Technology

37696 readers

315 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

446

Inventor of NTP protocol that keeps time on billions of devices dies at age 85 (arstechnica.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Most microcontrollers also don't need wall clock, monotonous time is sufficient. uint32_max counting in seconds gets you 136 years of uptime before the thing wraps which exceeds lifetime, in milliseconds it's 50 days which is well within the warranty window.

And, no, 64bit time_t is generally not an issue for 32-bit platforms: Those upper bits only get touched once every 136 years. OS vendors did step up and change stuff so everything that gets produced now should be fine. And don't even start complaining about memory budget while those things are talking json.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

in milliseconds it's 50 days which is well within the warranty window.

LOL. Stuff like that reminds me how great we have it in the EU, where warranty is 2 years minimum. 🇪🇺😁

Anyway, I'd mostly worry about "really smart" electric engineers rolling out their own time and crypto functions from scratch, because "trust me, I'm an engineer".