Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon launched public efforts on Monday to cancel the second leap, additional lice occasionally which made the clock in harmony with the actual rotation of the earth. The authority of the timeliness of the US and France agreed.
Since 1972, the authority of world timeliness has added a second leap 27 times to a global hour known as the International Atomic Time (TAI). Incent 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 order of appropriate activities such as adding data to the database.
Temporal tweaks cause more problems – such as internet blackouts – rather than benefits, they said. And dealing with seconds leaps in the end in vain, this group argues, because the speed of the rotation of the earth is actually not true -actually changed historically.
“We estimate that if we only hold on to Tai without a second observation, we must be good for at least 2,000 years,” said Research Scientist Ahmad Byagowi from the Meta Meta Facebook parent company via email. “Maybe at that time we might need to consider correction.*
The technological giant and the two main institutions agreed that it was time to throw away the second leap. That is the US National Standard and Technology Institute (NIST) and its French equivalent, Bureau International de Poids et Mesures (BIPM).
This government support is very important, given that in the end the government and scientists – not technology companies – are responsible for the world global clock system.
Changes in the second leap triggered a large -ranking Reddit blackout in 2012, as well as related problems at Mozilla, LinkedIn, Yelp and Airline Amadeus ordering services. In 2017, the second error in Cloudflare knocked on a small portion of the customer server of the network infrastructure company offline. Cloudflare software, comparing two hours, calculates that time has been resigned but cannot handle the results correctly.
The computer is very good at counting. But humans introduce deviations such as leaps that can make the keys fit in the work. One of the most famous is the Y2K bug, when the database written by humans recorded only the last two digits of this year and disrupted mathematics when 1999 became 2000. The related problem will come in 2038 when the 32-bit number that several computers use computers to count Seconds from January 1, 1970, no longer big enough.
And earlier this year, several choking websites when the web browser reached the 100 version because they were programmed to deal with only the two -digit version number.
To ease problems with computer clocks that do not like 61 seconds minutes, Google spearheaded the idea of ”jumps” which makes changes to the two second jumps in many small steps for a day.
Adding a second leap causes problems with a computer. And at some point, we must reduce one – something that never happened – and that is likely to reveal new problems.
“This can have a destroying effect on software that relies on timers or schedules,” said Byagowi and Meta Engineer Obeukhov in a Monday blog post.