Re: OT: time and computer networks
On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 08:56:44 -0600, Alex Malinovich
<demonbane@the-love-shack.net> wrote:
> Modern timekeeping systems have primarily been put in place for the
> benefit of the humans using the computers, not so much the computers
> themselves. The reason that things like NTP are so accurate is not
> because the majority of people using them NEED them to be so accurate,
> but because:
There's another reason to keep your computer well-synched, and that's
if you're performing micro-benchmarks. If you're really interested in
how many microseconds something takes (say because you're going to
scale it by a factor of several million), then you'd like to know at
what rate your clock tends to drift, and by how much that varies.
If you're just interested in having a reasonably accurate clock
(within a minute), then you certainly need less precision.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
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