> 
> This is because by-and-large software is written for the "lowest
> common denominator".

I am reminded of Spinal Tap's "We're cancelled in Boston, but don't worry, it's 
not a big college town".   Examples of protocols that get distinctly tetchy in 
the face of poor clock synch are, as has already been mentioned without seeming 
to upset your certainty, NFS (the computing glue of the nineties) and 
Kerberos/AD (the computing glue of the noughties).  The fomer needs clock synch 
except the documentation doesn't tell you (until you find "make" misbehaving 
because mtimes are being set by the client, not the server), and the latter 
documents it and drove the adoption of better time synch.   How you can use 
phrase like "by and large" when you're having to ignore two of the most 
significant distributed protocols of the past twenty years is something of a 
mystery.

ian

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