5 ms·
Trust upholds complaint about BBC homepage clock
- timthorn 13y agoThat clock means a lot to those of us in the UK of a certain age - it does create an emotional link to the website by being there.
- jumblesale 13y agoYeah, that clock is more than just an inaccurate way of telling the time, it's an iconic image from the BBC's history.
- claudius 13y agoIgnoring the issue whether a clock on a website is even remotely useful, this: > The corporation also added that it would take around '100 staffing days to make the changes involved in switching to an independent clock'. strikes me as at least slightly odd. Shouldn’t such a change be implementable by sending a ‘starting time’ with the initial request and then count using JS? I’m one of these why-does-your-field-even-have-its-own-journal-guys, but this doesn’t look particularly difficult to me.
- lttlrck 13y agoActually all they need do is add a disclaimer...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- thomasahle 13y agoIt still wouldn't work if the users clock, say, ticked at double speed or not at all.
- martin-adams 13y agoStill wouldn't work if their monitor was off. Is such a thing a real concern?
- IanCal 13y agoThat depends on the accuracy required. 1) How much drift is ok? Do you need to keep sending updates? 2) These pages should be heavily cached, which means the time you get will be out by potentially several minutes (or you've got to have a very short term cache for just the clock). 3) Load time. If the request takes 1s but you need to be accurate to the second then do you need to try and measure the initial request time and determine the likely delays? 4) Managing all the timezones. If the clock must show the local time then you can't just send server time back, we've got to send different things for different regions. How accurate does that have to be? Will Geo-IP be enough? Changes of the size 2-4 will require new code, load testing, QA, code reviews. Plus you've got to take people from projects / push back timescales, which need to be weighed and approved (what deadlines are coming up? What change freezes?).
- lucian1900 13y agoThe server time would drift by the latency from server to browser to start with.
- antihero 13y ago"reflect as accurately as possible, bearing in mind the technological constraints of delivering data across the internet"
- akx 13y agoWait... 100 staffing days? How is that even remotely possible?
- PavlovsCat 13y agoIf you put 100 people into a small room, it will take them 24 hours to solve this problem. With less people, or a bigger room, it can be done faster, simply because having more than enough oxygen and space for your limbs helps a great deal with the process. At least I think that's what it means...
- PavlovsCat 13y agoHaha, what's the downmod for? Because it was a bad joke, because it was a joke period, or because it actually went over the head of someone? HN, go out more.
- perbu 13y agoIMHO, because we shouldn't have snarky jokes here. This isn't /.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoIs that from the posting guidelines or just random snobbery? Anyway, unlimited unaccountable anonymous downmoderation is exactly that, a snarky joke that never ends. And in that respect, slashdot is dancing circles around HN. Respect your elders, how about that :P
- martin-adams 13y ago100 days to display a server generated clock rather than a client side one.
- icebraining 13y agoBut they don't really have to display a server generated clock, just pre-seed the client clock with the current server time in order to account for the offset. If they want to be really sure, they can re-set the offset regularly using AJAX. There's no need to reimplement the whole clock.
- VLM 13y ago"There's no need to reimplement the whole clock." Its a pity it "has to be" a symbolic fake looking virtual clock. A webcam snapshot updated every minute or a live video feed of the actual real world big ben clock would look cooler and be infinitely more impressive and "British" (British being the first word of BBC) Yes its not HTML5/CSS3/JS/AJAX but the tech infrastructure to cache semi-live real world pix like this would also be technologically cool, so don't worry about it. Now... go reimplement Big Ben (just kidding) (Edited to add, also you're also outsourcing your problem with this strategy... Time on Big Ben is wrong, who cares its not your problem, tell the Queen or whoever is in charge of Big Ben, its no longer a web developer problem)
- lucian1900 13y agoYou can't "just" pre-seed with the current server time, since there is latency between the server sending it and the client receiving it.
- shawabawa3 13y agoI don't think the clock has to be accurate to the ms. The latency between client and server will almost always be < 1 second. They can probably get away with time being accurate to ~1minute
- radio4fan 13y agoSure. 99.5 days of management busy-work, and 4 hours coding, testing and deploying.
- lttlrck 13y ago'100 staffing days' to make the change? That erodes more trust than the 'factual accuracy' of a decorative clock.
- radio4fan 13y ago"The corporation also added that it would take around '100 staffing days to make the changes involved in switching to an independent clock'." I'd like to see how they're going to implement that without relying on the user's time settings in some way. Sure, they could get the system timezone offset, but that's not really any more safe than using the system clock. GeoIP lookup? Surely location services won't fly because of the scary browser message. Any other ideas?
- claudius 13y agoThe article explicitly states that people expect this clock to show the correct time in the UK, which I find a somewhat reasonable assumption for the BBC.
- radio4fan 13y agoSo it does. Well, in that case it's a piece of piss to implement as claudius says below.
- adlpz 13y agoJust set it up to the on-load time in UTC. It's the BBC after all, put it in London time and say so somewhere in the footer.
- ig1 13y agoPeople surprised by the 100 days requirement have presumably never seen the type of infrastructure required by a top-100 website or had to deal with user-time issues. Having an independent clock means turning off caching, which is a big deal when you're serving millions of page requests. Not to mention having to deal with timezone issues, daylight saving, latency, etc. This stuff is hard.
- mcgoooo 13y agoi agree, i've actually worked at the bbc and the infrastructure that goes into these things is unbelievable and necessary.
- rasur 13y agosame here. It's absolutely not a couple of servers and a bit of node, kids!
- brador 13y agoThen what is it?
- rasur 13y agoWell, I haven't worked there since about 2006, so numbers may have changed, but it was at least 10000 servers of various types (redhat, solaris, windows were the usual suspects I had to build out) of which I was aware (between maidenhead, the various colo's i had some responsibility for, tv center, white-city). software? i know there was a lot of perl, ruby was gaining some traction, a few different CMS's.. etc, i've (thankfully) forgotten most of the details, but diverse ecosystem is an appropriate phrase here. undoubtedly things have changed between then and now, but i'd guess it's something similar hardware-wise. My penultimate day of work was racking up ~300 servers for the i-player farm (i was a system engineer) at red-bus in docklands. My back has only really just started to recover. :/
- adrinavarro 13y ago
- andyhmltn 13y agoHow does this 'undermine trust'? If you're basing your scheduling based exactly on that clock expecting the exact time in London, then you are doing something wrong.
- shawabawa3 13y agoIt's on the BBC and so people expect it to be accurate. For example, I imagine a lot of people aren't sure if/when the clocks change (daylights saving time). They check on the BBC, see that their computer time is "accurate" and assume the clocks haven't changed. As another example, I often google "time" to check to see if my clock is accurate. If that just echoed back my local time I would feel like that was a breach of trust
- martin-adams 13y agoOften when we switch from GMT to BST (one hour ahead) I have to Google the time in the UK (because of Apple's trouble in the past with daylight savings, I can't trust my phone). It would be reasonable to expect someone to go to the BBC homepage and see what the current time is after the daylight savings switch, and wrong to find the time was incorrect due to their PC not being configured correctly.
- andyhmltn 13y agoAh, that's a good point actually
- dbdbdb 13y ago"A member of the public complained that the clock on the homepage merely reproduces the time stored on an individual computer's internal system, whether it's accurate or not." Problem exists between computer and chair. Some people need to get a life.