Why aren't computer clocks as accurate as cheap quartz watches?

OS/2 could have supported Windows applications, but it didn't (at least not completely and well).

In those days Microsoft was the underdog, and the angry young males were rooting for it instead of IBM. It's amusing to see how history is now being revised so that the currently dominant player can be portrayed as the bad guy even back then. We're not at war with Eastasia, we're at war with Eurasia.

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Hehe. Well, one could argue that OS/2 was "the best operating system ever written" as of 1995 and Linux is "the best operating system ever written" as of 2005 ;)

But the thing that confounds the 'technically superior' crowd is that 'ignorant users' don't give a whit about 'technical superiority', they just want, as you put it, to get the job done (with the least pain, misery, and cost). Now, if the 'technically superior' crowd could explain why the nuances of intertask messaging and 'a real multitasking O.S.' (sic) will make the spell checker more brilliant then they might have a recognizable argument but, otherwise, it's just meaningless techno babble to the average user.

What can it do? It can run your Windows software too. Yeah? Well, so can Windows.

Its hard to sell that.

Yes, but those major leaps in functionality are mostly history now. These days, the improvements usually involve multicolored transparent menus, or larger and fancier 3-D icons, or other bells and whistles that consume hardware and software resources but contribute nothing to the basic purpose of the computer, for the average user.

The broader market (and especially the worldwide market) is only slightly beyond DOS today.

There may be plenty left to do; the problem is that nobody is doing it. Software companies tend to content themselves with adding useless bells and whistles--software bloat--to their products with each upgrade, because adding truly new features and functionality requires a lot of expensive development and involves taking serious risks. The idea is to milk existing business for all the money one can, so companies are unwilling to take risks with novelty. The bigger the company, the more true this becomes.

Maybe. So what next? To justify an upgrade, I need something truly interesting, and I just don't see that happening. The last upgrade I found _interesting_ was from Windows 3.x to Windows NT (I never bothered with Windows 95 and its ilk).

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Netscape wasn't seen as the bad guy; Microsoft was. The difference between subjective perception and reality is sometimes enormous.

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

Yup. I tell Linux users the same thing. And a lot of the older Linux users were OS/2 fanatics before Linux came along. They can't _both_ be "the best operating system ever written."

-- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

You betcha. So much for 'blind' justice ;)

It gets even more interesting when you look at the 'ICON on the desktop' issue. One could always install Netscape on a Windows machine, and sell it that way, but what Netscape wanted was for OEMs, with, one imagines, a bit of prodding from Netscape, the holder of monopoly power in the browser market, to be able to *remove* I.E. from Microsoft's own product, not simply coexist, and sell it with Netscape *only*.

One way of looking at it might be to say that Netscape was complaining about Microsoft 'infringing' on their 'free use of monopoly power' ;)

That's probably the closest thing to an accurate summary I've ever seen come out of you and this may come as a real shock but I am under no 'obligation' whatsoever to provide you with an opinion on ANYthing.

Your life must be constant bliss.

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I'm hounding you? For an opinion? On USENET?

That's funny too.

Do you think Microsoft Office is one application? I'm impressed that anybody (who is supposed to be high technology oriented) can muster the courage to say something like that in public. And I'm looking forward to you all plainly stating your (comedic) belief that Microsoft does not hold monopoly power. I don't mean BillW50, he is way past comedy.

That baseball bat analogy (in a prior post) was posed by one of the appeals court judges when Microsoft plainly argued that because because it is the rightful owner of Windows, it has the right to do anything with Windows.

Some Microsoft defender arguments are pretty funny, even arguments put forth by extremely well-paid attorneys in federal court.

Microsoft is in court every day forcing its will upon smaller software publishers. One year, Microsoft poured $650 million into our justice system. Microsoft constantly employs our government to physically force smaller software companies into compliance. If it weren't for our intellectual property law and our government to physically enforce that law at the point of a gun, Microsoft would fall apart like a playing card house.

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It's the other way around. Thousands of smaller software companies try to use the courts to compensate for their own inability to compete, by accusing Microsoft of various misdeeds on a regular basis.

So would every other software company.

I got your drift just fine. Now lets see if you got mine.

You are too full of yourself to get my drift.

So, two sides of the coin... then, there be the THIRD side of the coin.

Why do you have a clock on your computer? Can't afford a watch or a desk clock or a wall clock?

The answer is that a clock on the computer is useful to record creation/change time on files.

It doesn't really matter if the file was modified at 6:00.00 000000 or 6:00.00 000035

What matters is if one file was created before another. You're compiling, but the source hasn't changed, or has; the params file has been changed since X,Y, or Z... that kind of thing.

On a computer, Approximate Time is almost always all that's really needed; a clock that ***always runs forward***, and keeps time within a few minutes a day.

Even if Perry Mason drags you into the witness stand and confronts you with file dates and times, approximate is probably good enough to acquit you or convict you. If in the rare case it's not, bring in your expert to explain that computer clocks are often not accurate.

Wood

Or keep your clock set to 1935 and even Perry Mason won't know when they were actually made.

Except for spammers that routinely post years, even decades, into the past.

That is true if all activity is confined to a single computer. When multiple computers are involved, however, they must be synchronized. And if the computers interact with other computers outside local control (as by communication over the Internet), then they must not only be synchronized, but they must be synchronized to a universal standard, such as UTC.

This is why clock accuracy is important.

In the old days when every PC was completely isolated, time hardly mattered at all, and often people would use PCs without bothering to ever set the correct date or time. Nowadays, almost all PCs have to be at least approximately synchronized to the correct time of day, and often very precise synchronization is required.

OK, thanks, but why is it so important? A message is received on one computer at a certain time per that computer's clock. It was sent from another computer at some time, recorded in the message, per that computer's clock. Are we going to calculate transit time or something? Check to make sure it didn't arrive before it was sent?

What's the advantage of doing so? And why can't servers simply reject anything that is obviously far in the past?

Hell if I know but I just got one dated 1969.