More millennium bug terror could hit Linux thanks to a leap second

EXPERTS ARE PREDICTING 

something between minor inconvenience and jaw-dropping terror, after it was announced that a leap second will be added to clocks on 30 June.The Paris Observatory has confirmed that on the appointed day, atomic clocks will be programmed to add in 11:59:60, in order to compensate for the idiosyncratic nature of the Earth's orbit, caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, after consultation with the city's International Earth Rotation Service.

Leap seconds, which are added every few years, have historically not played nicely with Linux- and Unix-based systems, resulting in sites like LinkedIn and Reddit going temporarily up-swanneewardwhile reality caught up.Some countries have expressed their concern at the use of leap seconds, however Britain is among those keen to keep things just the way they are, not least of all because it would mean that Coordinated Universal Time, which is calculated mathematically, would start to drift from Greenwich Mean Time, which is measured by the time the Sun crosses the Greenwich Meridian

More pertinent, however, is the fear that more fundamental systems based on Unix and Linux architectures could be boggled by the bonus blink-of-an-eye, and that we could see planes fall out of the sky and pacemakers skip a beat.But, of course, that's what they said at the turn of the millennium, and all it actually did was... well... nothing, actually.Linux and Unix are already prone to a similar 'millenium bug' coming in 2038, at which point system calendars will reset to zero, leading to even more absolutely nothing.However, if you are reading a charred print out of this article you've found in the smouldering wreck of humanity, sometime in mid-July, The INQUIRERapologises. We got it completely wrong. Remain indoors.