[LEAPSECS] Did John Oliver just save the leap-second ?

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Wed Jul 1 04:31:20 EDT 2015


It was quite interesting to watch Twitter during the leap-second, it is
pretty obvious that John Olivers attention to the leap-second vastly
increased the awareness.

Given that awareness has always been the major deficiency about leap-seconds
he may just have saved them, by showing that awareness is possible.

That being said, it's appalling how much of the news coverage has not
been able to get even basic facts right, leaving a lot of people with
really weird ideas, from leapsecond happening at local midnight to
all days henceforth being one second longer.

It's pretty obvious from this:

	https://twitter.com/theckman/status/616039183648337920/photo/1

That the leap-second was anything but flawlessly executed, but we don't
know how much of that is bugs in monitoring and how much is bugs in
production.

I'm not quite sure about the consequence of this one:

	https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437

But it seems possible that large fraction of Linux systems have
been following Googles leap-smear without knowing it because of
systemd.

It will be some days before news from "Serious IT"™ filters out
through the press-officers to the world at large, most of them
will try to sweep any troubles under the rug as usual.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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