EU tells Meta it can't paywall privacy
Platforms should not confront users with 'binary choice' over personal data use
Security
18 Apr 2024 | 66
I suppose it depends how accurate you need to be. For most people, just synchronising the OS's clock to NTP every now and then will be perfectly sufficient, but there must be further use-cases. When I worked in ILR, we only needed accuracy to (say) half a second, in order to be able to synchronise between local and network content (put the fader up for IRN at the right moment), but to do so we had a receiver in the racks which synchronised to Rugby or DSF, that receiver itself had a laser-trimmed quartz crystal in case of loss of the LW signals, and it sent out pulses over a serial link to wall clocks in the studios, each of which had a standard (if fairly high-quality) quartz movement which could certainly keep them close enough to Rugby for several hours - possibly days, given how stable the studio temperatures were - just in case the serial link went down. No GPS (or at least, no civilian GPS) in those days, but even if there had been I suspect we'd have had a similar fail-safe cascade.
As for the Time Appliance, I like the casual throw-away phrase used for backup:
An oscillator (such as an atomic clock) backs things up
Yeah, I have a couple of those in a box in the attic somewhere, gimme a moment...
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
