to be some % bigger so that a "leap year" is not needed... in fact, leap years are nothing but mediocre design of a calendar.

[kpeavey]

I went out with a girl back in college, her father did whatever he did at the US Naval Observatory in Arlington, VA. I have no idea what he did, and the girl I went out with has nothing whatsoever to do with my story, so I'll just get on with it...

The US Naval Observatory in Arlington, VA is the timekeeper for the country. The keep track of time with sand in hourglasses, stopwatches, wind up alarm clocks and some really awesome tools like vibrating quartz and Xenonarific Atomic clock type of devices. These guys have some really cool toys, but truth be told, they are kinda dull at parties. Nonetheless, whatever time these guys say it is, thats what time it is. They'll spend years deeply involved in calculations in order to keep the time accurate to a fraction of a second. Kinda like tripping over a buck to pick up a nickel.

Anyway, as the standard reference of timekeeping, other timekeeping systems which need a standard reference use the USNO. The USNO keeps everyone on the same page by broadcasting a signal over the radio, a short wave band. They don't play Mozart, or Chopin or Billy Idol, nor do they play hip hop, top 40 or jazz (that's JAZZ, baby!) They certainly don't broadcast Limbaugh. They simple repeat the time, spoken in English followed by a precisely measured BEEP. Systems which use this broadcast as a standard reference include various governments, the military, scientists and engineers, astonomers, and some very particular chefs who want their biscuits to bake for juuust the right amount of time. Microsoft also uses this as their standard time reference, as do cell phone, television and communication companies. Chances are your computer, whether or not you want it to or even know about it, will make contact with the Microsoft timekeeping webthingy and keep your computer up to date, in about a milisecond.

The only place that does not use this time reference, as far as I can tell, is my employer. Seems they are always 10 minutes ahead of me in the morning and an hour slow around quitting time. The men ask me what time it is and I tell them "Time to get back to work you sorry arse sombich," thats when I kick something to look tough. The clock never stops, and even though I am always watching the clock, at the end of the week, sometimes my time has disappeared. This often ends in a conversation between me and my employer concerning the 2nd law of thermodynamics and sometimes temporal singularities. In the end, Time is Money, I put in the time, show me the money or I'll burn this place to the ground.

Time is an abstract concept at best. A day can last forever, but a lifetime goes by so fast. Measure the seconds, a watched pot never boils. Measure the paychecks, it zooms by and its tax time again already?! Remember way back when? Seems like only yesterday.

So this year we make up for all that time spent living in the past. What will you do with your extra second? If you could be anyone or do anything, even for just one second, this is the time to do it. We only get a little bit of time here on earth, but if you spend it right, a little bit is all you need.

[lper100km]

KP – an interesting and enjoyable piece.

My only quibble – the flow of time here does not change – nor will it. We just move the marker posts a little bit every so often that makes us feel that we have a little more or less.

[lowem]

Awesome.

Me, I stick to NTP.

[IslandCrow]

I now have more time to prepare for the coming collapse. The best news I hear all day.

ps having been a programmer in the pre-Y2K days (I left that job in '85), I am not so sure that things like this would be taken into account...yes we knew that there would be a problem come the year 2000...but that seemed a long way off, and memory storage was still expensive, so we just left the problem to be dealt with later.

[uNkNowN ElEmEnt]

It depends on the program. If its an updatable program that takes cues from a source on-line (for instance) the on-line updateable source will make the adjustment and no one will notice.

Many stand alone programs however, do not. Unless there is or was that consideration taken into account (and since its is not a regularly occuring change the chances are almost nil) at the time the program was created, then it will not make the change.

[bodigami]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('IslandCrow', 'I') now have more time to prepare for the coming collapse. The best news I hear all day.

ps having been a programmer in the pre-Y2K days (I left that job in '85), I am not so sure that things like this would be taken into account...yes we knew that there would be a problem come the year 2000...but that seemed a long way off, and memory storage was still expensive, so we just left the problem to be dealt with later.

[leal]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'M')y husband just told me there's an extra second this year at midnight on New Year's Eve, similar to the extra day in February during leap years. I am wondering how computer programs will deal with this. I know it's not a big deal, but a lot of the programs I use in meteorology deal in Julian seconds for time calculations. Are these extra "leap" seconds already accounted for in most such software? I've not encountered this issue before and I wondered if any other programmers on here were aware of it, and how/whether it's being accounted for.

Also, it's just sort of interesting that there's an extra second.