[LEAPSECS] New Year in Times Square

[Steve Allen]

On 2011 Jan 1, at 07:59, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:

> iPhone Glitch Temporarily Kills Alarms in 2011

> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374950,00.asp

> 

> And you can't blame leap seconds for this one... there wasn't any 

> this year.


I wonder if that's some sort of ISO week number thing in the
iCalendar parsing code.  In the historical record on the net
there are still lots of postings which blame the 2008 Zune
failure on the leap second instead of the leap year, so there
is broad misunderstanding of the mechanisms.

On 2011 Jan 1, at 11:16, Jonathan E. Hardis wrote:

> A data point, on how one of the most technically adept broadcasters

> in the U.S. deals with leap seconds:


For this and similar applications, if the leap second goes into the 
zoneinfo file then the same techniques which get tested twice a year 
to keep things from being an hour off will also keep things from
being a second off.

Putting the leap second into the zoneinfo file could be one of the
best favors ever done to the software industry, for it would prompt
a review of lots of applications that currently fail on other
*predictable* calendrical hiccups.
                                                                                
--
Steve Allen               <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
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