morwen: (Default)
Abigail Brady ([personal profile] morwen) wrote2005-07-30 03:01 pm

leap second

breaking the long drought of leap seconds, the International Earth Rotation Service announced earlier this month there is to be an extra second on Saturday 31st December 2005, at midnight GMT. so it will go from 23:59:58 to 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 and then to 00:00:00 on new year's day.

many of us have wished for more time. what will you do with the extra second?

[identity profile] danalkaelra.livejournal.com 2005-07-30 10:04 pm (UTC)(link)
So instead of telling programmers to write better software, they want to alter the measurement of time.

'it's not the program that's buggy it's your concept of reality'

[identity profile] eldritchreality.livejournal.com 2005-07-30 11:49 pm (UTC)(link)
That's the ultimate in the: "it's not a bug, its a feature" line of argument.

I can see it now, "Our software is futureproofed, we run on mordern up to date time 2.0, not that outdated badly designed time 1.0 you're all working with."

"You need to get new metaphysics before you can run our software. Your previous model is 6 billion years old, don't you think it's time to upgrade? We can assure you, the model we prefer is 100% made in the US, and guaranteed until the end of time"

That's a point, have any soothsayers popped up and made comments about the "end of time" yet? They've got to be able to get some serious milage out of this.

[identity profile] abigailb.livejournal.com 2005-07-31 08:38 am (UTC)(link)
I think it's the people who made minutes sometimes have 59 or 61 seconds who are altering the measurement of time. Obviously they've won, and this is just an attempt to try and restore the old measurement of time.