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<p>Thanks for the URL, I'll put it into the enhancement list. I'm
still not sure what I would put into the monitor and what would go
into a light weight (or full) NTP client, but I'll have a think
about it.</p>
<p>Passing on to the Department of Pointless Programming, I
'enhanced' <font size="4"><tt>uptime</tt></font> to handle the
maximum 70 bit millisecond uptime. It is:<br>
</p>
<blockquote>
<p><font size="4"><tt>VENTI2 up for 37539161 Millennia, 7
Centuries, 2 Decades, 9 Years, 8 Weeks, 2 Days, 11 Hours, 35
Minutes, 3 Seconds and 423 Milliseconds</tt></font></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So 37 million millennia is ...umm... well it's a long time.<br>
</p>
<p>The math was actually unremarkable, I changed an integer divide
instruction into a routine to handle single (<font size="4"><tt>IDIV</tt></font>),
double (<font size="4"><tt>DIV</tt></font>) and quadruple
intermediate results (<font size="4"><tt>DDIV</tt></font>),
picking the fastest divide that wouldn't overflow.</p>
<p>The harder part was rewriting the grammatical routines to
properly inflect the plural noun case. Once you get past Years,
English numerological noun inflection is no longer agglutanive
(like Spanish) but rather fusional, being more akin to Latin and
Italian. So the routine did the wrong thing.</p>
<p>A little more than half the systems programming staff at Columbia
were bi-lingual, some spoke three or more languages. So it bugged
us to see Unix cop-outs like "1 item(s)" processed. I mean, it's
a comparison and conditional transfer; an <font size="4"><tt>if</tt></font>
statement--barely more than 5 minutes' work.<br>
</p>
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<hr width="100%" size="2">On 1/20/22 5:21 PM, Peter Lothberg
wrote:
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<p>Time....<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Not quite. The acronym actually
says that it is not solar time, it's Greenwich MEAN
Time. UTC is merely the new name for GMT, obviously
adopted to keep the French from fulminating. </blockquote>
</p>
<p>GMT was established by the Greenwich observatory
observing the sun. </p>
<p>When the atomic second was created the target was the
year 1900 GMT second.</p>
<p>GMT is based on earth position, and it's modern
equivalent is UT1, when UTC and UT1 differs more than
0.92 sec </p>
<p>we do leap seconds.</p>
<p><a
href="https://www.iers.org/IERS/EN/Science/EarthRotation/UT1LOD.html"
target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.iers.org/IERS/EN/Science/EarthRotation/UT1LOD.html</a></p>
<p>UTC is based on a constant running timescale based on
the frequency of CS133 oscillating between two</p>
<p>hyper fine states.</p>
<p>So the difference between GMT and UTC can be almost a
second, and there is no system that </p>
<p>distributes GMT, BTP, GPS etc are all UTC based.<br
data-mce-bogus="1">
</p>
<p>-P</p>
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