That was not a very smart decision by the industry. Serviceablity has suffered as a consequence.
And we know how that does. Battery is out ... cell phone rings ... oh, got to take this one real quick ... :-)
My iron can be operated sans ground. With a laptop it's not really that tough anyhow because one can unplug the charger (many of those aren't grounded anyhow). Just watch for ESD.
Whoops :-)
Not really. Almost everything beyond 0Fh gets written once and then left alone the next five years of so. Ok, maybe someone buys a new drive and enters that. This would cause two write cycles to that location in five years.
#begin rant() The industry does not care about serviceability, reparability, longevity, recycling, and cost of ownership. All of these have front end costs associated with them, that are more expensive than simple replacement. Welcome to toss and replace, where the only things of importance is initial cost. With the current trend in irreparable iPads and iPhones, I would expect the industry to follow providing us with an irreparable laptop. The Retina MacBook Pro is close. Little things, like battery replacement become a non-issue when the battery is glued into the case, and where replacing the battery implies replacing the entire laptop. Even Intel has become part of the war on repair. New chips will all be of the non-socketed variety and are expected to be soldered directly to the main board. When you blow up a USB port on the motherboard, you can no longer move the expensive CPU to a new motherboard. #end rant()
I like my soldering irons grounded. It makes for better pyrotechnics when I hit the power bus after forgetting to unplug the device.
My abilities to write defective software is well known. I can do many things, but programming is not one of them.
True. It's the clock and status registers below 0Fh that get scribbled to constantly. One could split the CMOS function in half, with the lower half continuing to be CMOS, while the rest is changed to flash. However, that will add front end cost and additional complexity, which are not good things.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
If you're using Windows (XP and up for sure, don't remember about 2000), it has a built-in time sync functionality, *as long as the machine is not part of a domain*. Just go to the time and date settings in Control Panel and you should have an option for "Internet Time". It will default to the server time.windows.com (which probably round-robins to several machines at Microsoft) but you can add other servers if you like.
If your Windows machine is part of a domain, its time is synchronized from the domain controller as part of the networking protocol. If the domain controller is listening to an Internet time server, then it will propagate the correct time to its clients.
If you have old Windows or otherwise want some kind of independent time-setting software, nistime-32bit.exe is free of charge from
formatting link
. It says: "The program can be configured to query the server periodically and run in the background." I have used it before on Windows 98 and it seems to work OK; the minimum query interval is one hour. That NIST page also has a link to a list of other time-setting software for various OSes. (Trivia: it's called -32bit.exe, not to distinguish it from the 64-bit version, but from the 16-bit version!)
If you have Linux, you can run ntpd. Most recent distributions do this and provide some kind of happy clicky control panel. The real skinny is in /etc/ntp.conf . ntpd can get its reference time over the Internet, or from a local GPS receiver.
I don't know what OS X runs under the hood but I wouldn't be surprised if it's some flavor of ntpd. The knobs are apparently at Applications > System Preferences > Date & Time .
Same here, I think we somehow must have the same forefathers :-)
Although my dad was a pro when it comes to programming, and so is my sister, so maybe it's just me who didn't get the programmer's gene or where it mutated into a circuit design gene.
Wouldn't it be a zero-cost piece of cake to at least write those to hard disk and in case of finding a blank offer the user to restore from there? Also, the BIOS is in flash so why not store there instead?
It would behove the industry to think about this because there is one major reason why PC sales are slumping: The things became to darn complicated for ol'Leroy. He does not want to face a pricey Geek Squad call every time some obtuse "unrecoverable error" has occurred. So he invests his money into a smart phone instead. Because that's not complicated. A PC is complicated.
Yep, though on windows you need Meinberg for NTP. Windows Time service isn't as good. Linux real real NTP.
Tuning up NTP is a bit of work if you want to be optimal. Even though people claim the accuracy is independent of the time reference, I make it a point to find servers close to me (less hops) and that experience low jitter, which can be determined via logging features of NTP.
I have found that running the antivirus check will effect the NTP accuracy. It pays to plot the time error and then correlate it to known time dependent programs.
You should be able to get the time error under 20ms.
Get it to synch to your phone and you'll get better accuracy than that.
Call NIST directly with a hard connected modem and you can get within
2ms. Regularly. Every time.. repeatably.
Your claim of 20ms is falsely based. Do it 25 times, and I'll bet you get 25 different offsets from the real. So more likely plus or minus about 80ms. You could probably get closer by hand synching to your phone with the mouse click.
11000km in get 25 different offsets from the real. So more likely plus or minus
25 times? Fuck! do it a million times the offset is still always under 5ms, and that's using third tier timeservers.
These graphs are from someone else's server but are typical of a carelessly installed NTP setup:
I plotted the data. I know the results. The accuracy depends on your system. The RTC stability, temperature/tempco, system load, etc. That is why I said you have to plot the error relative to time of day.
Learn something. Here is a good source of NTP tracking tools:
Next time educate yourself before you post nonsense.
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Sometime in the last century, I decided to separate the errors caused by motherboard crystal clock oscillator drift from those produced by missed timer interrupts. I substituted TCXO oscillators for both the
14.318 clock oscillator, and the 40MHz system clock oscillator. I don't recall if it was a PII or PIII motherboard. After running a burning test on the motherboard, it lost about 10 seconds per day. Conclusion... clock oscillator drift isn't the controlling factor.
My next experiment was a WWVB (60KHz) receiver to provide time sync when the propagation was suitable, which was usually about 3-6AM. This worked just fine but had problems with RFI from the computer trashing the receive signal. Due to business and medical issues, I ran out of time to finish my testing. Also, my software sucked. There are commercial version available today and in my never humble opinion, is the way it should be done for home and laptop computers. With Wake-on-LAN currently being high fashion[1], it would be possible to update the clock when the computah is turned off, eliminating the RFI problem.
[1] Amazingly, Wake-on-LAN is required to be enabled for Energy Star
5.0 compliance, which is a great way to waste standby power. If your standby laptop battery life seems less than expected, turn it off. Some BIOS settings are also involved, such as WOL only with AC power only.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I kinda hate be snotty here but, since when is time a constant value? The battery is to keep the clock running. Replacement cycles should be similar to most watch batteries.
Way back in the early days of XTs you actually find the logic that segregated those addresses from actual memory to the clock chip. Been that way ever since.
Actually that change has already occurred. And as stated before the few bottom addresses do not access CMOS/FLASH but the clock chip (portion) itself. Check the specifications for a south bridge chip.
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