Remember the Y2K bug that gave everyone using computers sleepless nights Well something similar is coming our way in 2015.
Remember the Y2K bug that gave everyone using computers sleepless nights Well something similar is coming our way in 2015.
Newsscientist.com says June 30 will be a second longer than any other day this year.
A “leap second” needs to be added in 2015 to make sure the time on atomic clocks stays in sync with Earth’s rotational time, but some Internet companies are dreading the day.
Earth’s rotation has been slowing down by about two thousandths of a second every day. But atomic clocks, which are now accurate up to quadrillionths of a second, don’t change pace. While this situation isn’t an immediate problem, it would eventually cause clocks to become so out of sync with Earth’s rotation that they would read noon during the dead of night.
This will be the 26th leap second added to a calendar year since the practice began in 1972. In the past, the extra second has messed with computer systems. The last leap second was added in 2012, and it caused problems for big companies like Reddit, LinkedIn, Gizmodo and FourSquare.
The problem is that during the leap second, the computer clock shows 60 seconds instead of simply rolling over to the next minute, or shows the 59th second twice. The computer sees a leap second as time going backward. The machine registers this as a system error, and the CPU can overload.
Google, to skirt the problem, will add a millisecond to its servers every once in a while throughout the year. This way, the slowed-down servers don't notice when an extra second is slipped in. Another good way to avoid any trouble is to simply shut down a computer system for an hour or two around the leap second.
