171–180 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.
Unix timestamp resets to zero.
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I wonder why we bothered building GPS signal waveguides into the bottom of a mine then. Clearly we should have consulted the experts of hacker news first. Losing NTP for a day is going to affect fuck-all.
I'm not even sure why you're trying to argue this. It's well established that Time over Fiber is 1-2 orders of magnitude more accurate and precise than GNSS time. Fiber time is also immune to many of the numerous sources of interference GNSS systems encounter, which anyone who's done serious timekeeping will be well acquainted with.
I’m sure synchronising all the worlds detectors over direct fiber links would… work, but, they aren’t.
Unless you are trying to argue internal synchronisation in which case, obviously, but that has absolutely zero to do with losing NTP for a day, the topic of conversation.
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 network will route around the damage with no real effects. Maybe a few microseconds of jitter as you have to ask a more distant server for the time.
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I'm not even sure why you're trying to argue this. It's well established that Time over Fiber is 1-2 orders of magnitude more accurate and precise than GNSS time. Fiber time is also immune to many of the numerous sources of interference GNSS systems encounter, which anyone who's done serious timekeeping will be well acquainted with.
Trying to argue that neutrino experiments use GPS time, because they do? I’m sure synchronising all the worlds detectors over direct fiber links would… work, but, they aren’t. Unless you are trying to argue internal synchronisation in which case, obviously, but that has absolutely zero to do with losing NTP for a day, the topic of conversation.
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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:…
woah hold on a sec. that's not how these clocks are actually used though. It's a huge huge huge misconception that you can just plunk down an "atomic clock", discipline an NTP server with it and get perfect wallclock time out of it forever. That is just not how it works. Two hydrogen masers sitting next to each other will drift. Two globally distributed networks of hydrogen masers will drift. They cannot NOT drift. T…
Funny you should say that... https://developers.google.com/time/smear
Can anybody speak to the current best practices around running underground power lines? I see these types of articles about above-ground distribution systems from time-to-time, particularly in California. I feel lucky that my area has underground power, but that was installed back in the 1980s. Would it be prohibitively expensive for Boulder’s utility provider to move to underground distribution? I can’t help but thi…
Its very hard to repair and keep track of underground. https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/9/16/repairing-under...
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Actually DOGE involvement at the highest level would have resulted in Tesla solar and Tesla powerwall battery backups.
Apparently no engineers here anymore, all armchair politicians.
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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 disater plan is to have a few dozens stratum 1 servers spread around the world, each connected to a distinct primary atomic clock, so that a catastrophic disaster needs to take down the global internet itself for all servers to become unreachable. The failure of a single such server is far from a disaster.
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?
One. One watch. POTUS's watch. And in fact, that's why Boulder is currently shuttered... they disagreed.
It's open to the public for visits. They have a small science museum, offices, a library, etc. I highly recommend anyone with interest and opportunity to visit the mesa lab soon. It may not be open much longer. The view alone is worth the trip, and the building is cool too.
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The disater plan is to have a few dozens stratum 1 servers spread around the world, each connected to a distinct primary atomic clock, so that a catastrophic disaster needs to take down the global internet itself for all servers to become unreachable. The failure of a single such server is far from a disaster.
And the disaster plan for the disaster plan is to realize that it isn't that important at the human-level to have a clock meticulously set to correspond to other meticulously-set clocks, and that every attempt to force rigid timekeeping on humans is to try to make humans work more like machines rather than to make machines work more like humans.