Why you should worry about leap second in Jun-30, 2015

When this is end of Jun-30, 2015, an additional second will be added. 23:59:59 will stay for 2 seconds before in becomes 00:00:00 of Jul-1. This is UTC time.  So, for most of the European countries, it will be their late night. For the America, this is their evening time.

For Asia, it's the start of business hour. E.g. Sydney will be 10AM, Singapore 8AM, Tokyo 9AM. There is going to be lots of uncertainty on how it may affect different computer systems. The effort to be spent by different organizations to ensure their system works fine is going to be hugh (which I consider to be non-productive). I hope the IERS decision to add leap second will be revoked or at least moved to Dec-31 when most of the world will be enjoying their holiday.

If you want to know more, below some link you may look at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/13/technology/leap-second/

For technical readers, more information below on how Linux could be affected,

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49691

https://access.redhat.com/articles/15145

http://lwn.net/Articles/504744/

Below not exactly related to leap second but explains how application logic may cause problem when leap second is added.

https://blog.habets.se/2010/09/gettimeofday-should-never-be-used-to-measure-time

Updated after the leap second added on Jul-1: the systems I have are running fine after the leap second happen. I did have tools that would be hit by the Linux bug so I have to upgrade the OS for these machines. And its a tedious process to inventory check my servers to confirm all is prepared and no problem on Jul-1.