On Second Thought.
Earlier this week, Raffi was wondering what NTP would do with tonight’s leap second. This morning, curiosity got the best of me and I found a good explanation from the German time-keeper maker Meinberg. Basically, NTP will just pass the fact that there is a leap second along to the OS, and it’s up to the OS to decide how to handle it. The really interesting bits come from how the OS then handles it, since most applications can’t handle 23:59:60. If you are really interested, the Meinberg explanation has some great graphs of an NTP client skewing Window’s clock to account for the second.
The really interesting bits come from how the OS then handles it, since most applications can’t handle 23:59:60.
I personally think an easier way to take care of this problem would be for everyone to grab the heaviest object they can find and run east. If Newton knew what he was talking about, we could speed the rotation of the earth and wouldn’t have to bother with leap seconds (then again, that would only be about 8.7×10e-14 of the earth’s mass, and does anyone know how the earth’s population is distributed compared to latitude?)
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