18 ms·

NTP's Fate Hinges on 'Father Time'

95 points by doughj3 12y ago

acqq 12y ago
The article is split on 5 pages and due to the ads not easy to navigate through. The current situation of Harlan Stenn (59), who maintains NTP alone is on the fourth page: "With the Linux Foundation's $7,000 in monthly cash flow, Stenn finances his movement between his home lab, in Talent, Ore., and the NTP servers located in San Jose, Calif. In Oregon, Stenn lives with his wife and does most of his patch inspection, code writing, and release building three weeks a month. The fourth week, he stays in San Jose, close to two co-location data center providers that host NTP computers. He rents a room there to work on server and network administration, maintain the email list, and check on server backups. Much of the travel, room, replacement hardware such as disk drives, or needed commercial software such as the Coverity system for security checking on code, must come out of the $7,000 monthly stipend or be charged to his consulting business. Most of his 17-20 servers came out of a one-time, $10,000 grant in 2010 from the Internet Society, a policy and technology infrastructure advisory body for the Internet founded in 1991. Those servers are running at ISC.org in Redwood City, Calif., which hosts BIND and several other open source pieces of Internet infrastructure. For 15 years, it has provided space, electricity and some management "smart hands" to host NTP operations, without charging, said Stenn. "They would love for us to pay them," he said, and he once totaled the monthly bill at $1,400. But ISC.org also knows the NTP project can't pay and continues to host it, Stenn added." And on the first page: "Its ongoing development and maintenance now rest mostly on the shoulders of Stenn, and that's why NTP faces a turning point. Stenn, who also works sporadically on his own consulting business, has given himself a deadline: Garner more financial support by April, "or look for regular work.”" Now although he has a donate link on http://www.ntp.org http://www.ntp.org to: http://networktimefoundation.org/donate/ http://networktimefoundation.org/donate/ he doesn't have a clear goal set like GnuPG had. GnuPG doesn't state the goal because it reached it. But until then you were able to actually see how your support moves the bar. Maybe setting the goal would help here?
- mikeash 12y ago
  What would happen if he got fed up and quit, or was hit by a bus? I assume the article covers that too, but as you mention it's a bit painful to navigate, and since you seem willing to summarize/quote a bit, I thought I'd take advantage in a most selfish manner.
  - gpvos 12y ago
    The article doesn't really say. As far as I know, basically, there is no contingency plan. We'll just have to hope someone steps up.
imaginator 12y ago
tl;dr: Timelord needs financial support.
ChrisAntaki 12y ago
When I knock on someone's door, and then hand them a hot box of pizza, they smile and often hand me money: $5's, $10's, sometimes a $100. I'm just doing my job, just like this Harlan "Father Time" Stenn. I suppose we take for granted, that which we can't see.
moe 12y ago
So this guy gets $7000/mo from the Linux foundation for maintaining NTPd and... that's not enough?
- rxt 12y ago
  $7000/mo for his expenses, data center expenses and all the other associated costs...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - dingaling 12y ago
    He spends one week per month staying in San Jose ( where the servers are hosted for free ) to be... closer to the servers? It's hard to sympathize when there are such frivolous expenses. There's what, a thousand bucks at least on travel and accommodation per month. Going on-site is understandable when updates need to be performed that are too risky to do remotely. On-site on a fixed schedule, however, would quickly be over-ruled in any commercial operation.
    - moe 12y ago
      It's hard to sympathize I agree. If the article is a misrepresentation then they should correct that asap, it leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth. It feels like this guy saw how well the sob-story fundraiser worked for GnuPG[1] and figured he'd give it a shot, too. That's all good and well, but not while you already have a sponsor as generous as the Linux Foundation seems to be here. [1] https://twitter.com/stripe/status/563449352635432960 https://twitter.com/stripe/status/563449352635432960
    - NeutronBoy 12y ago
      "With the Linux Foundation's $7,000 in monthly cash flow, Stenn finances his movement between his home lab, in Talent, Ore., and the NTP servers located in San Jose, Calif. In Oregon, Stenn lives with his wife and does most of his patch inspection, code writing, and release building three weeks a month. The fourth week, he stays in San Jose, close to two co-location data center providers that host NTP computers. He rents a room there to work on server and network administration, maintain the email list, and check on server backups."
kapsel 12y ago
Its also worth checking out Poul Henning-Kamps (FreeBSD comitter) work on Ntimed, check out: https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed The overall architectural goals are the same as every other FOSS project claims to follow: Simplicity, Quality, Security etc. etc. but I tend to think that we stick a little bit more closely to them. This work is sponsored by Linux Foundation, partly in response to the HeartBleed fiasco, and after studying the 300,000+ lines of source-code in NTPD. I concluded that while it could be salvaged, it would be more economical, much faster and far more efficient to start from scratch. Ntimed is the result.
- acqq 12y ago
  His post announcing his "from the scratch" effort: http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html The problem with all such initiatives ("we start clean") is that they typically never even reach the feature set of the previous software (implementing features takes orders of magnitude more time than some simple "proof of concept") and that they often make the same errors the older software already solved. JWZ wrote nicely somewhere about that effect (something like "it's not 'hard to read code,' those are the actual features implemented") but I can't find the link.
  - spectre256 12y ago
    Joel Spolsky has one of the most convincing discussions on this topic: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html "Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it's just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes. ... Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it's like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters. When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work."
tech-no-logical 12y ago
how does this relate to alternative implementations like openNTPd ? this guy maintains the reference implementation of the protocol I guess ?
- noselasd 12y ago
  ntpd (http://www.ntp.org/ http://www.ntp.org/) is the reference implementation.
- slasaus 12y ago
  From [1] I get that PHK decided not to use privilege separation because it's not portable enough. AFAIK that's one of the main differences between OpenNTPD and Ntimed. Well, that and precision of course. OpenNTPDs accuracy is "only" around milliseconds [2] (which is probably good enough for anyone not using dedicated time hardware like a stratum server). The portable version missed the frequency adjustment code for years, but recently this has been added to the portable version as well. I've also read a discussion with PHK somewhere that he didn't like OpenNTPD because it had no auth (sorry, can't find the source again). I guess this complaint has been mitigated recently now that TLS auth is supported in OpenNTPD [3]. /edit: not sure if it's clear but I was comparing OpenNTPD to Ntimed. But the named differences still exist when compared to ntp4. [1] http://phk.freebsd.dk/_downloads/FOSDEM_2015.pdf http://phk.freebsd.dk/_downloads/FOSDEM_2015.pdf page 13 and 14 [2] http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_02_11-time_for_a_change http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_02_11-time_for_a_change at 30:30 and 34:00 [3] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150210103656 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150210103656
  - floatboth 12y ago
    ntimed is a weird project IMO, because it's not different enough from OpenNTPD: both are small NTP daemons written in C. He could've created a fork of OpenNTPD with more precision and without privilege separation instead. If ntimed was written in Rust though... THAT would've been excellent.
    - gpvos 12y ago
zb 12y ago
…commercial software such as the Coverity system for security checking on code, must come out of the $7,000 monthly stipend or be charged to his consulting business. Coverity is free for Open Source projects, why is he paying for it at all?
danbruc 12y ago
Can somebody shed some light on how maintaining one network protocol implementation and possibly improving it every couple of years could consume three million Dollars every year? We all know how easy it is to underestimate the required effort and how quickly tiny things can blow up into major issues, but it is completely beyond my imagination in the case of NTP.
- brohee 12y ago
  You need drivers for time sources for a start, there are enough of these to use full time devs for years...
  - danbruc 12y ago
    This sounds like a bad and unsustainable idea, with capital B and U. Shouldn't it be the responsibility of the vendor to provide a driver? Why would you put the burden to deal with all kinds of clock hardware onto someone maintaining a network protocol implementation? I could see reasons to have one or three or so generic drivers, but if the vendor comes up with something fancy not covered by one of the few generic drivers it should be their responsibility to provide a suitable driver.
    - gpvos 12y ago
      Most time sources have other uses than serving NTP time. Those are the uses that people want to pay lots of money for. Serving NTP time isn't very lucrative.
- smackfu 12y ago
  It sounds like that is his opinion of what a "proper" support operation looks like, abstract from the actual support requirements of NTP.
pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Not wanting to be too blunt but how're the Linux Foundation ensuring that if this guy dies [or decides to quit] then the situation is readily recoverable - do they have a system where they keep credentials recorded and have access to the data-centres and such? Wouldn't it be considerably cheaper to hire someone at the data-centre to do the reboots or whatever it is he's in situ to do? [What do they call that "remote hands" or something.]
rythie 12y ago
From the article: "Apple Macintosh computers and servers running OSX use NTP, and Stenn said Apple developers have called him for help on several NTP issues. In the last such incident, he said he delayed a patch to give Apple more time to prepare OS X for it. When they were ready, he applied the patch and asked "whether Apple could send a donation to the Network Time Foundation," Stenn recalled. "They said they would do their best to see that Apple throws some money our way." But it hasn't happened yet." Surely, he needs to say upfront that there is a consultancy fee. I'm sure most big companies can't make donations easily, what they can do is pay for services and products which they do all day, everyday.
- rythie 12y ago
  It's almost like this (at the Apple store): Customer: I'd like new MacBook, I really need to get some work done. Apple Employee: Here you go, this should solve your problem. (gives him a new MacBook) Customer: Great Apple Employee: Could donate to the Apple foundation? Customer: Sure, I'll ask my partner what they think. (walks out the shop with the MacBook, without paying for anything).
- pnathan 12y ago
  It's becoming entirely clear to me that the vast bulk of nerds running open source projects do not have the requisite skills to operate their projects as a sustainable business adequate to pay their own bills. I am, broadly, of the opinion that a non-profit either needs to take up (or form), an "infrastructure consultancy" firm with financial structure and incentives to ensure that projects like LibreSSL, GPG, NTP, etc are funded and maintained; some of that will involve consulting work for large firms for large piles of money. Anyway, I don't have a lot of swing in that field, but... it's my conclusion. :-)
  - rythie 12y ago
    I've come to the same conclusion. It needs a set of junior consultants to do more basic stuff for a decent amount, leaving the main person/people as the highest cost per day - and only called in if necessary. Someone to setup funding or support structures with companies that need/want it.
jbb555 12y ago
Too many pop up adverts on that page. I gave up on reading the article, it wasn;t worth the utter spam
- doughj3 12y ago
  Sorry, I tried to find an alternate article but this seems to be the original and the only other one I found was blogspam based on this. I'm a bit annoyed with the ads and the fact it's split over 5 pages, also (I even checked the "Printer Friendly" link to see if it would display all on one page, but it didn't). Still, I thought the content itself would be interesting here.
thoughtsimple 12y ago
Apple is touting a 50 ms accuracy on their new Apple Watch. That sounds suspiciously like the accuracy of NTP. If Apple is relying on NTP for the watch, they would be crazy to not help out financially for its support.
- devicenull 12y ago
  50 ms? NTP is far more accurate then that.
  - thoughtsimple 12y ago
    If it is 10 ms, Apple isn't going to promise that. It is on the right order of magnitude I think.
- nate_meurer 12y ago
  No watch gets it's time using NTP, and I don't even know how that would work. Almost all radio timepieces take their time from WWVB (or international equivalents). There may be a few that use GPS like cell phones do. EDIT: The apple watch uses GPS.
  - thoughtsimple 12y ago
    No GPS hardware in the Apple Watch so it would be more accurate to say it uses GPS in the iPhone. Any reference for this? It does make sense though.
    - nate_meurer 12y ago
      Hmmm, you're right, the Apple site says it uses GPS and WiFi in the iphone, whatever that means. So I guess it's possible the watch syncs with the phone using NTP. Good catch.
smackfu 12y ago
Maybe I missed it, but I don't understand why one of the companies that creates NTP devices doesn't just hire him. They surely already have plenty of engineers on staff, what's another? Is it that he doesn't want to work for a company?

95 points by doughj3 12y ago

acqq 12y ago

The article is split on 5 pages and due to the ads not easy to navigate through. The current situation of Harlan Stenn (59), who maintains NTP alone is on the fourth page: "With the Linux Foundation's $7,000 in monthly cash flow, Stenn finances his movement between his home lab, in Talent, Ore., and the NTP servers located in San Jose, Calif. In Oregon, Stenn lives with his wife and does most of his patch inspection, code writing, and release building three weeks a month. The fourth week, he stays in San Jose, close to two co-location data center providers that host NTP computers. He rents a room there to work on server and network administration, maintain the email list, and check on server backups. Much of the travel, room, replacement hardware such as disk drives, or needed commercial software such as the Coverity system for security checking on code, must come out of the $7,000 monthly stipend or be charged to his consulting business. Most of his 17-20 servers came out of a one-time, $10,000 grant in 2010 from the Internet Society, a policy and technology infrastructure advisory body for the Internet founded in 1991. Those servers are running at ISC.org in Redwood City, Calif., which hosts BIND and several other open source pieces of Internet infrastructure. For 15 years, it has provided space, electricity and some management "smart hands" to host NTP operations, without charging, said Stenn. "They would love for us to pay them," he said, and he once totaled the monthly bill at $1,400. But ISC.org also knows the NTP project can't pay and continues to host it, Stenn added." And on the first page: "Its ongoing development and maintenance now rest mostly on the shoulders of Stenn, and that's why NTP faces a turning point. Stenn, who also works sporadically on his own consulting business, has given himself a deadline: Garner more financial support by April, "or look for regular work.”" Now although he has a donate link on http://www.ntp.org http://www.ntp.org to: http://networktimefoundation.org/donate/ http://networktimefoundation.org/donate/ he doesn't have a clear goal set like GnuPG had. GnuPG doesn't state the goal because it reached it. But until then you were able to actually see how your support moves the bar. Maybe setting the goal would help here?

mikeash 12y ago
What would happen if he got fed up and quit, or was hit by a bus? I assume the article covers that too, but as you mention it's a bit painful to navigate, and since you seem willing to summarize/quote a bit, I thought I'd take advantage in a most selfish manner.
- gpvos 12y ago
  The article doesn't really say. As far as I know, basically, there is no contingency plan. We'll just have to hope someone steps up.

imaginator 12y ago

tl;dr: Timelord needs financial support.

ChrisAntaki 12y ago

When I knock on someone's door, and then hand them a hot box of pizza, they smile and often hand me money: $5's, $10's, sometimes a $100. I'm just doing my job, just like this Harlan "Father Time" Stenn. I suppose we take for granted, that which we can't see.

moe 12y ago

So this guy gets $7000/mo from the Linux foundation for maintaining NTPd and... that's not enough?

rxt 12y ago
$7000/mo for his expenses, data center expenses and all the other associated costs...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dingaling 12y ago
  He spends one week per month staying in San Jose ( where the servers are hosted for free ) to be... closer to the servers? It's hard to sympathize when there are such frivolous expenses. There's what, a thousand bucks at least on travel and accommodation per month. Going on-site is understandable when updates need to be performed that are too risky to do remotely. On-site on a fixed schedule, however, would quickly be over-ruled in any commercial operation.
  - moe 12y ago
    It's hard to sympathize I agree. If the article is a misrepresentation then they should correct that asap, it leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth. It feels like this guy saw how well the sob-story fundraiser worked for GnuPG[1] and figured he'd give it a shot, too. That's all good and well, but not while you already have a sponsor as generous as the Linux Foundation seems to be here. [1] https://twitter.com/stripe/status/563449352635432960 https://twitter.com/stripe/status/563449352635432960
  - NeutronBoy 12y ago
    "With the Linux Foundation's $7,000 in monthly cash flow, Stenn finances his movement between his home lab, in Talent, Ore., and the NTP servers located in San Jose, Calif. In Oregon, Stenn lives with his wife and does most of his patch inspection, code writing, and release building three weeks a month. The fourth week, he stays in San Jose, close to two co-location data center providers that host NTP computers. He rents a room there to work on server and network administration, maintain the email list, and check on server backups."

kapsel 12y ago

Its also worth checking out Poul Henning-Kamps (FreeBSD comitter) work on Ntimed, check out: https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed The overall architectural goals are the same as every other FOSS project claims to follow: Simplicity, Quality, Security etc. etc. but I tend to think that we stick a little bit more closely to them. This work is sponsored by Linux Foundation, partly in response to the HeartBleed fiasco, and after studying the 300,000+ lines of source-code in NTPD. I concluded that while it could be salvaged, it would be more economical, much faster and far more efficient to start from scratch. Ntimed is the result.

acqq 12y ago
His post announcing his "from the scratch" effort: http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html The problem with all such initiatives ("we start clean") is that they typically never even reach the feature set of the previous software (implementing features takes orders of magnitude more time than some simple "proof of concept") and that they often make the same errors the older software already solved. JWZ wrote nicely somewhere about that effect (something like "it's not 'hard to read code,' those are the actual features implemented") but I can't find the link.
- spectre256 12y ago
  Joel Spolsky has one of the most convincing discussions on this topic: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html "Back to that two page function. Yes, I know, it's just a simple function to display a window, but it has grown little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. Well, I'll tell you why: those are bug fixes. ... Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it's like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters. When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work."

tech-no-logical 12y ago

how does this relate to alternative implementations like openNTPd ? this guy maintains the reference implementation of the protocol I guess ?

noselasd 12y ago
ntpd (http://www.ntp.org/ http://www.ntp.org/) is the reference implementation.
slasaus 12y ago
From [1] I get that PHK decided not to use privilege separation because it's not portable enough. AFAIK that's one of the main differences between OpenNTPD and Ntimed. Well, that and precision of course. OpenNTPDs accuracy is "only" around milliseconds [2] (which is probably good enough for anyone not using dedicated time hardware like a stratum server). The portable version missed the frequency adjustment code for years, but recently this has been added to the portable version as well. I've also read a discussion with PHK somewhere that he didn't like OpenNTPD because it had no auth (sorry, can't find the source again). I guess this complaint has been mitigated recently now that TLS auth is supported in OpenNTPD [3]. /edit: not sure if it's clear but I was comparing OpenNTPD to Ntimed. But the named differences still exist when compared to ntp4. [1] http://phk.freebsd.dk/_downloads/FOSDEM_2015.pdf http://phk.freebsd.dk/_downloads/FOSDEM_2015.pdf page 13 and 14 [2] http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_02_11-time_for_a_change http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_02_11-time_for_a_change at 30:30 and 34:00 [3] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150210103656 http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150210103656
- floatboth 12y ago
  ntimed is a weird project IMO, because it's not different enough from OpenNTPD: both are small NTP daemons written in C. He could've created a fork of OpenNTPD with more precision and without privilege separation instead. If ntimed was written in Rust though... THAT would've been excellent.
  - gpvos 12y ago

zb 12y ago

…commercial software such as the Coverity system for security checking on code, must come out of the $7,000 monthly stipend or be charged to his consulting business. Coverity is free for Open Source projects, why is he paying for it at all?

danbruc 12y ago

Can somebody shed some light on how maintaining one network protocol implementation and possibly improving it every couple of years could consume three million Dollars every year? We all know how easy it is to underestimate the required effort and how quickly tiny things can blow up into major issues, but it is completely beyond my imagination in the case of NTP.

brohee 12y ago
You need drivers for time sources for a start, there are enough of these to use full time devs for years...
- danbruc 12y ago
  This sounds like a bad and unsustainable idea, with capital B and U. Shouldn't it be the responsibility of the vendor to provide a driver? Why would you put the burden to deal with all kinds of clock hardware onto someone maintaining a network protocol implementation? I could see reasons to have one or three or so generic drivers, but if the vendor comes up with something fancy not covered by one of the few generic drivers it should be their responsibility to provide a suitable driver.
  - gpvos 12y ago
    Most time sources have other uses than serving NTP time. Those are the uses that people want to pay lots of money for. Serving NTP time isn't very lucrative.
smackfu 12y ago
It sounds like that is his opinion of what a "proper" support operation looks like, abstract from the actual support requirements of NTP.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

Not wanting to be too blunt but how're the Linux Foundation ensuring that if this guy dies [or decides to quit] then the situation is readily recoverable - do they have a system where they keep credentials recorded and have access to the data-centres and such? Wouldn't it be considerably cheaper to hire someone at the data-centre to do the reboots or whatever it is he's in situ to do? [What do they call that "remote hands" or something.]

rythie 12y ago

From the article: "Apple Macintosh computers and servers running OSX use NTP, and Stenn said Apple developers have called him for help on several NTP issues. In the last such incident, he said he delayed a patch to give Apple more time to prepare OS X for it. When they were ready, he applied the patch and asked "whether Apple could send a donation to the Network Time Foundation," Stenn recalled. "They said they would do their best to see that Apple throws some money our way." But it hasn't happened yet." Surely, he needs to say upfront that there is a consultancy fee. I'm sure most big companies can't make donations easily, what they can do is pay for services and products which they do all day, everyday.

rythie 12y ago
It's almost like this (at the Apple store): Customer: I'd like new MacBook, I really need to get some work done. Apple Employee: Here you go, this should solve your problem. (gives him a new MacBook) Customer: Great Apple Employee: Could donate to the Apple foundation? Customer: Sure, I'll ask my partner what they think. (walks out the shop with the MacBook, without paying for anything).
pnathan 12y ago
It's becoming entirely clear to me that the vast bulk of nerds running open source projects do not have the requisite skills to operate their projects as a sustainable business adequate to pay their own bills. I am, broadly, of the opinion that a non-profit either needs to take up (or form), an "infrastructure consultancy" firm with financial structure and incentives to ensure that projects like LibreSSL, GPG, NTP, etc are funded and maintained; some of that will involve consulting work for large firms for large piles of money. Anyway, I don't have a lot of swing in that field, but... it's my conclusion. :-)
- rythie 12y ago
  I've come to the same conclusion. It needs a set of junior consultants to do more basic stuff for a decent amount, leaving the main person/people as the highest cost per day - and only called in if necessary. Someone to setup funding or support structures with companies that need/want it.

jbb555 12y ago

Too many pop up adverts on that page. I gave up on reading the article, it wasn;t worth the utter spam

doughj3 12y ago
Sorry, I tried to find an alternate article but this seems to be the original and the only other one I found was blogspam based on this. I'm a bit annoyed with the ads and the fact it's split over 5 pages, also (I even checked the "Printer Friendly" link to see if it would display all on one page, but it didn't). Still, I thought the content itself would be interesting here.

thoughtsimple 12y ago

Apple is touting a 50 ms accuracy on their new Apple Watch. That sounds suspiciously like the accuracy of NTP. If Apple is relying on NTP for the watch, they would be crazy to not help out financially for its support.

devicenull 12y ago
50 ms? NTP is far more accurate then that.
- thoughtsimple 12y ago
  If it is 10 ms, Apple isn't going to promise that. It is on the right order of magnitude I think.
nate_meurer 12y ago
No watch gets it's time using NTP, and I don't even know how that would work. Almost all radio timepieces take their time from WWVB (or international equivalents). There may be a few that use GPS like cell phones do. EDIT: The apple watch uses GPS.
- thoughtsimple 12y ago
  No GPS hardware in the Apple Watch so it would be more accurate to say it uses GPS in the iPhone. Any reference for this? It does make sense though.
  - nate_meurer 12y ago
    Hmmm, you're right, the Apple site says it uses GPS and WiFi in the iphone, whatever that means. So I guess it's possible the watch syncs with the phone using NTP. Good catch.

smackfu 12y ago

Maybe I missed it, but I don't understand why one of the companies that creates NTP devices doesn't just hire him. They surely already have plenty of engineers on staff, what's another? Is it that he doesn't want to work for a company?