Man, I so love NTP. Y’all younglings have no idea what it was like in the day.
Us kids would literally “synchronize watches”, like in the old war movies. We’d call the free “time and temperature” number to sync up. No one’s clocks matched exactly. Now we just take it for granted.
Every device in my house is within 1-second of every other. LOL, I meet with people all over the globe on Zoom, and we’re all on time. To the second.
NTP is so critical for the information age, I can’t overstate it. If you’re not a programmer or other such nerd, it’s hard to get your head around how complex the NTP protocol is. Yet it works wonderfully! Much, much respect.
In Australia there was exactly that toll free number you could dial that was a recorded person reading out the time 24/7. That voice is forever etched in my mind.
“At the third stroke, it will be 7:35 and 15 seconds" beep, beep, beep
Same in the UK, the speaking clock on (it had various numbers over the years but the most memorable was) 123.
Every device in my house is within 1-second of every other.
Meanwhile, my new oven’s clock drifts by over a minute in just a few days after setting it to the correct time, smh
Lol I was very much doing the same as a kid, but this comment read like an old timer telling of an age long ago. I legit typed out “that was interesting man, thanks for sharing”.
Not sure wether to laugh or cry because I’m so old 😂
Guess it was … his time.
Hey! Knock off the puns before I clock ya!
Now wait a minute, no need to be hasty
It was his turn, next may be hours.
And not a moment too late.
Network time protocol protocol
Along the DNS system, one of the most used ones in the whole international internet network
MAC address
I’m a fan of ELF format. Can I join you?
Time as experienced throughout the universe stops abruptly as the true source of time sends its first and last kiss of death deny message back to the universe.
What a legacy to leave behind.
This is a shame. One of my first proper programming projects was a timesync client for the Amiga, back in the 1990s. It used SNTP (the simpler version of NTP), as everybody else seemed to be using other protocols (I think there’s one called time which just returns the current time in text form). I was immensely proud of it, it’s called FACTS if you want to look it up.
Anyway, David Mills is a bit of a hero of mine because that protocol inspired me to create some software, and probably made me even more obsessed with accurate time.
They coulda picked a better picture. Institutional cinderblock hallway, prominent fire extinguisher, florescent lighting, etc.
It’s from Wikipedia. It’s nice to see he was still working in 2005 - I suspect this was taken at University of Delaware.
The best people in history are the ones who don’t want to stop working just to get their picture taken.
One of my favorite pictures of a person ever is Albert Einstein just working at his desk, oblivious to everything around him.
I’m sure better pictures of him exist
EDIT
Like this one, which is the first image search result
https://www1.udel.edu/udaily/2012/dec/mills-research-computer-120711.html
Error on your link
Thanks for the warning! The picture is visible only on db0 for some reason…
Yeah, the domain part got replaced with “*removed*”. I’ve seen that before when some instances censor certain slurs, but it’s hard to imagine what’s wrong with ibb.co that’d get it added to a filter.
Edit: And now I can confirm that just typing out the URL i-dot-ibb-dot-co gets filtered on lemmy.world. Weird.
Initially I uploaded a whole picture to Lemmy, and it didn’t work on other instances. When the other poster warned me of that, I replaced it with a direct link to ibb, and I thought it should work fine, but now you notice not even that works. Again, thanks for notifying me, it’s quite weird, perhaps due to some overzealous filtering on .world, or just a bug on db0…
The Architect
