[LEAPSECS] leap smear

Daniel R. Tobias dan at tobias.name
Fri Sep 16 18:46:30 EDT 2011


On 16 Sep 2011 at 10:54, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> Well, Googles hack is a workaround for internal use with no regard

> to subsecond interoperability with anybody else.


That's typical of Google's general philosophy, where they value their
services functioning smoothly over strict compliance with external
standards; for instance, "web purist geeks' find it infuriating that
Google's HTML fails to validate, but they're more interested in
shaving off a few bytes by doing things like omitting quotes around
attributes even where the standards require them, so long as all
known browsers render the page correctly.

Where time is concerned, they (probably correctly) judge that
subsecond precision of timestamps isn't going to matter to users of
their services, so all they're really concerned about is internal
consistency between their many servers, which will be achieved if
they all maintain accurate timepieces following the same internal
standard for dealing with leap seconds.

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