Notice: Trying to access array offset on value of type null in /srv/pobeda.altspu.ru/wp-content/plugins/wp-recall/functions/frontend.php on line 698
The tech giants and two key agencies agree that it’s time to ditch the leap second. Those are the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its French equivalent, the Bureau International de Poids et Mesures (BIPM).
Zuckerberg told employees that there are a ‘bunch of people’ at his company who ‘shouldn’t be here’ and part of his plan to amp up the expectations at Meta is so people can realize ‘this place isn’t for Breaking news you.’
This is the silicone valley CEO’s latest crack down on ‘lazy’ staff, after he provided a deluge of cushy benefits for employees during the coronavirus pandemic — including extra days off and company-wide bonuses.
To ease the problems with computer clocks that don’t like 61-second minutes, Google pioneered the idea of the «leap smear» that makes the leap second’s changes in many tiny steps over the course of a day.
In a written statement to Parliament, Mr Clarke said: ‘The latest estimate of £42.5bn shows an increase against the original range of £35-39bn, which is primarily due to the most recent valuation of the UK’s obligation under Article 142 for EU pensions.
The temporal tweak causes more problems — like internet outages — than benefits, they say. And dealing with leap seconds ultimately is futile, the group argues, since the Earth’s rotational speed hasn’t actually changed much historically.
Not everyone was shocked by the price however, with one person, seemingly referring to the cost of living crisis, writing: ‘Cheese, where I live, in Asda is about £2.50/2.70. The price has gone up quite a bit.’
‘Everyone is taking the p**s at the moment and I don’t know why because all the queues have disappeared from the chippy,’ the wrote. ‘Pubs and restaurants are pretty empty, everyone has cut back because of high prices, so they lose out even more in the end!’
Computers are really good at counting. But humans introduce irregularities like leap seconds that can throw a wrench in the works. One of the most infamous was the Y2K bug, when human-authored databases recorded only the last two digits of the year and messed up math when 1999 became 2000. A related problem is coming in 2038 when a 32-bit number that some computers use to count the seconds from Jan. 1, 1970, is no longer large enough.
«We are predicting that if we just stick to the TAI without leap second observation, we should be good for at least 2,000 years,» research scientist Ahmad Byagowi of Facebook parent company Meta said via email. «Perhaps at that point we might need to consider a correction.*
Since 1972, the world’s timekeeping authorities have added a leap second 27 times to the global clock known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Instead of 23:59:59 changing to 0:0:0 at midnight, an extra 23:59:60 is tucked in. That causes a lot of indigestion for computers, which rely on a network of precise timekeeping servers to schedule events and to record the exact sequence of activities like adding data to a database.
Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched a public effort Monday to scrap the leap second, an occasional extra tick that keeps clocks in sync with the Earth’s actual rotation. US and French timekeeping authorities concur.
The leap second change triggered a massive Reddit outage in 2012, as well as related problems at Mozilla, LinkedIn, Yelp and airline booking service Amadeus. In 2017, a leap second glitch at Cloudflare knocked a fraction of the network infrastructure company’s customers’ servers offline. Cloudflare’s software, comparing two clocks, calculated that time had gone backward but couldn’t properly handle that result.