Poul-Henning Kamp's article "The One-second War (What Time Will You Die?)" [0] is a great read. I certainly was unaware of the background, and how it can affect actual systems.
I'm not sure about the etiquette of arXiv links, but I have always preferred being taken to the abstract, so that I can decide whether I want the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.3141. It's just a click from there to the PDF (or other formats, if there are any).