On July 1 at exactly 7:59:59, Bejing time, the world' s atomic clocks will pause for a single second, or, more precisely, change to the unusual time of 7:59:60. The addition of a leap second   , is to keep our clocks in time with the slowing of Earth' s rotation   and astronomical time as measured by the sun. Just one extra second could affect the way computers and websites work, however. When the last leap second was added back in 2012, the community website Reddit crashed. For Reddit, the problem was that a Linux system got confused when it checked the network time and found an extra second. Speaking to Wired about the problem back in 2012, Linux creator Linus Torvalds commented:"Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something. It' s really annoying, because it' s code that is almost never used, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions. " Companies have thought of their own solutions, and Google' s"leap smear"may be the best- known example. As company engineer Christopher Pascoe explains in a blog post, companies usually try to turn back the clocks by one second at the end of the day so that they play that second again. However, Pascoe believes this creates problems. He asked:"Does email that comes in during that second get stored correctly?"Google has a solution: Cut the extra second into milliseconds and then put these tiny amounts of time into the system throughout the day."This means that when it became time to add an extra second at midnight."Says Pascoe."Our clocks have already taken this into account over the course of the day." For many companies without Google' s money, however, the leap second will likely still cause some crashes. What' s Pascoe' s attitude toward Google' s solution to the problem?
Ambiguous. Approving. Doubtful. Cautious.