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NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

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Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#191

Post by ssl-3 »

ill13 wrote: post #74
fuzztester wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for database transaction roll back and roll forward actions. And most enterprises, including banks, use databases. So by bad luck, you may get a couple of transactions reversed in order of time, such as a $20 debit incorrectly happening before a $10 credit, when your bank balance was only $10 prior to both those transactions. So your balance temporarily goes negative. Now imagine if all those amounts were ten th…

To clear, most banks "sort" transactions from to high to low to create more NSF fees on purpose. That purpose equates to over $12 billion in fees for 2024 https://finhealthnetwork.org/research/overdraft-nsf-fees-big...

Awful stuff.

I was just starting off in life (kid, girl, job, apartment, bank, debit card, bills) when I made a 63-cent error with my bank account. Which is to say: If all of the negative debits and all of the positive credits were summed, then the account would have been in the negative by 63 cents.

I screwed up. And in a fair and just world, I'd owe the bank some extra tithing for quite clearly having spent some money that I very definitely did not have. Maybe $20 for the error and $10 per day spent in the red, plus the 63 cents, or something along those lines.

But it wasn't that way. Because the transactions were processed in batches that were re-ordered to be highest-first, I discovered that I owed the bank a little more than $430.

At the time (around 25 years ago, now) that was an absolute mountain of money to me.

The banker at the branch I went into was unapologetic and crass about the fees.

Looking over my transactions, they said "You know how to do math, right? You should have known that the account was overdrawn, but you were just out spending money willy-nilly all over town anyway."

I replied with something like "I made a single error of 63 cents. The rest of what you said is an invention."

This went back and forth for a bit before I successfully managed to leave the building without any handcuffs, fire trucks, or ambulances becoming involved -- and I still owed them more than $430.

The lesson I learned was very simple: Seriously, fuck those guys.

($12 billion in 2024, huh? That's all? Maybe the no-fee fintechs are winning.)

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#192

Post by bibimsz »

simojo wrote: post #152
IncreasePosts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they gave days of advanced warning they would do this. there was time to prepare.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#193

Post by kevinh456 »

Lammy wrote: post #182
basilgohar wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Timekeeping has been an important mechanism for humans for as long as recorded history. 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…

Tell me how you feel about DST.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#195

Post by rogerrogerr »

Lammy wrote: post #182
basilgohar wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Timekeeping has been an important mechanism for humans for as long as recorded history. 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…

> The ownership class are the ones who invented things like time zones to stop their trains from running in to each other

In a world where this didn't happen, your comment would most likely read:

> The ownership class are the ones who had such indifference toward the lives of the lower class passengers that they didn't bother stopping their trains from running into each other.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#196

Post by Brian_K_White »

Lammy wrote: post #178
cornholio wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is like the kid in school who doesn't think they should have to learn algebra since they think they will never use it.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#197

Post by royce »

user3939382 wrote: post #167

It’s fine. The public pays for sci-fi clocks used by NIST and the Navy and we get shit latency over NTP and a WWVB signal that barely reaches a huge chunk of the country. CLOCKS WE PAID FOR. Jane Street gets lightning access to clocks and our pension managers get their NTP trades front run. NTP is a disgrace and an insult when it is working.

The rest of the snark/ bitterness aside ... NTP takes latency as a constraint, and accommodates for it.

And far from a disgrace, NTP was a brilliant design for its time, and has proven to be far more future-proof than should have been expected.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#198

Post by henning »

Lammy wrote: post #178
cornholio wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And as things fell apart / Nobody paid much attention

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#199

Post by scheme271 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #187
simojo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. Losing the contents of (lots of) fridges is cheaper, as a whole, than incidentally burning the countryside. We all ultimately pay for the result no matter what, so that seems like a reasonably-sensible bet. 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…

It's probably not worth it to go through your insurance for the loss of food and perishables in the fridge/freezer. It counts as a claim on your home insurance and can result in increased rates or even your insurer dropping coverage at the next renewal.

Re: NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

#200

Post by [deleted] »

usea wrote: post #179
b112 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One. One watch. POTUS's watch. And in fact, that's why Boulder is currently shuttered... they disagreed.

I think this comment is referencing the government's recent announcement[0] to shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. They do climate research at the Mesa Laboratory there. 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…

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