Has he not heard of sleep(1) ? Saying "it's flash" is no excuse, flash is perfectly capable of sleeping.
Basically, sleep(1) won't always align with clock updates, so sometimes a given time will display for more or less time than a second. This can be observed by opening the clock widget on Windows XP for example, it's very noticeable. I don't actually know a nice way to do it, maybe updating 10 times per second or so?
[1] http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/video-frame-display... - it's down right now, one of the diagrams illustrates the problem well though: http://software.intel.com/file/3984
// In a real program one would probably not use time()
// Also, some older pre-release versions of the realtime
// kernel patches had the clock_nanosleep() and time()
// clocks out of sync by 0.5s (IIRC)
for(;;) {
struct timespec after_epoch = { .tv_sec = time(NULL) + 1, .tv_nsec = 0 };
// Check for EINTR in a real program
clock_nanosleep(CLOCK_REALTIME, TIMER_ABSTIME, &after_epoch, NULL);
printf("Tick\n");
}
Unfortunately, this probably doesn't help with Flash or JavaScript clock demos.
Alternatively, use time() to only sleep the remaining timespan until the next second.