The International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) has declared the end of leap seconds!
UTC will no longer add and subtract seconds based on the wobbling of the earth. No longer will we have occasional minutes with 58 or 61 seconds. This eliminates a large class of software bugs, one of which caused thousands of GPS units to fail.
I’ve long ranted that leap seconds are silly and dangerous.
- The claim that astonomers need leap seconds is false. They have other means of factoring in the earth’s wobble.
- People that need leap seconds can use their own timezone. Why change the UTC that most people use?
- Humans can’t tell if we are off by a few seconds. Imagine there is a leap second every other year. By the time you died the sunset would be less than a minute off. You’d never notice!
Leap seconds cause confusion and software bugs. Software has to managae the occasional 59- or 61-second minute. That’s a lot more difficult than one would think. Since Unixtime is number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970, you can’t calculate today’s date/time without carrying around an up-to-date list of all the leapseconds (positive and negative) that have ever happened. That’s a lot of info to include in every program that does time calculations.
Here’s the official resolution:
