121–130 of 169 posts
That feature is simply insane. How did MS think this was a good idea? To address the issue they were trying to address (what happens when a mission critical server's RTC malfunctions or the battery dies?), Windows should treat it no differently than any other hardware malfunction in a mission-critical server: raise an alarm so a system operator can take a look and address the issue.
Blows my mind that anyone would use Windows on a server.
The story takes place in a future African megacity before, during, and after an alien invasion. Part of the game's story is shown from an AI's perspective who controls the city's operations trying to evacuate the Human survivors.
Whenever the story is shown through the AI's perspective, you can see an overlay of the AI's working memory including which suburb's cameras are being monitored, the emotional state of the AI, and the current running timestamp.
Some of the aliens end up withdrawing from within the city by making an FTL jump which causes extreme localised time dilation.
Immediately afterwards, the timestamp in the AI's working memory is frozen because it's not sure what the exact timestamp is anymore, each system it connects to gives it a slightly different time depending on how close it was to the FTL event.
It guesses a likely time and uses that until sometime later it is able to reconnect with other unaffected human networks and resumes the correct timestamps.
This time heuristic was shown in the game, but also makes an appearance of sorts in the announcement trailer (seen in the bottom right): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WroxHMo6B_k
That feature is simply insane. How did MS think this was a good idea? To address the issue they were trying to address (what happens when a mission critical server's RTC malfunctions or the battery dies?), Windows should treat it no differently than any other hardware malfunction in a mission-critical server: raise an alarm so a system operator can take a look and address the issue.
Ever heard of the good idea fairy? Seems like a perfect example.
(Whatever other representations there are of "The Good Idea Fairy", I can't help but think of Baldrick and his "cunning plans".)
While this Windows feature does sound quite bonkers as described, it is also baffling to me that the timekeeping on computers is such a mess; would it really be that difficult to have my multithousand dollar computer keep time at least as well as a dollar-store quartz watch? Have time already set in factory, and be correct to within few hours at least; enough to do networking and more accurate time syncing safely.
Your dollar-store quartz watch isn't on a worldwide network communicating with other watches where there needs to be an agreement on what time it is. The watch also expects you to notice when the time drifts and for you to correct it. That includes DST adjustments, leap second adjustments, and physically moving to different timezones. Even when using an NTP server to set your time, network latencies have to be taken…
Does it? My system/bios time is in UTC. The timezone is not managed for me, when I travel I change it. DST and leap seconds are deltas you add to UNIX epoch. Tracking the number of ticks since epoch is a simpler task, much closer to what a quartz watch attempts to do on its own. Both fail when the battery does, of course.
If your end user facing application can't handle 300ms drift that seems like a bug in the application. Even stuff like TOTP generators let you apply a time delta correction and servers usually allow >1 minute drift.
Why not use all that STS cleverness to get a "rough" estimate of the current time, then use that estimate to securely connect to an NTP server and get the actual time?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not let the user at least give an estimate for the current time & date. Should be close enough for certificate validation. Yes, that gets annoying fast for said user, but a good incentive to eg fix the bios battery.
Imagine there is no user, and there are thousands of machines
/ sarcasm
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't imagine the sequence of horrible decisions that led to doing this. My guess is that it was created because of Windows Phone 10. But it's not a feature I'd like even on my phone.
That seems far-fetched considering that afaik all cell networks provide time syncing