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Pastimes : Laughter is the Best Medicine - Tell us a joke

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To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (18947)4/30/2001 8:32:17 PM
From: SIer formerly known as Joe B.  Read Replies (2) of 62549
 
Wo-oah, what I want to know, where does the time go?

Super-Accurate Atomic Clock Hates Sundays
dailynews.yahoo.com
Monday April 30 6:35 AM ET

OTTAWA (Reuters) - A C$40,000 Canadian clock display designed
to be accurate to within a few millionths of a second a year has lost an
hour every Sunday this month, embarrassed officials admitted on Friday.

They said a software bug had affected the large electronic Millennium
Clock outside Ottawa's National Research Council (news - web sites) (NRC), which is directly linked
to a C$1 million cesium clock responsible for maintaining official Canadian time.

``The clock itself is not losing time. The problem is a display, which doesn't display time properly,'' said
a fed-up Jean-Simon Boulanger, the NRC's group leader of frequency and time.

``Why their software makes it go back an hour on Sundays I have no idea. We're providing the right
time to the software but the software is providing something else to the display,'' he told Reuters. ``It's
embarrassing.''

NRC officials have had to reset the clock every Monday morning this month.

Boulanger said the display had not taken into account the fact that clocks went forward on April 1 to
mark the introduction of Daylight Saving Time.

Just to add to the humiliation, the display sports a plaque boasting that the Millennium Clock
``celebrates Canada's rich history of leadership in timekeeping''.

Boulanger said the display had been plagued by problems since it was installed in June 1999 to
celebrate the turn of the century.

``It was meant to be there only for passage of the year 2000 but someone said 'Why not keep it to the
year 2001?' It's supposed to be taken away any time now,'' he said with more than a hint of relief
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