The minute number on my cellphone clock changes at the same instant as my computer clock, which is precisely when the clocks on the Penn Station screens change. My cellphone clock also changes at precisely the same time as my wife’s cellphone and my friend’s cellphone, and he uses a different cellphone provider. Additionally, the clock on the TV listings channel also moves at the same time as my cellphone. Pretty nice.
Then why do the six wall clocks currently visible from from desk all show six different times, with an eighteen minute spread between the earliest and latest?
Oh, and none of those clocks are in synch with my computer or my desk phone (which are two minutes apart themselves).
Simple answer is that the wall clocks aren’t connected to an NTP server (network time protocol) that’s in turn connected to a master clock such as tock.usno.navy.mil
Pretty much every computer on the planet seems to be connected to NTP now, (even your standalone Windows XP computer at home will go sync to Microsoft’s own NTP server every week or two) so they’re all ticking along in perfect sync.
Incidentally, a clock that ran at the perfect speed, and was set to exactly the right time in 2004 is now behind by one second.
It’s like that in my house too; it’s awful. It’s 2:15, 2:17, 2:19, and 2:22 right now. However, the computers and cell phones all agree that (when I looked) it was 2:16, which plays right into the NTP explanation.
The 'Dope, of course, has its own rules of time. I guess it has heavy gravity.
Yes, much more synchronisation now.
When my PC was running Windows ME the clock was as accurate as chose to keep it. Then I downloaded a small program that would synchronise the system clock with an NT server periodically. Now my laptop and PC are both running XP and the clocks are automatically setup to synchronise.
I used to have a non-CDMA mobile phone (I can’t remember what it’s called here, GSM?) and the clock was never synchronised, now I have a CDMA phone and the clock is always synchronised because that is, apparantly, part of how CDMA phones work.
When I fly I’m required to have a time piece set to within 30secs of UTC, so I have my wrist watch accurately set. The other clocks in the aircraft such as the ones on the GPS and search radar are all automatically synchronised to UTC as well (mainly because GPS requires accurate time to work, and the radar gets much of its information from the GPS.)
Overall, it seems that time pieces are becoming more connected with UTC and with each other.