[time-nuts] FW: Bulletin C number 30

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Jul 5 09:55:51 EDT 2005


In message <20050705.124646.08659276.cfmd at bredband.net>, Magnus Danielson write
s:

>> Sea-level on this planet, yes.
>
>Whatever sea-level on this planet is. It's not at the sea-level at all.

I know, but I didn't even want to add all that complication :-)

>The Universal in UTC is to indicate our world, the earth, and not to be
>confused with the universe as in deep space. It was never meant to include
>Mars for instance.

"universal" was used in the meaning of "the entire known world", and what
happened is that this got one moon larger and expansion to another planet
is now feasibly in reach.

A redefinition to make UTC still fit the creeping meaning of the word
"universal" seems very appropriate to me :-)

>When different IT systems can be off by minutes (I have received the reports
>about that some telcos have this problem for instance) I think there are a
>bigger issues to handle first.

I can see on my stratum 1 server how far off some clocks are when systems boot,
you'd be surprised.

For the longest time, a very famous Swiss maker of precision timepieces
had a web-server which were years out of whack if you examined the HTTP
headers :-)

>But, Werner is bringing out a very important point, if you *do* care about
>doing it right, you need to do it properly and that involves caring about many
>different things, including the relative brokenness of many systems and the
>consequence when the systems missalign. Some of the systems could potentially
>be fixed thought. NTP with the propper patches on kernel and software in
>general will indeed solve parts of the problem, at least in the UNIX world.

Actually, that's the depressing thing, UNIX doesn't fix it orderly with
NTP, it just pastes over the problem :-(

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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