WTF with my computer clock?

No - The Bill has never used that. Or rather not in general - it may have been tried on a 'special'. The current ones are shot HD using progressive scan.

But IIRC, they suppress one field and repeat the other for this effect?

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    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Certainly, no one in their right mind would deliberately reverse the interlace ordering - the result is unwatchable.

Sylvia.

Here in Australia I got documentary proof that a station was deliberately running late. See

I had recorded that channel that evening, on a PC that has its clock synchronized to an accurate clock, and the times given in that schedule were to within one second of when the material was actually broadcast.

They just weren't the times that had been advertised.

Sylvia.

Much as I'd like to be able to support the view that the BBC's standards are falling, I have to advise that I was already being frustrated by the BBC's apparent inability to keep to its published schedules back in the early 1980s. This is nothing new.

Australia's counterpart, the government funded ABC which also doesn't carry advertisements, is also apparently unable, or unwilling, to broadcast things when they say they will.

I suspect that, as with the commercial stations, it's deliberate. I'm just less than clear what the motivation would be for a non-commercial station.

Sylvia.

You have to set net time up before you can use it.

Not sure what a 'color matrix' is but the color is much more vibrant on HD. And this is a rear projector circa 1999 so its HD is 480p :)

If you give it some thought, it's near impossible to make a prog run 'to the second', as some seem to want. You could, of course, always make it shorter and fill the gaps with trails etc - allowing the next one to start on the second. But that would bring even more complaints. ;-)

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    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

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Maybe not with live shows but when shows are pre-recorded the broadcaster knows the exact length of each show long before broadcast so should be able to make the published schedule fit what is actually broadcast - like if you broadcast a pre-recorded show at 8pm and you know the recording is exactly

60 mins long then advertise the next one as 9:02 to allow for trailers not 9:00 and run late.

Why is BBC1's 'ONE SHOW' always broadcast 2 minutes early (both start and end times) - I know it's live but showing just 1 trailer before the show would make it run to schedule, surely showing extra trailers would bring in less complaints than viewers missing the first 2 minutes of every episode.

On 8/16/2009 6:52 AM Meat Plow spake thus:

Well, duh; that was kinda my point.

So I take it you don't disagree with what I said, or have nothing else to add?

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On 8/16/2009 9:55 AM Michael A. Terrell spake thus:

Thanks, but I'm happy with the little utility I already use that contacts NIST (Nat'l Institute of Standards and Technology); see

for more info.

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Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism

But only in W2K. XP, Vista, and 7 all have default SNTP setup although the default server 'time.windows.com' is a bit dodgy. I use time-nw.nist.gov.

I agree that for most a minute per month is reasonable but I would expect the same accuracy as my $29.99 Timex wristwatch which is more like a second a month. If you use the NIST SNTP server you'll be as accurate as how frequently your SNTP client updates.

Oh they do know the *exact* length of a pre-recorded show - but even those won't run on time to the second. And so much is automated these days, playout wise.

Do people really switch on at the exact minute? More of a problem with VHS recorders where you're swapping channels to record two progs. Luckily PVRs get round this - to some extent. But the one thing you can be sure of is programme companies not cooperating with one another just for the viewer. ;-)

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    Dave Plowman        dave@davenoise.co.uk           London SW
                  To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On 8/16/2009 2:51 PM Meat Plow spake thus:

So that kinda begs the question of why computer mfrs. can't (or won't) include clocks that are at *least* as accurate as a Timex, no? Wouldn't a computah be a more compelling reason for a more accurate clock? (I know, $$$ bottom line, right?)

Of course, it would be nice to know one's computer would maintain accurate time even if, god forbid, it was somehow disconnected from The Network ...

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Found--the gene that causes belief in genetic determinism

Because it's difficult. The right way to have done it would have been to do a function call from an RTC (real time clock) every time some application needs the actual time. IBM or MS, in their infinite wisdom, elected to install an RTC on the mainboard, copy its contents to the operating system, and then let the OS have the time available without having to read it from the RTC chip. Great idea in the days of 4.77MHz CPU's, which don't have too many operations per second. Not so great an idea with 3GHz processors, where the much larger number of operations per second will produce far more lost interrupts per second. The result is clock drift, always in the form of losing time. Most apps that require accurate time (i.e. SMTPE time code synchronized NLS editor, SONET, etc) will usually get the time from an external source, rather than use the OS or even the RTC.

There are internal GPS receivers that will supply accurate bus timing.

If your worried about losing sync when the internet hickups, you can go cheap and just use the NMEA-182 time data from the GPS or the 1pps time ticks. Last resort is a WWVB time receiver, which works quite well in the middle of the night, when you probably don't need it.

Incidentally, I had an odd experience back in the stone age of PC's. I was doing work for a local PC dealer. I wrote my first, and almost last, Turbo Pascal program that displayed an analog clock on the CGA screen, and planted it on a PC in the window of the store. I knew it wasn't terribly accurate, but it was tolerable (at about 5 minutes per day). Shoppers would walk up to the window, look at the computer screen, and then reset their wrist watches using the PC as a reference. Of course, the computer MUST be more accurate. I eventually had to put a sign in the window warning that this was a bad idea.

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Yup. Most of these computers use motherboards which are manufactured under extreme competitive pressure. Shaving a few pennies off of the bill-of-materials, per board, can make the difference between getting the contract and not.

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Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
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You should stay away from NIST (and all other stratum one servers) to avoid overloading their server unless you have a real need for high precision -- REALLY high. Otherwise, find a good stratum two server to connect to; you'll never know the difference. There are a lot; just google. I use time.apple.com.

Isaac

Functionally impossible. By adding money, you can reduce the drift rate but you can't make it zero. Period. Just use NTP. And *stay away* from the stratum one servers like NIST; they have better things to do than keep your computer's clock on time.

Isaac

I don't agree. NO CLOCK, running alone, can be really accurate over the long term. A much better way is to take the output from a crummy, inaccurate *but low cost* clock and using an external time reference, synthesize from it a local clock of simply amazing accuracy.

NTP solves the problem completely, and at a very low cost (processing cycles instead of expen$ive hardware). NTP works even if the computer it's running on has *no RTC* (in the hardware sense) at all. All it needs is some sort of interrupt generated every N cycles of the processor clock (N is any integer that produces regular interrupts a few times a second; the actual interval is not important).

Isaac