The,Importance,Time,and,Synchr computer The Importance of Time and Synchronisation in Computing
----------------------------------------------------------Permission is granted for the below article to forward,reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as longas no changes a Gone are those times when the companies and the organisations didn't need a hi-tech system to handle them. Owing to the considerable increase in the business sector and thus, an enormous increase in the complexity of the organisational struc
Computersare now part and parcel of our daily lives and we often take them for granted. Whetherwe are starting our car, loading the washing machine or taking cash out of thebank, a computer is behind it.We are alsoused to computers talking to each other, necessary when we are booking online ticketsor drawing cash from the bank. Computers communicate by the way of timestamps,most computer transactions from sending and receiving emails to savingdocuments are reliant on a time stamp. Timestamps are merely the time theprocess commenced, next time you receive an email, check the time it was sent,it is quite possible the email was sent after you had received it, this isbecause the time on each machine is not synchronised.For sometransactions it is necessary for computers to be perfectly synchronised, even afew seconds difference between machines can have serious effects, such asfinding an airline ticket you had booked had been sold moments later to anothercustomer or you could draw your savings out of a cash machine and when youraccount is empty you could quickly going to another machine and withdraw it allagain. If machineswere not synchronised then many time sensitive transactions could not happen soit is important that computers tell the same time. However, what time is bestto synchronise to and how to all machines know the correct time? Clocks andwatches are everywhere but if you check the time on more than one device,chances are they are telling time differently. It may be a matter of secondsbut as we have seen, seconds can make all the difference.Fortunatelythere is an international standard time called UTC (Universal CoordinatedTime), and the exact UTC time is broadcast by special radio transmissions or bythe GPS network as a time code.Computerscan receive this time code by using a time server. Normally these servers useNTP (Network Time Protocol) which converts the time to a language the computerunderstands. NTP servers allow computers to synchronise to the exact same timeno matter where they are in the world.Without NTPtime servers, computers would be unable to carry out task that we now take forgranted such as online shopping, trading on the stock exchange or even drawingmoney from a cash machine.
The,Importance,Time,and,Synchr