Re: went pretty dang smoothly at this end
On Sat, 31 Dec 2005, Rob Seaman wrote: Was watching time.gov and leapsecond.com (the comparative clocks). Counted up to 23:59:60 (well, 16:59:60 in Tucson). The GPS-UTC incremented as did the TAI-UTC. The TV didn't melt down either. No obvious Airbuses plummeting from the sky. Life be good. I was on board a United Airlines Boeing 777 en route from Chicago to London. We were at 30,000 feet somewhere over eastern Canada when the leap second occurred. The first officer gave us a countdown to midnight in London, and I'm happy to report that the plane failed to fall out of the sky, explode, or otherwise deviate from its course at 23:59:60. David Harper
Re: a system that fails spectacularly
Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: Some of us have been trying to drive this point though for some time: 99.99% of all programmers have no idea what a leap-second is. And these are the people who program the technology that runs our civilization. The confusion runs deeper than that. I discovered last year that implementations of Java up to and including Java 1.3 did not implement the correct daylight saving time rules for the United Kingdom during the period between 27 October 1968 and 31 October 1971 when the U.K. kept its clocks permanently one hour ahead of GMT and called this British Standard Time. The daylight saving time rules were implemented as little more than a blanket starts on the last Sunday in March, ends on the last Sunday in October prescription, with no provision for irregularities such as BStandardT. As a result, Java programs would assume that the U.K. was keeping GMT during the winter months of 1968/9, 1969/70 and 1970/1 when in fact the clocks were an hour ahead. This error was fixed in Java 1.4, when a rather more sophisticated mechanism was added for handling daylight saving time rules, based upon the Unix zoneinfo database, which does know about the irregularities and exceptions. When even Sun Microsystems can make this kind of mistake, with all of the resources at its disposal, Joe or Jane Programmer working for a small company can be forgiven for not being familiar with the arcane world of leap seconds. There are, after all, only 102 of us on this mailing list :-) David Harper -- Dr David Harper Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, England Tel: 01223 834244 Fax: 494919 http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Users/adh/
Re: a system that fails spectacularly
Rob Seaman wrote: I don't know whether to be more embarrassed for the company or for the international standards process. How many companies claim ISO 9000 conformance? If they don't comprehend the requirements of international standards pertaining to their products, how likely is it that they comprehend their customers' requirements? I am reminded of the Dilbert cartoon from way back when, in which the pointy-haired boss is talking to a potential customer. Customer: Your product looks good, but you can't be our supplier unless yoru company is ISO 9000 certified. PHB: So ... you don't care how bad our internal processes are, as long as they're well-documented and used consistently. Customer: That's right. PHB: Our documented process says I must now laugh in your face and double our price. I think says everything you need to know about ISO 9000 in the real world. David Harper -- Dr David Harper Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, England Tel: 01223 834244 Fax: 494919 http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Users/adh/
