3 ms·
It's pretty "crazy" that all software that handles UTC needs to have an access to the internet (or software updates) every 6 months. You simply can't leave, say
by nawitus 12y ago
It's pretty "crazy" that all software that handles UTC needs to have an access to the internet (or software updates) every 6 months. You simply can't leave, say, a sensor somewhere for a year and expect it to record events in UTC.
Sure, you can record events in something else than UTC and convert it to UTC at a later time.
- fennecfoxen 12y agoUnless you have some fancy hardware around running your clock you've got bigger issues; as a general rule you can't run a computer and expect the time to remain +/- 1 second of UTC.
- agildehaus 12y agoNTP exists so we don't have to own this hardware. You can easily expect to be within milliseconds of UTC if this is working properly and you're syncing with stratum 1 servers. And better yet, the hardware to do this yourself isn't really "fancy" anymore: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA19G0A49787 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA19G0A497...
- Dylan16807 12y agoUh, NTP needs to have access to the internet (or a specialized hardware clock). GPS is also relying on a network. Running a calibrated atomic clock yourself is definitely in 'fancy' territory.
- agildehaus 12y agoThe statement was that you needed fancy hardware to get < 1 sec accuracy to UTC which is patently false, network availability or not you can easily (without an atomic clock) get that level of accuracy.
- makomk 12y agoYou need fancy hardware to get that level of accuracy in any way that doesn't also automatically give you leap second announcements, which was the problem we were talking about. NTP announces them, GPS announces them, the various longwave time stations announce them...
- fennecfoxen 12y agoEh. That hardware $300 and requires a network connection too. If that's reasonable to do, is network access to distribute leap-second information really a problem? (There may be cases where the answer is yes, but... we digress.)
- bpicolo 12y agoYep. That's why unixtime is actually a pretty logical measure.