Leap Second!

Faugaun

Ok, let me get this straight....according to the leap second wiki this has occurred 26 times since 1972? that's 26 times in 43 years.....So basically we are spending an hour long maintenance to correct something that over the course of my entire life will change less than 1 minute? WTF is wrong with society? I'm sure wall street the banks and everyone else did the same thing ....Sigh I don;t understand people ....

coryevans_3b14_ESO

Faugaun wrote: »

Ok, let me get this straight....according to the leap second wiki this has occurred 26 times since 1972? that's 26 times in 43 years.....So basically we are spending an hour long maintenance to correct something that over the course of my entire life will change less than 1 minute? WTF is wrong with society? I'm sure wall street the banks and everyone else did the same thing ....Sigh I don;t understand people ....

It's to keep the calender/clocks correct. Why is that a bad thing?

abbymeach

I wouldn't want to risk my in game clock being 1 second off, glad they're doing everything in their power to avert this potential disaster!!

maxlacab16_ESO

Leap Second = leap 1 second

Leap Year = leap 1 day

Figures. Those atomic clock people have their terms straight at least!

Faugaun

coryevans_3b14_ESO wrote: »

Faugaun wrote: »

Ok, let me get this straight....according to the leap second wiki this has occurred 26 times since 1972? that's 26 times in 43 years.....So basically we are spending an hour long maintenance to correct something that over the course of my entire life will change less than 1 minute? WTF is wrong with society? I'm sure wall street the banks and everyone else did the same thing ....Sigh I don;t understand people ....

It's to keep the calender/clocks correct. Why is that a bad thing?

why not just do a 1 hour correction every (43/26*60*60) 5953.8461538461538461538461538462 years? That way at least as few people as possible have to deal with these absurdities.......I mean honestly what are we calculating that even matters to the level of accuracy that 1 second off every 1.65 years is so critical?

Caligamy_ESO

So this will probably require a 5 gb patch downloading at 50 kbps I'm guessing..

Faugaun

NIST Time Scales

NIST has two major time scales. The core scale, AT1, is a weighted average of commercial clocks, dominated by active hydrogen-masers. The most-used output is UTC(NIST), a real-time realization of the international standard, Coordinated Universal Time.
AT1 produces a stable frequency from the twelve minute measurement cycle out to several months. AT1 is generated every twelve minutes as a weighted average of several commercial atomic frequency standards. Dominated by about six active hydrogen masers, there are a number of commercial cesium beam-tube standards in the scale.
UTC(NIST) is a real-time realization of the international standard for time, Coordinated Universal Time, a weighted post-processed time scale. The time standard, UTC, is agreed by international treaty to be generated as a weighted average of clocks around the world. As such, it only exists after the fact. Any real-time version must be a prediction of what the defined value will be when it is published in circular-T.

Source: http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp50/TimeScales.cfm

Faugaun

So the most common time utilized is the real-time weighted average (which only exists in the past) which we use to predict into the future .... Well at least this makes sense since we take an average and go with that and completely disregard the solar time....

coryevans_3b14_ESO

Faugaun wrote: »

So the most common time utilized is the real-time weighted average (which only exists in the past) which we use to predict into the future .... Well at least this makes sense since we take an average and go with that and completely disregard the solar time....

Why wouldn't we disregard solar time when it changes daily?

Faugaun

coryevans_3b14_ESO wrote: »

Faugaun wrote: »

So the most common time utilized is the real-time weighted average (which only exists in the past) which we use to predict into the future .... Well at least this makes sense since we take an average and go with that and completely disregard the solar time....

Why wouldn't we disregard solar time when it changes daily?

I'm just observing that we do .... and we should...


Anyways, I am curious....why couldn't this just wait till next regular maintenance instead of generating a whole hour of game downtime for a 1 second correction?

Nilmot

One thing is for certain. We should leave decisions like this up to video game message boards and not collective world science.

Egonieser

Because 1 second may not matter to you but it matters in the digital world. Even miliseconds count, where your brain has not even begun to process information, supercomputers have done millions if not billions of calculations in that second. And if the time is off even by that amount, it can cause serious desync and wrong predictions where it matters because they are done to accuracies of micro, even nanoseconds.

So yeah... It does matter. Maybe not to you, but it does to the digital world.

coryevans_3b14_ESO

Because that one second could cause huge conflicts.

ADarklore

I just think it sucks that they'd decide to do this in a week that already has had downtime for maintenance instead of waiting to do it during a week that one isn't scheduled.

maxlacab16_ESO

Nilmot wrote: »

One thing is for certain. We should leave decisions like this up to video game message boards and not collective world science.

...agree!

Dave2001

Caligamy_ESO wrote: »

So this will probably require a 5 gb patch downloading at 50 kbps I'm guessing..[/quote

Hey why not? Their patching system seems to make about as much sense as a "leap second".

Scamandros

Probably more to do with backend system maintenance and pesky legal conditions/loopholes that start to jump up when your not in sync with the rest of the world's time

Dave2001

C'mon.. it's F'in 7:30am here in eastern US. WTF is the server doing still down ? It takes that long to fix a "leap second" discrepancy? Pitiful.

Pendrillion

ADarklore wrote: »

I just think it sucks that they'd decide to do this in a week that already has had downtime for maintenance instead of waiting to do it during a week that one isn't scheduled.

The problem is that it is not an optional thing to do. Every computer and networked device on this planet will have this. Its not something ZOS has control over. They have to do it exactly at the indicated time... You know synching with the whole planet. Other wise you won't be able to log on tomorrow. If you do it early you are disconnected as well...

Faugaun

Egonieser wrote: »

Because 1 second may not matter to you but it matters in the digital world. Even miliseconds count, where your brain has not even begun to process information, supercomputers have done millions if not billions of calculations in that second. And if the time is off even by that amount, it can cause serious desync and wrong predictions where it matters because they are done to accuracies of micro, even nanoseconds.

So yeah... It does matter. Maybe not to you, but it does to the digital world.

Wait so a slide rule can land man on the moon but a few nanoseconds are gonna kill the digital world? Finding that hard to believe...

here's a paradox for you... the digital world falls apart if time is off by a nanosecond but...time likely doesn't exist: http://wokenmind.com/quantum-theory-proves-that-time-does-not-exist/17/03/2013/

Rinmaethodain

When did the maintenance start? How many minutes ago?

They said its going to be about hour per megaserver?

coryevans_3b14_ESO

Dave2001 wrote: »

C'mon.. it's F'in 7:30am here in eastern US. WTF is the server doing still down ? It takes that long to fix a "leap second" discrepancy? Pitiful.

What's pitiful is your level of ignorance as it pertains to what actually needs to be "fixed" when it comes to an issue like this.

Ljungstroem

ADarklore wrote: »

I just think it sucks that they'd decide to do this in a week that already has had downtime for maintenance instead of waiting to do it during a week that one isn't scheduled.

+1 for this. We console gamers have had a rough week. Enough said about this.

I do not completely understand this whole leap second thing, but im sure they have a reason. They even mentioned that they were serious about this update.

Phinix1

Egonieser wrote: »

Because 1 second may not matter to you but it matters in the digital world. Even miliseconds count, where your brain has not even begun to process information, supercomputers have done millions if not billions of calculations in that second. And if the time is off even by that amount, it can cause serious desync and wrong predictions where it matters because they are done to accuracies of micro, even nanoseconds.

So yeah... It does matter. Maybe not to you, but it does to the digital world.

Hey I'm all for science, but I'm just not buying that at all. Yes accuracy of time keeping matters in the scenario you paint, on a second by second basis. HOWEVER, it doesn't matter WHAT time is reading on the clock. It could be off by 40 YEARS and 1 second for all the computer cares. The ONLY thing that matters is accuracy in the duration of one second ticking on the atomic click after the next, not on what human-readable numbers display on your monitor whilst they are ticking.

Time of day is meaningless in the computational world. Only passage of time is relevant.

Rinmaethodain

I hope the NA megaserver will be up in 15 minutes, because thats when supposedly all maintenances should be done.

I wonder why they couldnt do it during that 7 hour downtime last monday when they patched game.

Faugaun

Pendrillion wrote: »

ADarklore wrote: »

I just think it sucks that they'd decide to do this in a week that already has had downtime for maintenance instead of waiting to do it during a week that one isn't scheduled.

The problem is that it is not an optional thing to do. Every computer and networked device on this planet will have this. Its not something ZOS has control over. They have to do it exactly at the indicated time... You know synching with the whole planet. Other wise you won't be able to log on tomorrow. If you do it early you are disconnected as well...

So why are we chatting on a forum on the internet while "the rest of the world does this at the exact same time" ?

Phinix1

Faugaun wrote: »

Pendrillion wrote: »

ADarklore wrote: »

I just think it sucks that they'd decide to do this in a week that already has had downtime for maintenance instead of waiting to do it during a week that one isn't scheduled.

The problem is that it is not an optional thing to do. Every computer and networked device on this planet will have this. Its not something ZOS has control over. They have to do it exactly at the indicated time... You know synching with the whole planet. Other wise you won't be able to log on tomorrow. If you do it early you are disconnected as well...

So why are we chatting on a forum on the internet while "the rest of the world does this at the exact same time" ?

*chuckles*

maxlacab16_ESO

Aett_Thorn

MaximusDargus wrote: »

I hope the NA megaserver will be up in 15 minutes, because thats when supposedly all maintenances should be done.

I wonder why they couldnt do it during that 7 hour downtime last monday when they patched game.

Because then they'd be out of sync with the rest of the world up until the rest o the world switched over.

Listen, maybe you think that the system is set up badly if even a second can throw the whole thing off, but we are talking about a globally connected system that involves communication with satellites in space, and this requires a certain degree of precision. For things like GPS satellites, having some be off by a second can cause your GPS to think that you are in a different spot than you are. For banking, it can cause huge issues.

So yes, this was a pain for us because the game needed to adjust to ensure communication with players across the globe. But hey, it's not like we need a global banking system or GPS, right?

Flake

Servers up ^_^

abbymeach

I'm new to ESO, so when I saw the servers going down again this morning after the long maintenance on Monday, I started to panic. "Honeyyyy, we need to switch back to our old MMO, this one has too many maintenance patches!!" Alas, it is for Science, so I guess I'll suck it up. But I'm still not over that 5gb patch crap, I can only get limited data where I live (10gb/month)!