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Time.gov was upgraded today
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Amorymeltzer 7y agoI can't comment on accessibility or responsiveness or what have you, but this is a wonderful display. Strong, clear delineations without being too bright or garish, and densely packs a bunch of information together without losing clarity or concision. Love it.
- eganist 7y agoIt's brilliant. And the front-end code, though not at all complicated, is clean and easy to understand. I can't speak for code quality, though. NIST published an update to their About page for time.gov mid-week (https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/about-timegov https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/about-t... ); the only reason I know it was updated today or might've been late last night is because I used the old time.gov to set a watch the day before, and when I opened the tab today, the clock read: aN:aN:aN --- The nice part is that save for the custom web analytics code from digitalgov.gov as well as jquery, it's not minimized.
- zingermc 7y agoAre those the last two characters of stringing NaN?
- eganist 7y agoyes!
- chipperyman573 7y agoI wonder what the deal with them refreshing every 10 minutes is... This is at the bottom: setInterval(function() { location.reload(); }, 600000);
- eganist 7y agoMy only guess is accounting for local clock drift.
- kijin 7y agoThey're probably still tinkering with this and that, and the forced reload ensures that what's on the screen isn't too different from what they're actually serving even if users keep their tabs open all day long. If they change something, like moving a timezone boundary, they only need to wait 10 minutes before all clients are updated. Moreover, any clock that updates itself in JS is also limited by the accuracy of the device's own clock. Periodic reloading ensures that the displayed time doesn't drift far from the server's clock. Of course they could do this by AJAX, but location.reload() also works fine if there's no client state worth preserving.
- corylulu 7y agoYeah, should definitely be done with a XHR/Fetch call. Honestly, I would love if it updated through a websocket considering it's lower latency and can update far more often without the need for expensive HTTPS calls or a reliance on internal clocks.
- kortilla 7y agoSounds like pointless astronaut engineering. What problem do you think that would solve?
- ascar 7y agoI don't think their 10 minute update interval is based on the performance limitations of the HTTP protocol, but used because it's simply not necessary to do it more often. Maintaining an open full duplex connection for a single fetch request every ten minutes sounds like terrible overengineering that in the end is probably much worse performance wise. Both protocols use TCP as an underlying protocol. So the latency of the timedata from the final request should be pretty much the same (neglectible differences due to larger HTTP header that needs to be sent and parsed on receive). We don't really care about the additional round-trips before, because they don't affect the clockdrift. However, if you really do care about the clockdrift due to client-server latency there are protocols like NTP that try to calculate that drift and minimize it.
- sneak 7y agoWhy does time.gov need analytics? None of the usual reasons businesses cite as requiring them are valid here.
- eganist 7y agoThe accountability of government to the people would be the primary reason, the idea being to show the value for the money you're being taxed. But to answer your specific question, regardless of whether it's needed or not, it's mandatory. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/memoranda/2017/m-17-06.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me... requirement #2
- mattmar96 7y agoInteresting stuff. Surprised to see such tech literacy on the White House’s website.
- willis936 7y agoThe fed is also responsible for making ghidra. Not everyone working for the fed is a lawyer.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoYou shouldn't be. There are incredibly competent technologists currently in positions to deliver. https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/ https://18f.gsa.gov/
- acdha 7y agoThink a little deeper about that: the government doesn’t need to sell things but that doesn’t mean that the people building sites don’t care about knowing who’s visiting, what they do, or how the site performed. For example, when do you stop spending more money supporting old browsers? There’s even an open source project around the public analytics.usa.gov dashboard: https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov https://github.com/18F/analytics.usa.gov
- xwowsersx 7y agoAgreed, really brilliant. The way the different states are colored according to their time zone and then that color reaching out to the labels on top with those ray-like things is actually pretty clever. Interesting to wonder how often are people needing to come up for a design for this type of information? Am I wrong to think not very often? My point is it's cool to see a design for something that isn't "solved" or that not many have ever really worked on.
- eganist 7y ago> The way the different states are colored according to their time zone and then that color reaching out to the labels on top with those ray-like things is actually pretty clever. So the different components of this visualization genuinely solve a few different problems around color-blindness (necessary for 508 compliance is my guess, but I'm not an expert here) Grab a screenshot (https://i.imgur.com/9ynIz5G.jpg https://i.imgur.com/9ynIz5G.jpg) and drop it in here (https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/ https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simul...) The only mode where any two zones next to each other are nearly identical is Red-blind/Protanopia (CMK identical, Y 8% higher in UTC-7 compared to UTC-8†). Monochromacy/Achromatopsia is a close second... and that's where the gradients to the clocks come in - even for those users, there's still a mechanism to distinguish those two zones. I'd guess some serious usability research went into this. --- † RGB, though more accurate since we're talking about a screen, would've been a little more complicated to compare in writing since only yellow changed between the two in CMYK
- xwowsersx 7y agoVery interesting, thanks for the color-blindness link.
- jryb 7y ago> I'd guess some serious usability research went into this. I find that unlikely. If they just swapped the blue color of Alaska with the Mountain time zone there would be no ambiguity between adjacent colors at all for any type of color blindness.
- NelsonMinar 7y agoPleased to see they retained support for properly displaying :60 seconds during the leap second.
- neurobro 7y agoIt looks like it was designed to fit perfectly above the fold on the screen, but then some manager (to put it mildly) came along and made them insert a useless grey bar at the top, pushing everything else down. Nothing a little "Block element..." can't fix, though.
- chrisseaton 7y agoHow come it uses AM and PM rather than 24-hours?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eganist 7y agoScreenshot as of 8:57pm UTC-5 if it's down for you: https://i.imgur.com/dFrM24l.jpg https://i.imgur.com/dFrM24l.jpg Edit: holy cow that screenshot became dated very quickly. Map was updated to fix Florida and Texas; new screenshot as of 9:35 UTC-5: https://i.imgur.com/9ynIz5G.jpg https://i.imgur.com/9ynIz5G.jpg
- mrtnmcc 7y agoUnder UTC time in lower right corner it says 'your device is off by 0.403 seconds'. This is on my android cell phone and is surprising.. wonder where the offset is coming from.
- willis936 7y agoGet a dedicated NTP client app to be certain of your UTC offset. While NIST won’t have messed up their NTP implementation, I don’t trust web browsers to handle time-sensitive things.
- selectodude 7y agoFirefox adds about 100 milliseconds.
- eganist 7y agoThe code generating this is un-minified and loaded from here: https://time.gov/scripts/zzz__0fd3fed7f945928bf590af174cd541f0e02fce58.js https://time.gov/scripts/zzz__0fd3fed7f945928bf590af174cd541... It's basically: timeDotGov.data.realTimeDif = timeDotGov.data.serverTime - timeDotGov.data.responseTime; with added corrections. Grep for realTimeDif to see all of it.
- ComodoHacker 7y agoCould this be used for fingerprinting?
- wizzwizz4 7y agoYes.
- nexuist 7y agoI know Arizona doesn't observe DST, but how come the whole state isn't shaded? Does the Grand Canyon observe DST?
- shortsightedsid 7y agoI think parts of the Navajo Nation does observe DST.
- dogecoinbase 7y agoThis is correct. Additionally, the Hopi Reservation, an enclave within the Navajo Nation, does not observe DST, hence the smaller shaded region.
- nexuist 7y agoOh wow. It's really cool that the developers put the effort in to denoting the difference. Thank you!
- JshWright 7y agoThe map actually simplifies the situation significantly. There are two Hopi enclaves within the Navajo Nation, the larger of which has a Navajo enclave nested within it. Because of all this, you can travel less than 100 miles in a straight line and have to change your clock six times...
- dmckeon 7y agoThere is also a Navajo enclave within that Hopi reservation/enclave: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2016-May/023665.html http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2016-May/023665.html
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ourmandave 7y agoDidn't this used to be a java plug-in? It also showed a world map and where the sun was currently shining. I only know it used to be one of the first results on googling "current time".
- eganist 7y agoThey made it a standard html/js front-end app that precisely mimicked the java applet some years ago, but they ditched that entire UX today.
- monocularvision 7y agoI have used that very version recently from Mobile Safari. Didn’t realize they had mimicked a Java applet, but I remember thinking that it sure looked like one (knowing it couldn’t be because I was on Mobile Safari).
- dtparr 7y agoOdd. It appears to show all of TX in central time. I thought the Western tip (El Paso, basically) was Mountain. Edit: fixed now. Quick work for a Friday night!
- eganist 7y agoUnless something's changed, you appear to be correct (edit: as of just before 9pm eastern - https://i.imgur.com/dFrM24l.jpg https://i.imgur.com/dFrM24l.jpg) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_United_States In fact, considering it's from NIST, there's a stunning lack of precision in the map. The controversial Florida timezone split (2000 elections) isn't reflected here either, and the map itself is largely rounded without considering individual locales. edit: fixed! Nice!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoIt's corrected now. Hello NIST employee watching this thread. Nice quick turnaround!
- geekone 7y agoThanks! And you fixed FL :) Really great refresh from the old version of the site.
- afterburner 7y agoI never realized the time zones cut through so many states.
- danso 7y agoHere's what the site looked like previously, a classic design: https://images.mix.com/production/b0/9f/b09f278d6474c4ac543bcaa0a05eb825.png https://images.mix.com/production/b0/9f/b09f278d6474c4ac543b...
- ebg13 7y agoWith a giant Texas flag down the side. I wonder why Texas.
- komali2 7y agoAs a Texan I'm offended it's not obvious why. In all seriousness I always thought it was a sort of minimal representation of the American flag. The star isn't oriented the way it is on the Texas flag.
- xwowsersx 7y agoJust before this upgrade today, it looked like that?
- eganist 7y agoLiterally yes, though it was worse some number of years ago. It looked precisely like this, but was a java applet.
- collinmanderson 7y agoI believe it was Flash for a while, and then eventually the Flash app was automatically converted to "HTML5".
- Forgivenessizer 7y agoYes LOL I would load it for a nolstalgia trip. You need Netscape Gold (or a skin) for the full effect.
- RandomBacon 7y agoI remember using time.gov about 17 years ago. It was "worse" back then: the home page had two buttons: one that displayed a static time in HTML, the other that displayed a Flash or Java element where the seconds ticked. (Worse compared to today, back then it was good for the time and I appreciated the resource.) Great job to those of you working on this website! The update looks amazing, and I'm sure I will continue using it for years to come!
- petarb 7y agoIt's a lot better than before but still not 100% polished. E.g. the bottom left of the footer shows undefined #responseTime https://i.imgur.com/703v1cC.jpg https://i.imgur.com/703v1cC.jpg
- twright 7y agoTIL the Navajo nation (in North East Arizona) recognizes daylight savings while the enclaved Hopi nation does not along with the rest of Arizona.
- rconti 7y agoOh man. I went on a Southwest roadtrip with my wife. We had an appointment to tour Canyon de Chelly with a Navajo guide on Sunday AM. We checked into a motel just barely on the reservation on Saturday night before the DST change. When we entered Arizona, it was, I think, on different time from California. But that night, California was going to move onto the same time as Arizona. The Navajo reservation, too, would be changing times, to match Central, I think. My new-to-me car, with a "DST" box checked on the Nav system, and with the theoretical capability to change timezones based on location and DST rules, would do god-knows-what. We of course had to assume our appointment would be on Navajo time, but had no way of knowing whether our cell phones would switch or not, because there was no way of knowing whether there was GPS-based timezone logic, how precise it was, whether timekeeping was only based on the tower you're connected to, and whether the towers in question were on the reservation or outside of it. Needless to say, we actually set the bedside alarm clock and used it. (of course, these things often go awry as you find out you set it on radio instead of buzzer, and the radio is not tuned to a legitimate station, or the volume is too low, or whatever). Oh and I later found out the checkbox on my car just literally meant "are you on DST or not". Yeah, even though it has the capability to pull time from the satellites and cell towers, and even though it knows where I am, and in fact WOULD set the clock from GPS, you had to manually set the timezone and current setting of DST as you moved on and off DST.
- wtmt 7y agoWas the bedside clock set correctly or was intelligent enough for you to make it on time for the tour? It’s not clear to me from your story what happened with the tour.
- rconti 7y agoWe made it :) It was an old school alarm clock, so you could expect it to at least be consistent, which is all that mattered. I don't remember if we set it ahead, or left it where it was, but we knew where it would be tour time. Whereas we could not trust our phones to not do something funky. Or to do something funky and undesired.
- vector_spaces 7y agoMaybe a silly question, but how can they reliably detect and display the error between my system time and the actual time? I would think there'd be some latency introduced while the page is being loaded/drawn, and by the JavaScript code that's displaying/changing the time, among others.
- kube-system 7y agoSimple. Measure the latency, and then correct for it! > When a user connects to www.time.gov on a computer or mobile device, the Javascript in the client's browser checks the local clock on the device and then requests the time from a NIST server, which has been synchronized with UTC(NIST). When the packets containing the NIST time stamp arrive at the client's browser, the device clock is checked again and compared to the first check of the local clock. The result is a measurement the round-trip delay of requesting/receiving the time stamp. https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/about-timegov https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/about-t...
- StringyBob 7y ago> It is estimated that the one-half of the round-trip delay happens in each direction. Anyone know how true this is? Particularly for mobile/asymmetric bandwidth connections - what might the errors bars be?
- eganist 7y agokube-system nailed it, though if you want to see the JS in action, visit https://time.gov/scripts/zzz__0fd3fed7f945928bf590af174cd541f0e02fce58.js https://time.gov/scripts/zzz__0fd3fed7f945928bf590af174cd541... and grep for realTimeDif
- winrid 7y agoNice. No React or Angular here! Wonder if that's normal for government projects?
- 7y ago
- sirbranedamuj 7y agoI emailed about this but since it seems there may be a NIST employee reading: the "your device clock" does not respect the 24 hour clock display option.
- Deadron 7y agoWhoever developed the javascript could benefit from a formatter. Also, synchronous ajax calls?
- saltedonion 7y agoMobile safari says can’t connect to the server. Is it down or does it not have a web interface ?
- Keverw 7y agoDesktop Safari says it won't connect either, but if I open it in Chrome, it loads... odd. Wonder what could be causing that? Makes no sense to me.
- Keverw 7y agoWell it's loading now. It gave a black screen so makes me wonder if maybe it could have been DNS related? Doesn't Safari use system's DNS while Chrome and Firefox is moving to DNS over HTTPS? That could be a very good explanation why, otherwise kinda puzzled about that.
- skunkworker 7y agoA functional and easy to read government website? Well that’s not something you see every day.
- all_blue_chucks 7y agoSo why is my Windows 10 clock over a second fast? Isn't NTP accurate to within a fraction of a second?
- bl4ckneon 7y agoWould like to understand too. On a new android 10 phone it was 1.7 seconds. Not that large, but in computer/processing time it is pretty large.
- bdibs 7y agoMy iPhone is showing 0.024s for an extra data point.
- diebeforei485 7y agoPhones need to work with the cellular network, so they sync their time with the cellular tower using a GSM protocol (NITZ) and not NTP. Your phone's settings should have a way to sync with the cellular network (for example, if you set a manual time and then choose set time automatically). Cell towers (edit: in the USA) are usually within a second of time.gov, so your offset should hopefully be under a second after you sync with the cellular network.
- jcrawfordor 7y agoWhile cellular towers uniformly use a GPS time source for TDMA reasons (which is exactly synchronized to the Naval time minus a known offset), they are surprisingly inconsistent about how time information is delivered to handsets. CDMA requires that towers rebroadcast exactly the GPS time, but GSM generally does not. As a result, GSM handsets may have less accurate time sync depending on how the time service is actually provided. It's somewhat common for CDMA cellular equipment to be used as a stratum-1 time source in lieu of GPS, since CDMA is easier to receive inside buildings. But GSM is unsuitable for this purpose, and since the long-term prognosis for CDMA seems perhaps less than optimistic, some operators may be forced to run a GPA antenna to the roof.
- 7y ago
- animex 7y agoIs it supposed to be pulsing/twitching constantly? (using Edge-Chromium)
- sciurus 7y agoThat's an amazing improvement, but I'm already nostalgic for the old design. Next you're going to tell me they've upgraded the Space Jam website. Tangentially, I find myself using https://time.is/ https://time.is/ a lot, check it out if you frequently need to check time in another city or verify your clock is synced.
- mycall 7y agoDo they have the audio version that is broadcast on AM?
- whitehouse3 7y agotime.is/ is a damn near perfect website. Doing one thing really well. I only wish it had more date display options: day number and ISO8601 Week Number.
- 333c 7y agoI used to use time.is, but recently it's gotten more and more ads. Now, this new version of time.gov has the feature that compares device time to correct time, so I think I'm going to switch over.
- jumpinalake 7y agoStop being so jealous of our Canadian version: https://nrc.canada.ca/en/web-clock/ https://nrc.canada.ca/en/web-clock/
- consultutah 7y agoOk. Done being jealous. Thx
- 93po 7y agodoesn't even work without enabling third party JS
- eadmund 7y agoYup, I noticed that myself. If it doesn't work with uMatrix … then it doesn’t work.
- icebraining 7y agoHardly "third-party", it's just a second domain of the same institute.
- jimsmart 7y agoWhatever they’re doing, it’s still “third-party” enough that it won’t work with mobile Safari (or perhaps Safari’s default settings).
- prepend 7y agoGiant box telling me “ Browser compatibility To ensure the proper operation of the web clock application, please use the most recent version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or Safari, with JavaScript enabled.” Viewing using latest version of mobile safari, JavaScript enabled. Not sure if they aren’t detecting browser, aren’t detecting JavaScript, or are just letting everyone know this even if they have the right browser. I suppose I should be lucky that it’s not twice the size and in French as well.
- whoopdedo 7y agoThey broke my workflow[1]. Not really, I don't do this anymore. But at a past job I dealt with malware infected computers. One of the first things I'd do out of habit was make sure it had the correct time. We could connect them to a network but it was heavily firewalled which included blocking NTP. Not wanting to have to set time manually all the time I wrote a Powershell script that parsed www.time.gov. I'm sure that script won't work now. [1] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
- m3kw9 7y agoI wonder how they lined up each of the time box to each color gradient at diff resolutions. From what I see, that gradient and map is a single pic.
- testfoobar 7y agoOld school nerds remember setting their calculator watches by calling into the us naval observatory master clock. https://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/time/telephone-time https://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/time/telephone-time
- zZorgz 7y agoPersonally (on desktop) this design strains my eyes. I want to look in the center where there's nothing to grasp, and there's the official statement, black banner, time boxes, time zone titles in highly varying colors/fonts competing with each other. Also I notice the page auto-refreshing in the background.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lunias 7y agoAwesome! I go to that site every couple weeks to set my watch!
- wnevets 7y agoThat actually looks good while still being functional. It even works with IE11
- jrockway 7y agoHow does this work if your time is really far off? The actual time is served over HTTPS (and the server doesn't even listen on port 80), so if your system time is so far off that it's beyond the validity range of the certificate, your browser won't let the site load. Then you won't be able to determine the time, and fix your computer. This feels like the one website ever that needs to be served over HTTP ;)
- taywrobel 7y agoIf you’re connecting over http(s) to set the time of a system, you’re doing it wrong. That’s what the NTP servers are for (which don’t require encryption) - https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi
- viraptor 7y agoFirst, you shouldn't set the time manually. There's sntp/NTP and whatever windows protocol is. Second, you should never leave the certificate replacement till the last moment. Even the 3-months certs should be rotated a month before expiry for safety. If your clock is a month off, that's not something the website can help with.
- tatersolid 7y agoThe “windows protocol” has been NTP since the year 2000. Before that there was NET TIME which ran over SMB and probably still works because backwards compatibility is what built the MSFT empire.
- llacb47 7y agoAw, I quite liked the simple design of the old version.
- thedance 7y agoIt says my mac is off by nearly a full second, and sntp from the command line agrees. 2020-02-07 20:49:08.720955 (+0800) +0.949762 +/- 0.732397 pool.ntp.org 108.59.2.24 s2 no-leap Why is the clock discipline on macos so bad? ETA: my local linux box by contrast is off by 1ms. 2020-02-07 20:54:23.770052 (+0800) +0.000570 +/- 0.019234 pool.ntp.org 50.205.244.108 s2 no-leap
- ezconnect 7y agoMy Windows 10 was off by 3.3sec and just checked when it was last sync (12hours ago). Did the resync and now just off by 0.08sec
- catchbepis22 7y agoI'm off by 0.08 seconds. Why is it off at all?
- dannyw 7y agoEh, my Linux server is off by 2s, and that’s supposed to be server grade hardware. The reality might simply be that being off by a second doesn’t matter so much, as long as it’s gradual. For example, Google chose to “smear” a leap second by prolonging each second by a tiny bit, and everything was fine. And finally, to pay devils advocate, clients being off by +- a few seconds might actually be a good thing. If everyone was aligned to the millisecond 99.99% of the time, then a lot of timing bugs and inconsistencies won’t be surfaced except on the field.
- Matumio 7y agoIf you're running some form of ntp, the underlying hardware doesn't matter that much. An offset greater than 0.5s is probably caused by ntp not running, time jumps during hibernation, automatic VM live migrations, or other virtualization issues. Not sure how bad a time jump of 0.5s really is, but in the past those did not happen on servers, so there are old ntp configs that attempt to correct it over days. Probably a mistake, because the instant correction of a large time jump should have no worse effects than the time jump itself.
- teruakohatu 7y agoIsn't it odd not to have an HTTP to HTTPS redirect? I assumed I was having DNS issues.
- jdfellow 7y agoMap gets me wondering exactly which meridian within these time zones does solar noon match up with clock noon.
- freepor 7y agoSome of the last few bits of local government control shown in the poor overlap of time zones and state boundaries.
- russellbeattie 7y agoI can't believe all the seconds on that page aren't synchronized. Or at least on my tablet they aren't! They're flipping at slightly different moments. Should have had one timer event firing to change every element at the same tick.
- reilly3000 7y agoI thought that was happening at first on my fast desktop, but it seemed to be to be an optical illusion the more I looked at it. I’d probably have to set some breakpoints or something to verify, but it’s Friday night...
- missblit 7y agoThey are all updated in the same JavaScript function. However each clock is updated in a seperate call to .innerHTML. This means the DOM is updated seperately for each clock instead of just once for all the clocks. So depending on how eager your browser is about doing layouts, I could imagine different clocks updating on different frames to be a possibility.
- stjo 7y agoI’m fairly sure the JS standard guarantees that no layouting (or any form of rendering) would happen mid function execution. Haven’t looked in the source code yet, but if they do function updateAllClocks() { A.innerHTML = ...; B.innerHTML = ...; } Then A and B would update on the screen on the same frame and the order doesn’t matter (If A is not parent of B or vice versa of course) This is not true if they do a lot of setTimeouts(), but is true for all other “normal” synchronous code.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> I’m fairly sure the JS standard guarantees that no layouting (or any form of rendering) would happen mid function execution. I think the JS standard doesn't have any notion or layout of rendering. Which part of the standard are you referring to?
- 7y ago
- nicksardo 7y agoMany years ago I created a site that similarly syncs time between server and clients for the purpose of sharing stopwatches & timers. I found that using a websocket connection yielded a higher precision. https://chronograph.io https://chronograph.io
- csande17 7y agoA fun copy-paste goof in one of the CSS files: https://time.gov/css/NIST-styles.css https://time.gov/css/NIST-styles.css has the footer text from github.com at the bottom.
- hanspeter 7y agoA reminder to always click to raw format before copying code from GitHub.
- jcrawfordor 7y agoThere are two independent timekeeping authorities in the US, the NIST and the Navy, which maintain the official civil and military time respectively. By policy the civil and military time are synchronized, and the precise offset between civil and military time is monitored by the NIST as a form of quality assurance. The offset between the two is generally less than the error in the comparison method. The Navy offers a similar online time service although it is clearly far less developed from a design perspective (https://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/time/display-clocks/simpletime https://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/time/display-clocks/simpletim...). However, what's perhaps more useful is that the Navy continues to offer a telephone time service (202-762-1401) while NIST does not. Additionally, the GPS time, while operated by the Air Force, is precisely synchronized to the Navy time plus or minus a known offset (due to the decision to no longer apply leap seconds to the GPS constellation to avoid leap-second-related problems). There is some history here. The NIST is interested in timekeeping from a metrological perspective since it is important to many commercial and scientific pursuits. The Navy, on the other hand, has long been interested in accurate timekeeping because it is required for celestial navigation. The transit telescope maintained at the Naval Observatory comes from the legacy of the Naval Observatory as a tool to correctly adjust the clocks used by ships at sea for navigation. Similarly, many of the most significant advances in mechanical timekeeping were spurred by the need for compact and reliable clocks for use at sea. The Navy operates master clock equipment at Schriever AFB for closer proximity to the NIST equipment at Boulder, but the primary means of comparison of the two time bases is by observing the GPS time. Because of the simplicity and low cost of GPS time sources, GPS is as ubiquitous for time measurement as it is for navigation.
- wglb 7y ago> Navy continues to offer a telephone time service (202-762-1401) while NIST does not. But on this page https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/radio-stations/wwv/telephone-time-day-service https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/radio-s... NIST shows a working phone number...
- hamandcheese 7y agoI like the Navy version far more.
- Thorrez 7y agoThe old site would give you a confidence interval of the time, but the new one doesn't seem to have that. I can't see any estimate of how accurate the time is.
- qmarchi 7y agoThere's a value at the bottom of the black box on the right stating your computers drift from NIST.
- Thorrez 7y agoI don't care about the time my computer is set to. I care about the confidence interval between the time displayed on the webpage and ground truth. The webpage currently says my computer is over 1 second off from the truth. In the old site, it wouldn't tell me anything about my computer. It would tell me a confidence interval between the website's time and the truth, and it was usually about .1 seconds IIRC.
- rafaele 7y agoConsidering what it [looked like 1 week ago](https://web.archive.org/web/20200129180342/https://time.gov/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200129180342/https://time.gov/), I'd say this is an improvement. My favorite part is "THE OFFICIAL U.S. TIME". No messing around.
- juretriglav 7y agoThe site appears to be down now.
- tempodox 7y agoIf you append `?t=24` to the URL it shows 24-hours clocks.
- kyberias 7y agoOff by +0.096 s
- cyansmoker 7y agoaaaand it's down.
- bsimpson 7y agoWeird that the Gulf and the East Coast get all their little peninsulas and islands, but there's just a squiggle on the California coast where San Francisco should be.
- javajosh 7y agoIf you stare at one of the second digits in the center, say the Mountain Time seconds digit, its interesting to note whether you're peripheral vision does or does not detect the other digits changing. For me, it seems number dependent: I see 1-2-3, and 7-8 but the other transitions appear static!
- hakanito 7y agoTried it, similar for me! Interesting find
- LAMike 7y agoPuerto Rico should be added
- olex 7y agoIt is, look on the bottom right.
- matthewcanty 7y agoI'd like this visualisation for the world!
- po1nter 7y agoMy device's clock is off by 1 hour. I looked into it and it turns out that on Firefox Developer Edition (v73.0b12 64-bit) returns an incorrect value for Date.getTimezoneOffset() (0 instead of the expected -60). I'm not sure if it's a bug or an anti-tracking/privacy "feature".
- wizzwizz4 7y agoIt's probably because you have Firefox Developer Edition. Do private windows always open at the same, 4:3 window size? If so, that sounds like the resistFingerprinting about:config entry.
- prepend 7y agoWhile I used to use this years ago managing servers I recently pulled up the old version again helping some admins in my org debug why the 2factor Authenticator apps weren’t working for signon. Both server and client must have synced time. I validated my phone and desktop’s time using time.gov when the admins claimed that their server was right and my clients were off. I thought it was kind of funny they would claim their time was accurate without checking it. Also funny that their server and local ntp would be off. But time.gov saved the day by providing an always available, easy to use standard.
- mwexler 7y agoFor a while, Time.gov was one of the poster children for Lazlo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLaszlo), one of the more interesting cross platform toolsets back in the day (akin to Haxe nowadays). You can see the LZW (lzx) files in older versions of the site in Archive.org Wayback (2007 or so onward). The team translated their purely Java portion into Lazlo then cross compiled into swf for Flash. So, it went from CGI (perl) to Java to Flash to HTML (still via Laszlo) to a few revisions here and there to work around browser changes to finally this latest revamp. See some background in https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=50644 https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=50644 from 2007.
- badrabbit 7y agoCan you change the link to https:// https://? Can't connect over http.
- lai 7y agoLove how it says undefined at the very bottom.
- whiddershins 7y agoOnly sorta related but that map doesn’t show this interesting detail which I experienced first hand: The Navajo Nation Reservation is on a different time zone than the state it is mostly inside. But the Hopi Reservation is entirely contained within the Navajo, and is on a different time zone. When we drove through that region my phone just freaked out, switching times back and forth arbitrarily. And the hotel had three clocks in the lobby for clarification.
- quantified 7y agoI wish they would upgrade the systems that serve the story. I’ve timed out (given up on it after 30 seconds) trying to read it on over 10 different occasions at different hours of day and night.