The leap second is added to co-ordinated universal time (UTC) to
keep it close to mean solar time. A total of 25 leap seconds
have been added over the last 40 years. The leap second added on
June 30 caused problems around the world. Jonathan Corbet told
iTWire that there were fixes for the kernel in the works being
tested now. "But there is no huge hurry to get them into a
released kernel; the next leap second won't happen for some
time," he said. "It's not like an actively exploited security
problem." One known problem in the kernel is something known as
the Unix Millennium Bug that will surface as an inability to
keep time close to or in 2038. But that is very far away and
Corbet, when asked about it, responded: "I don't think there's
much thought going into it now." The kernel stores system time
as a signed 32-bit integer and and interprets it as the number
of seconds that have elapsed since zero UTC time on January 1,
1970. "If you dig around on the net, you can probably find
examples of (Linux creator) L