[Apologies if this is duplicate, I wasn't sure what list was active and when]

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.

Passing on to the Department of Pointless Programming, I 'enhanced' uptime to handle the maximum 70 bit millisecond uptime.  It is:

VENTI2 up for 37539161 Millennia, 7 Centuries, 2 Decades, 9 Years, 8 Weeks, 2 Days, 11 Hours, 35 Minutes, 3 Seconds and 423 Milliseconds

So 37 million millennia is ...umm... well it's a long time.  In fact, at well over two and half times the current age of the universe, it may even be long enough for politicians to evolve into decent, caring, thinking individuals.

The math was actually unremarkable, I changed an integer divide instruction into a routine to handle single (IDIV), double (DIV) and quadruple intermediate results (DDIV), picking the fastest divide that wouldn't overflow.

The harder part was rewriting the grammatical routines to properly inflect plural noun cases.  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 (and considered 'irregular').  So the routine did the wrong thing.

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 if statement--barely more than 5 minutes' work.

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On 1/20/22 5:21 PM, Peter Lothberg wrote:

Time....

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.

GMT was established by the Greenwich observatory observing the sun.

When the atomic second was created the target was the year 1900 GMT second.

GMT is based on earth position, and it's modern equivalent is UT1,  when UTC and UT1 differs more than 0.92 sec

we do leap seconds.

https://www.iers.org/IERS/EN/Science/EarthRotation/UT1LOD.html

UTC is based on a constant running timescale based on the frequency of CS133 oscillating between two

hyper fine states.

So the difference between GMT and UTC can be almost a second, and there is no system that

distributes GMT, BTP, GPS etc are all UTC based.

-P