4 ms·
Wonder why they don't add an average weight to the time rather than this troublesome extra second.
by xedarius 11y ago
Wonder why they don't add an average weight to the time rather than this troublesome extra second.
- bad_user 11y agoWhat do you mean?
- to3m 11y agoYou could add an extra second by having the previous 1,000 seconds (16 hours) last 1,001ms each, say. Then the scope for confusion is more likely to be limited to software that reads human time, and counts milliseconds, and requires the two to match over time. Probably a much smaller percentage of all programs. When you know what the problems are likely to be, you can of course pick the approach that's least likely to cause you problems! But if you're going in blind, then this seems like it could be a safer way to do it. (You might use some kind of a curve to do this, so it's smooth like. I imagine this is what the comment about weighting refers to.)
- ucho 11y agoThat's how Google does that: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/05/Got-a-second-A-leap-second-that-is-Be-ready-for-June-30th.html http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/05/Got-a-second... . The drawback is that their clock will be "wrong" for most of that day.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bad_user 11y agoSo the problem is that seconds were measured relative to the duration of a day, but that standard changed and now seconds are measured with atomic clocks, making a day to not be equal to 24 hours, yet we pretend that it is, hence the need for leap seconds. I understand that this isn't ideal for people dealing with actual dates and times, but the upside is that timespans expressed in seconds are now universal, so for example Unix timestamps actually have meaning that doesn't change according to earth's rotation.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]