Time May Be Running Out for Millions of Clocks(voanews.com)
voanews.com
Time May Be Running Out for Millions of Clocks
https://www.voanews.com/a/time-may-be-running-out-for-millions-of-clocks/4554376.html
4 comments
Let's build a $5bn wall but cut $26.6mil in funding for a necessity. Makes sense, I hope congress can stop this?
Wtf? What possible good could turning off WWVB do? Are we going to have to buy digital GPS-enabled wall-clocks because the Orange Menace isn't done taking a baseball bat to the china shop? Bloody hell. GPS does works, barely, inside given the right receiver and antenna combination... at least good enough for a time fix.
There was a project on HN sometime in the last year where someone was broadcasting the WWVB signal indoors at low power. It would be a loss for this station to go off the air, but unless you’re in a remote location with no internet connectivity to broadcast the time signal yourself at low power, the world will go on.
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/22/build-your-own-radio-clock-t...
https://hackaday.com/2014/03/22/build-your-own-radio-clock-t...
A reason we keep the older water navigation beacons active.
These people in DC, many of them seem to have absolutely no technological comprehension. Nor basic systems understanding.
Not just in technology, but in accounting, agriculture -- essentially all sustaining human endeavors: You create and foster and innovate redundancies.
Because shit breaks. Nature is "fickle". People are selfish. And you want to survive these things.
Finally, when you do transition to newer systems (and hopefully, newer redundancies), you want to have an orderly wind-down and transition.
Something the Washington buffoons also ignore, these days. For people who claim to espouse "business", they demonstrate surprisingly little respect for a predictable, planful business -- or other -- environment.
Yes, there are always surprises -- including the inherent surprises of discovery and disruption.
But, it'd be nice to leave businesses and agencies capacity to focus on these, instead of endlessly jerking them around with whiplash policy changes and politically motivated jack-in-the-box initiatives.