Re: February 30th 2000

[Malcolm Beattie]

H. Peter Anvin writes:
> Actually, Sweden had a double leap year in 1712.  This was the result
> of a botched Government plan to do a gradual switch from the Julian to
> the Gregorian calendar (not really a bad idea, given the social
> upheaval the very short month tended to cause.)  The idea was to have
> NO leap years between 1700 and 1748.  The Julian leap year in 1700 was
> duly skipped, but by 1704 the plan was already forgotten and a leap
> year was had; same in 1708.  In 1712 they gave up and had a double
> leap year, bringing them back onto the Julian calendar.  Sweden
> finally switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1753 (by ending
> February way early, 

They went from 18 Feb 1753 to 1 Mar 1753 according to my large list of
changeovers. The attached note mentions the 1704 and 1708 leap year
omissions and puts it down to the fact that "the King was absent
fighting his endless wars" (story courtesy of Anders Berglund).

>		      if I recall correctly.)

My, you do have a long memory :-)

Um, this is seriously off-topic. ObKernel: the zone/compartments/MAC
I'm implementing for the kernel now copes with networking as well as
filesystems and tasks so you can have multiple "virtual machines"
running with different IP source addresses/routing in each. It should
be ready for some sort of alpha release soon.

--Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Beattie <[e-mail]>
Unix Systems Programmer
Oxford University Computing Services