181–190 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.
Perhaps, "We don't know." will become popular?
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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.
I really, really can't get behind this sentiment. Having a reliable, accurate time keeping mechanism doesn't seem like an outlandish issue to want to maintain. Timekeeping has been an important mechanism for humans for as long as recorded history. I don't understand the wisdom of shooting down establishing systems to make that better, even if the direct applicability to a single human's life is remote. We are all par…
And for 99% of that history, Noon was when the sun was half-way through its daily arc at whatever point on Earth one happened to inhabit. The ownership class are the ones who invented things like time zones to stop their trains from running in to each other, and NTP is just the latest and most-pervasive-and-invasive evolution of that same inhuman mindset.
From a privacy point of view, constant NTP requests are right up there alongside weather apps and software telemetry for “things which announce everyone's computers to the global spy apparatus”, feeding the Palantirs of the world to be able to directly locate you as an individual if need be.
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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.
THE TIME RIFT OF 2100: How We lost the Future --- and Gained the Past.
https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7132077&cid=493082...
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There are many backup clocks/clusters that NIST uses as redundancies all around Boulder too, no need to even go up to Fort Collins. As in, NIST has fiber to a few at CU and a few commercial companies, last I checked. They're used in cases just like this one. 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…
I'm the Manager of the Computing group at JILA at CU, where utcnist*.colorado.edu used to be housed. Those machines were, for years, consistently the highest bandwidth usage computers on campus. Unfortunately, the HP cesium clock that backed the utcnist systems failed a few weeks ago, so they're offline. I believe the plan is to decommission those servers anyway - NIST doesn't even list them on the NTP status page an…
Now if the (otherwise very kind) guy in charge of the Bureau international des poids et mesures at Sèvres who did not let me have a look at the refrerence for the kilogram and meter could change his mind, I would appreciate. For a physicist this is kinda like a cathedral.
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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...
I regret to inform you that as a consequence of that sustained time travel, your mind and body will be slowly deteriorating and you’ll sooner or later end up dead.
What a defeatist attitude, I plan to live forever or die trying! /s
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Notably, we had the marshal fire here 4 years ago and recently Xcel settled for $680M for their role in the fire. So they're probably pretty keen not to be on the hook again
I guess that explains why they had no qualms shutting down half of Boulder's power with a vague time horizon. After losing everything in my fridge, though, they finally turned it back on today.
On the fridge itself: You may find that the contents are insured against power outages.
As an anecdote, my (completely not-special) homeowner's insurance didn't protest at all about writing a check for the contents of my fridge and freezer when I asked about that, after my house was without power for a couple of weeks following the 2008 derecho. This rather small claim didn't affect my rate in any way that I could perceive.
And to digress a bit: I have a chest freezer. These days I fill up the extra space in the freezer with water -- with "single-use" plastic containers (water bottles, milk jugs) that would normally be landfilled or recycled.
This does a couple of things: On normal days, it increases thermal mass of the freezer, and that improves the cycle times for the compressor in ways that tend to make it happier over time. In the abnormal event of a long power outage, it also provides a source of ice that is chilled to 0F/18C that I can relocate into the fridge (or into a cooler, perhaps for transport), to keep cold stuff cold.
It's not a long-term solution, but it'll help ensure that I've got a fairly normal supply of fresh food to eat for a couple of days if the power dips. And it's pretty low-effort on my part. I've probably spent nearly as much effort writing about this system here just now as I have on implementing it.
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Time travel is extremely dangerous right now. I highly recommend deferring time travel plans except for extreme temporal emergencies.
Would traveling to the past in order to put in place a preemptive fix for this outage be wise or dangerous? Asking for a friend.
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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.
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…