It's necessary, but not exactly computer friendly. In 2012 it crashed websites such as Reddit and Yelp and snarled up airline departures in Australia, so you'd think most computer experts would really hate them. After all, we have perfectly accurate timekeeping systems, such as the one used by GPS, that don't futz with leap seconds.

But it turns out many computer folks are OK with the leap second, including Linux's creator, Linus Torvalds.

We're going to get another leap second at the end of June, and Torvalds doesn't anticipate any major glitches this time around. A lot of software has been patched since the 2012 disaster. "Last time it happened, people spent some effort making sure it was fine afterwards. Hopefully that all stuck," he says. "That said, the reason problems happen in this space is because it's obviously rare and special, and testing for it in one circumstance then might miss some other situation. So I'd certainly expect a few people to worry."

Torvalds went on to pontificate about whether the creators of the POSIX standard, used by Linux and Unix operating systems, made a tragic mistake defining a day as exactly 86,400 seconds while, apparently contradicting themselves by simultaneously forcing computers to use the leap-second friendly UTC. Here's his rationale for keeping computers from switching away from UTC. It's classic Torvalds: Technical, opinionated, and pretty damned funny.

It's necessary, but not exactly computer friendly. In 2012 it crashed websites such as Reddit and Yelp and snarled up airline departures in Australia, so you'd think most computer experts would really hate them. After all, we have perfectly accurate timekeeping systems, such as the one used by GPS, that don't futz with leap seconds.

But it turns out many computer folks are OK with the leap second, including Linux's creator, Linus Torvalds.

We're going to get another leap second at the end of June, and Torvalds doesn't anticipate any major glitches this time around. A lot of software has been patched since the 2012 disaster. "Last time it happened, people spent some effort making sure it was fine afterwards. Hopefully that all stuck," he says. "That said, the reason problems happen in this space is because it's obviously rare and special, and testing for it in one circumstance then might miss some other situation. So I'd certainly expect a few people to worry."