5 ms·
The headline is kind of clickbait, almost no clocks in daily life get their base clock frequency from powerlines. Edit: Nevermind
by etaioinshrdlu 9y ago
The headline is kind of clickbait, almost no clocks in daily life get their base clock frequency from powerlines.
Edit: Nevermind
- triplesec 9y agoThis is untrue given the examples in the article such as oven clocks
- baq 9y agoyeah except the one in my oven, in my microwave and in my coffee machine... all late by exactly the same amount.
- wiz21c 9y agosame for me, drove me nuts. Fortunately my PC looks at atomic clocks...
- Piskvorrr 9y agoYour PC also has a quartz oscillator and battery backing, there's no way it synchronizes time from AC power.
- wiz21c 9y agosure, I just meant my PC has a very sophisticated (hence fragile) way of keeping its time accurate. And forget about battery backing, it's a desktop and its bios battery is long dead :-) (hence the atomic clock)
- Piskvorrr 9y agoOnce you do synchronize it off the net, it's still the quartz oscillator keeping the local beat, as it were :)
- isostatic 9y agoI synchronize with ntp every 500 million cpu cycles :p
- c3833174 9y agoIIRC modern operatings systems use counters in the CPU for timekeeping instead of directly accessing the RTC
- Piskvorrr 9y agoWell, the CPU is somewhat beyond my ken. You are right, of course - yet I think there would be another oscillator driving the clock generator as well. Turtles all the way down ;)
- gmueckl 9y agoBasically every device that is connected to main power and has a clock skips an internal quartz based circuit. Usually, this gives much higher precision for the same price point because frequency is typically controlled very, very tightly.
- preya2k 9y agoNot true. I experience this right now with the integrated clock in my stove. Applies to a lot of clocks in kitchen appliances.
- GrumpyNl 9y agoIn Holland on the first day of the month we set off all the war alarms for a minute to test if they still function. This month a lot of them failed, caused by the power frequency
- wiz21c 9y agoImagine for a second that North Korea or US were involved in the electricity dispute in question... And because of that, as you say, Holland wan't test it's war alarm (which is vital infrastructure I guess) I wonder what would be the position of EU...
- cat199 9y agoDo you really think the US is not involved in this dispute?
- wiz21c 9y agoahahaha conspiration !!!
- cat199 9y agoit's not really a conspiracy when energy payment squabbles are smacking you in the face in the news.. https://www.export.gov/article?id=Kosovo-Energy https://www.export.gov/article?id=Kosovo-Energy https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-gazprom/ukraines-naftogaz-claims-2-56-billion-victory-in-gazprom-legal-battle-idUSKCN1GC2Z8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-gaz... etc etc etc
- ddnb 9y agoOh god, I hope no Germans are reading this, it would be their perfect time to strike...
- Piskvorrr 9y agoWhere this procedure is in effect, there's a different signal for "test" and "emergency". The opposite situation is more common - we've had a couple of cases where the person in charge actually initiated the emergency protocol instead of the expected test protocol.
- Piskvorrr 9y agoYou might want to look around a bit, your assumption is incorrect: there's a surprising amount of appliances that are not IoT, but do rely on such unexpected side channels such as AC-as-a-clock - not everything has a network port, a quartz oscillator or even a GPS receiver, but most appliances do have a power plug.
- TomMarius 9y agoIt might interest you that you can use the power plug to connect the device to the internet.
- castis 9y agoThat is definitely interesting, do you know where I could find more info on it?
- TomMarius 9y agoSure, it's called "Powerline networking", you can find cheap modems that you connect to your internet connection and then you can use other modems as clients.
- Piskvorrr 9y agoAgain, you are assuming that everything has enough power to run a networking stack, or even that there is Turing-equivalent hardware to run anything at all. (Yes, yes, I know this is HN, where any device is fit for a computer; most of the world isn't.) My water heater from late 1990s has a cleverly wired set of transistors - not even chips, the logic is literally wired into the product: cheap yet resilient. Connecting that to the internet would need adding some sort of computing device, adding several orders of magnitude in complexity (you can ping it and now it's also brittle, yay). (I assume that you mean "to the local network, which is then connected via more conventional means, oh, and did I mention you need yet another computer to route data to the remote end?" - from what I've seen, attempts at WAN-over-power have largely been abandoned, even industrial IoT went for LoRa and friends. And from what I've experienced, LAN-over-power is a last-resort desperate hack: better than nothing at all, but barely better than two cans on a string w/r/t packet loss.)
- pvg 9y agoThe clocks thing isn't quite true but you're right that it's a badly editorialized clickbait title. The linked press release never mentions anything as dramatic as 'an energy war in the Balkans' nor does the actual title reflect what's been posted on HN at all.
- Aissen 9y agoThe clock thing is true, albeit simplified: I didn't have enough characters to say which type of clocks. Regarding "an energy war in the Balkans", I could have said "an electricity dispute between Serbia and Kosovo", but again, I wouldn't have had enough characters. I'm not sure the title was that bad, or that editorialized.
- pvg 9y agoIt was bad and editorialized, which is why the mods changed it. You could have just summarized the original title, as the site guidelines ask you to.