Time,Wars,Confrontation,Keepin computer Time Wars: Confrontation in Time Keeping
----------------------------------------------------------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
Timeis certainly a concept most of us take for granted, it passes us by and we onlynotice it when we catch a glimpse of a grey hair in the mirror or arrive latefor that important meeting. Yet keeping track of the time has occupied mankindfor millennia. Fromearly sundials and water timers to modern digital watches and atomic clocks,humans have found more and more accurate and innovative ways of telling thetime.Computersalso need to know the correct time. Accuracy is essential in keeping the Internetand computer networks communicating with each other but to a computer thepassing of time is a simple equation based on the accumulation of discretemoments added to a base time, normally the number of seconds from that point intime. Humanson the other hand have a variety of different notions about how to measure time. We separate it into seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years, decades centuries and evenmillennia.And this is wehere the problem lies as historically we have forcedtime to correspond with the orbit and rotation of the Earth, called solar time,which as it turns out is not that precise, well not enough for a computeranyway.Computer networks use Network Time Protocol (NTP),the time synchronization standard used by on the Internet to keep at the sametime. NTP lets machines query regional time servers that get the UniversalCoordinated Time UTC from highly accurate reference clocks either from theInternet or through radio or GPS receiver. However,UTC is based on atomic time and it differs from the Earths rotational time (solarsystem) because the day is slowly lengthening. The moons gravity lengthens theglobal turn by roughly 1.4 milliseconds that is, thousandths of a second per day per century. Since 1820, what we think of as a 24- hour period hasgotten 2 milliseconds longer. As a result, atomic time differs from solar time by onesecond about every 500 days. To adjust leap seconds are added every year or so.However as computers become more reliant on accuracy this leap second can causeproblems as a second can be a vasrtamount in some time sensitive applications.Some suggest to combat this problem leap seconds should beeliminated and the world should stick with just atomic time even though that wouldresult in sun at midnight and dark during the day (albeit in 43,000 years time). Others argue that having a time scalebased on the Earths rotation is primitive and not needed in the modern age,although many farmers and astronomers are keen to argue the opposite.However, as atomic clocks and computers becomeincreasingly more accurate and precise it seems that humans and our spinningworld are not going to be able to keep up.
Time,Wars,Confrontation,Keepin