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Microsoft's New Web Browser - "Spartan" (Code Name)

Spartan, Microsoft’s new browser to challenge Google Chrome

"Spartan" is the codename of a web browser in development by Microsoft. Officially unveiled on January 21, 2015, it is expected to be bundled with Windows 10 alongside Internet Explorer. Spartan is based on a fork of Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine, which is also found in Internet Explorer.  


The new "Edge" engine will be used by default across Windows 10, and pages can be rendered in the previous MSHTML engine for backwards compatibility with enterprise-specific websites and software.


"Spartan" does not support legacy technologies such as ActiveX and Browser Helper Objects, and will instead utilize an extension system. Internet Explorer will remain available alongside "Spartan" on Windows 10 for use in scenarios requiring IE-specific functionality, and will use the same dual-engine configuration as "Spartan".

Some Unique Features :

• The browser allows you to collaborate with others by marking up with drawing on the page directly. You’ll also be able to click anywhere on the page and comment.

• The browser features a reading mode that automatically downloads articles for offline reading later, which is useful if you’re catching a flight without internet access.

• Cortana is coming to the browser too, and can learn from your habits and give you details about specific things that it thinks relevant, just like Google Now does on Android.

Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President of Operating Systems at Microsoft. said that Spartan is the current codename and will likely change before the release.

"SPARTAN" AT A GLANCE

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What is Leap Second - June 30, 2015 Leap Second & Internet !!!

Leap Second

A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth's rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth's rate of rotation. Since this system of correction was implemented in 1972, 25 such leap seconds have been inserted. The most recent one happened on June 30, 2012 at 23:59:60 UTC. A leap second will again be inserted at the end of June 30, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC.

The UTC time standard, which is widely used for international timekeeping and as the reference for civil time in most countries, uses the international system (SI) definition of the second, based on atomic clocks. Like most time standards, UTC defines a grouping of seconds into minutes, hours, days, months, and years. However, the duration of one mean solar day is slightly longer than 24 hours (86400 SI seconds). Therefore, if the UTC day were defined as precisely 86400 SI seconds, the UTC time-of-day would slowly drift apart from that of solar-based standards, such as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and its successor UT1. The purpose of a leap second is to compensate for this drift, by occasionally scheduling some UTC days with 86401 or 86399 SI seconds.

Specifically, a positive leap second is inserted between second 23:59:59 of a chosen UTC calendar date (the last day of a month, usually June 30 or December 31) and second 00:00:00 of the following date. This extra second is displayed on UTC clocks as 23:59:60. On clocks that display local time tied to UTC, the leap second may be inserted at the end of some other hour (or half-hour or quarter-hour), depending on the local time zone.

A negative leap second would suppress second 23:59:59 of the last day of a chosen month, so that second 23:59:58 of that date would be followed immediately by second 00:00:00 of the following date. However, since the UTC standard was established, negative leap seconds have never been needed.

Because the Earth's rotation speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and unpredictable. Insertion of each UTC leap second is usually decided about six months in advance by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), when needed to ensure that the difference between the UTC and UT1 readings will never exceed 0.9 second. Between their adoption in 1972 and June 2012, 25 leap seconds have been scheduled, all positive; this will become 26 leap seconds at 23:59:60 UTC on June 30, 2015.

June 30 will be a second longer than any other day this year

A leap second needs to be added in 2015 to make sure the time on atomic clocks stays in sync with Earth's rotational time, but some Internet companies are dreading the day.

Earth's rotation has been slowing down by about two thousandths of a second every day. But atomic clocks, which are now accurate up to quadrillion of a second, don't change pace. While this situation isn't an immediate problem, it would eventually cause clocks to become so out of sync with Earth's rotation that they would read noon during the dead of night.

"Earth is slowing down over geological time, and that can lead to a problem when you've got a ton of clocks," Demetrios Matsakis, chief scientist for Time Service at the U.S. Naval Observatory, told Live Science. "What do you do when the day gets longer?"

The solution that the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) came up with is to add a second every now and then to keep the standard atomic time in sync with Earth's time. This year, the extra second is scheduled for the midway point in the year, at 11:59.59 p.m. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on June 30.

This will be the 26th leap second added to a calendar year since the practice began in 1972. In the past, the extra second has messed with computer systems. The last leap second was added in 2012, and it caused problems for big companies like Reddit, LinkedIn, Gizmodo and FourSquare.

The problem is that during the leap second, the computer clock shows 60 seconds instead of simply rolling over to the next minute, or shows the 59th second twice. The computer sees a leap second as time going backward, Matsakis said. The machine registers this as a system error, and the CPU can overload.

Google, to skirt the problem, will add a millisecond to its servers every once in a while throughout the year. This way, the slowed-down servers don't notice when an extra second is slipped in. Another good way to avoid any trouble is to simply shut down a computer system for an hour or two around the leap second, Matsakis said.

But many programmers are oblivious to leap seconds, and this can also cause problems. The additional seconds happen so infrequently and so irregularly that it makes it difficult for computer companies to catch on to the problem. While Reddit, LinkedIn, Gizmodo and FourSquare will likely remember the lesson they learned three years ago, other sites that didn't experience any issues are likely still "blissfully unaware," Matsakis said.

But the leap second could put more than just computer systems at risk. It's a little over-cautious, Matsakis admits, but he said he would not want to be on board a plane during a leap second. The extra second has been known to interrupt GPS receivers, which could be a problem for pilots.

The year 2015 will have an extra second — which could wreak havoc on the infrastructure powering the Internet.

At 11:59 p.m. on June 30, clocks will count up all the way to 60 seconds. That will allow the Earth's spin to catch up with atomic time.

The Earth's spin is gradually slowing down, by about two thousandths of a second per day, but atomic clocks are constant. That means that occasionally years have to be lengthened slightly, to allow the slowing Earth to catch up with the constant clock.

But last time it happened, in 2012, it took down much of the Internet. Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp and LinkedIn all reported problems, and so did the Linux operating system and programs using Java.

The reset has happened 25 times since they were introduced in 1972, but the computer problems are getting more serious as increasing numbers of computers sync up with atomic clocks. Those computers and servers are then shown the same second twice in a row — throwing them into a panic.

If a computer is told to do an operation at the time that is repeated, for instance, the computer is unsure what to do. Or if an e-mail is received in that moment, it could find its way in the wrong bit of the server.

Last time, Google anticipated the problem and built a smart update, which it called "leap smear". It modified its servers so that they would add a little bit of extra time every time they were updated, so that by the time of the leap second they were already caught up with the new time. It said when it laid out the plan in 2011 that it would use the same technique in the future, when new leap seconds are announced.

The Leap Second & Its Impact. Let's Recall The Altea reservation and departure system

Time lords in Paris will add a leap second to UTC on 30 June this year. The last time they added a leap second to the world's clocks was on 30 June, 2012, extending UTC by an additional second.

One by-product of that was that they temporarily took down air travellers in Australia. The Altea reservation and departure system run by Amadeus, one of the largest computer travel reservation systems on the planet, couldn’t cope and crashed. For 48 minutes, passengers and staff at Qantas and Virgin Australia were thrown back into the 1990s world of manual check-in and delayed flights.

The reason? Altea ran a version of the Linux kernel that harboured a long-dormant Linux bug that meant the freeware didn’t recognise leap seconds.

The second the clocks ticked past midnight GMT, the bug awoke and took down Altea. 135 airlines had implemented the Altea reservation system by 2012 but the Australians were the first to go down once the clocks hit midnight.

Servers run by Mozilla, StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare, Reddit and LinkedIn were also reported to have been hit by the same bug, meaning a lot of people couldn't post their “critical” status updates or restaurant reviews.

The problem was they all ran Linux, and back then the addition or removal of a leap second sent the system into meltdown – the system would deadlock.

The bug was found to affect kernels version numbers 2.2.26 to 3.3, inclusive.

Not that it was all Linux’s fault: Mozilla’s Hadoop and ElasticSearch Servers using Java were also taken down. A Java fix was quickly developed.

Since that inglorious day the kernel has been patched. Distro makers like Red Hat also released their patches to make sure the problem didn’t crop up again.

As for Amadeus, the giant it reckoned it had sidestepped the bug with a workaround that it had implemented within an hour of things going south.

An Amadeus spokesperson told The Reg it's monitoring very closely industry discussions on the new leap second and following best practice standards. "Planning is already in progress and we are preparing to ensure a smooth transition," the spokesperson said.

So in the era of Cloud Computing, the Leap Second on June 30, 2015, will impact the Internet System ??? A big question with no full proof answer !!! 

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