On 21 Dec 2005 at 21:33, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: > I think the difference between you and me as a programmer is that > if you make a mistake, some radio telescope bungles up an observation > or worst case runs against a mechanical end-stop. If I make a > mistake in FreeBSD millions of machines may bungle up things I have > not even dreamt about them doing. > > For Windows the problem is two orders of magnitude higher.
I'm a programmer, myself, and I'm pretty confident that all of the computers (Windows or Linux) that I have anything to do with running, maintaining, or writing programs that run on them, will fail to have any adverse effect due to the presence or absence of a leap second at the end of this year or at any other time. This confidence comes from the fact that none of these computers, nor the software running on them, has any need for continuously-accurate real time syncronized with a world standard, something I know from the fact that their system clocks can at times get many seconds (or even minutes) removed from correct time due to their own inaccuracy, requiring pretty big jumps forward or backward each time they are reset to the standard time (which happens automatically at intervals on some machines, and is done manually from time to time on others). While the system clock is inaccurate, all software on the machines continues running with no problem other than that system log timestamps are not exactly correct. This can be annoying when one is trying to track down a network problem by comparing logs on different systems, but it is not life-threatening. Any leap seconds that occur are "lost in the noise" of the adjustments that need to be made to the system clocks every time the time is re-synchronized. I suspect more "real world" computers are in roughly this situation as opposed to being absolutely dependent on being correct to the millisecond or microsecond at all times; the system clocks of practically all computers are just not sufficiently accurate for that. If computers start having an actual atomic clock on board, maybe things will be different. -- == Dan == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
