81–90 of 218 posts
Can anybody expand on the implications of this? Being unfamiliar with it, it's hard to tell if this is a minor blip that happens all the time, or if it's potentially a major issue that could cause cascading errors equal to the hype of Y2K.
The answer is no. Anyone claiming this will have an impact on infrastructure has no evidence backing it up. Table top exercises at best.
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I think people have a wrong idea of what a modern atomic clock looks like. These are readily available commercially, Microchip for example will happily sell you hydrogen, cesium or rubidium atomic clocks. Hydrogen masers are rather unwieldy, but you can get a rubidium clock in a 1U format and cesium ones are not much bigger. I think their cesium freq standards are formerly a HP business they acquired. Example: https:…
It is also important to realize that an atomic clock will only give you a steady pulse. It will count seconds for you, and do so very accurately, but that is not the same as knowing what time it is. If you get a rubidium clock for your garage, you can sync it up with GPS to get an accurate-enough clock for your hobby NTP project, but large research institutions and their expensive contraptions are more elaborate to s…
This makes me wonder, if you take the average time of all wristwatches on the planet, accounting for timezones and throwing out outliers, how close would you get to NTP time? And how many randomly chosen wristwatches would you need to get anything reasonable?
I have a hunch my casio wrist watch is designed to be running a bit too quick to make resetting the seconds easier. Your averaging assumes manufacturers try to make their watches as accurate as possible for average conditions
Given two time changes per year I guess something like 1 min per year is acceptable
Wind gusts were reaching 125 MPH in Boulder county, if anyone’s curious. A lot of power was shut off preemptively to prevent downed power lines from starting wildfires. Energy providers gave warning to locals in advance. Shame that NIST’s backup generator failed, though.
Somewhat interesting that they themselves don't have access to the site. You'd think there would have been some disaster plans put in place?
The failure of a single such server is far from a disaster.
Of the various internet .+P, NTP is one I never learned about as a student, so now I'm looking at its web page [1] by its creator David L. Mills (1938-2024). I've found one video of him giving a retrospective of his extensive internet work; he talks about NTP at 34:51 [2] and later at 56:26 [3]. [1] https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html [2] https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?si=WXJCV_v0qlZQK3m4&t=2092 [3] https://yout…
In [3] he mentions that one can use NTP to observe frequency deviations and use it as an early warning system for fire and AC failure. That really intrigues me. Can you actually? Has this ever been implemented?
That's why the most stable ones are insulated and ovenized[1].
So an AC failure which would lead to higher room temperatures would lead to stronger or more frequent correction by the NTP client, as the local oscillator would drift more.
Not sure about the fire case though. I mean the same applies there but I'm not imaginative enough to think of a realistic scenario where NTP would be useful for averting a fire.
[1]: https://blog.bliley.com/anatomy-of-an-ocxo-oven-controlled-c...
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Time travel is extremely dangerous right now. I highly recommend deferring time travel plans except for extreme temporal emergencies.
Uhh, here's the problem, I'm sort of stuck travelling into the future at a more or less constant rate. I don't know how to stop doing that...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time travel is extremely dangerous right now. I highly recommend deferring time travel plans except for extreme temporal emergencies.
Uhh, here's the problem, I'm sort of stuck travelling into the future at a more or less constant rate. I don't know how to stop doing that...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time travel is extremely dangerous right now. I highly recommend deferring time travel plans except for extreme temporal emergencies.
Uhh, here's the problem, I'm sort of stuck travelling into the future at a more or less constant rate. I don't know how to stop doing that...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat interesting that they themselves don't have access to the site. You'd think there would have been some disaster plans put in place?
Maybe this is the disaster plan: There's not a smouldering hole where NIST's Boulder facility used to be, and it will be operational again soon enough. There's no present need for important hard-to-replace sciencey-dudes to go into the shop (which is probably both cold, and dark, and may have other problems that make it unsafe: it's deliberately closed ) to futz around with the the time machines. We still have other…
Fun facts about The clock:
You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is.
The room is just filled with asbestos.
The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world. They do the adjustments so it's all fine in the end. But you have to define something as the second, and that little unused port is it.
You can take a few pictures in the cramped little room, but you can't linger, as again, just your extra mass and gravity affects things fairly quickly.
If there are more questions about time and timekeeping in general, go ahead and ask, though I'll probably get back to them a bit later today.