Having clocks synchronized between your servers is extremely useful. For example, having a guarantee that the timestamp of arrival of a packet (measured by the clock on the destination) is ALWAYS bigger than the timestamp recorded by the sender is a huge win, especially for things like database scaling.
For this though you need to go beyond NTP into PTP which is still usually based on GPS time and atomic clocks
Actually interesting to think about what UTC actually means and there is seems to be no absolute source of truth [0]. I guess the worry is not that much about the NTP servers (for which people anyways should configure fail overs) but the clocks themselves.
Could you define an absolute source of truth based on extrinsic features. Something like taking an intrinsic time from atomic sources, pegged to an astronomic or celestial event; then a predicted astronomic event that would allow us to reconcile time in the future.
It might be difficult to generate enough resolution in measurable events that we can predict accurately enough? Like, I'm guessing the start of a transit or alignment event? Maybe something like predicting the time at which a laser pulse will be returnable from a lunar reflector -- if we can do the prediction accurately enough then we can re-establish time back to the current fixed scale.
I think I'm addressing an event that won't ever happen (all precise and accurate time sources are lost/perturbed), and if it does it won't be important to re-sync in this way. But you know...
Getting from 95% compatible to 100% compatible may not only take a lot of time, but also result in worsening the performance. Sometimes it's good to drop some off the less frequently used features in order to make the tool better (or allow for making the tool better)
> I'm more curious how/why the author ended up with a $500 gift card. That's a large amount, and the author never shares how this was obtained, which seems like a key missing detail. Did the author buy the gift card for himself (why?) or did someone give him a very large gift (why not mention that?)
The author mentions a big store (names it similar to Walmart for US based readers).
I would assume this was an accepted form of "return a product without a receipt" or "we want to accept your complain about this product we sold going crazy 1 day after it's warranty but we cannot give you cash back" etc
I don't understand. Gift cards typically cannot be returned, at least in the US. And the author said the gift card was redeemed "to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan", which also cannot be returned I'd imagine.
But gift cards aren't supposed to work that, right? If it wasn't "legal" or "okay" to have a 500 dollar card, they shouldn't be sold. They are available, therefore they should be perfectly usable.
I don't want to speculate more, but one of the use cases for them is for people that choose to not use cards online (or even don't have credit cards at all) to be able to buy digital goods with cash.
Either way, if we're questioning buying/using the gift card, we're blaming the victim
I'm not blaming anyone; I just find it surprising that this detail wasn't mentioned or explained. Its omission makes the article less trustworthy to me.
People are fast to pull out pitchforks in response to outrage-bait posts like this, but (generally speaking) a nontrivial percentage of such posts are intentionally omitting details which can help explain the other side's actions.
Also I genuinely wasn't familiar with this specific use-case for gift cards. At least in the US, you can buy general-purpose prepaid debit cards for this type of thing instead, or use various services which generate virtual cards e.g. privacy.com. To me that seems infinitely more normal than buying a large-value "gift card" for yourself, but I'm admittedly not familiar with the options in other countries.
1. The prepaid Visa or Mastercard come with an extra fee (like 5-6 dollars per card if I recall correctly?)
2. I didn't see the prepaid cards in stores outside the US, so they are probably not that popular outside.
Sometimes you also want to shift your spending, like if you spend 500 USD this month at this store, you'll get some good % cashback. So you end up buying a gift card that you know you'll definitely use next month.
privacy.com even if it was available in some country just means you give transactions of your identity to some other company. Cash (and so gift cards if they don't accept cash) is the most private way.
The file operations on macOS are rather slow too. I needed to invest in some rsync-based syncing for an in-docker application build as accessing the mounted volume from a Docker container was around 20 times slower than on Linux :O
That’s another issue. The access from macOS/windows to the Linux filesystem (docker volume) is over the loopback network. Also the other way around docker bind mounts to windows/macos filesystem.
With lack of regulations, the theory is, there will be many competing manufacturers of insulin, dropping the cost down. Probably not as simple as that, but that's the idea at least
Now, that's all just regulations. What are regulations but laws that restrict/govern the way to do commerce? Anti-slavery is part of that, just like every other concession we've had to pry from the hands of capitalists over the last 100 years, like no child labor, no locking workers into factories, PPE, etc...
You're free to call contract law and private property law "regulations", but recognize that these branches of law have very different properties, history, and functions than what we traditionally refer to by regulations. Traditionally, when people talk about regulations they are talking about legislation, i.e., rules and decrees created by a legislative body, voted into law by some parliamentary body or created by an executive agency to support decrees of a parliamentary or similar body with the power to declare law. You can think of this as legislation or declaratory law.
Contrast this with contract and property law. These laws were created primarily out of common law, a long evolutionary process arising out of series of decisions from a judiciary attempting to reconcile conflicts between the parties. This is judicial or conciliatory law.
Crucially, most if not all the advances and the rise of extreme productivity from capitalism that supports populations in excess of 8 billion as opposed to about 0.5 billion, have come from emphasis and pre-eminence on the latter kind of law and the smashing of the former kind of law, i.e., the destruction of the guild system of privileges, removing or minimizing protectionist laws, etc. And the former kind of law has either been nominal, merely codifying the advances caused by the latter law like in the case of child labor, or it has been reactionary and hampered the progress of the latter sort of law.
I installed this extension 5 minutes ago and it's already such an improvement. Never occured to me that there can be extensions to override shortcut defaults.
My understanding of this technology is that it's closed-circuit. No water is exchanged between the power plant and the ocean once filled with ocean water.
For this though you need to go beyond NTP into PTP which is still usually based on GPS time and atomic clocks
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