On 2012-06-06, Julien Ridoux <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 6, 2012 4:41:59 PM UTC+10, unruh wrote:
>> On 2012-06-06, Harlan Stenn <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear unruh (Dr. William Unruh?),
>
> It seems there is a little misunderstanding, I hope you won't mind some 
> clarification.

Of course not. 
>
> The article you keep quoting is a high level description of the work, and we 
> have worked with ACM Queue editor and reviewers to provide an overview easy 
> to grasp for the non-expert. This was what ACM Queue was after. Please view 
> this article that way and not as a scientific paper. I believe you are well 
> aware of synchronisation issues, and I understand your reaction, but again, 
> you were not the targeted audience (and for what it is worth, yes, we also 
> have cheap GPS receivers on our office window that took less than 15mn to set 
> up).

But high level descriptions should not be puff pieces. 

>
> I would encourage you to read the scientific papers we published. I am 
> confident you will see the level of hype being much lower. The description of 
> the algorithm you are requesting can be found in several papers. Repeating 
> myself, the main one being : ""Robust Synchronization of Absolute and 
> Difference Clocks over Networks". It does describe the algorithm in more 
> details. It may not deliver all the details you are after (or be slightly 
> outdated), but the code publicly available is also there for you to read. It 
> is the ultimate reference after all.
>

It would be nice to have a link to that publication, in particular not
not one where you have to buy it. 
And asking people to read the code is a cop out. I have tried hard to
read the ntpd code for example, and the chrony code. While the latter is
slightly (only sightly) better than the former, both are a real pain to
figure out what is going on. Reading code is always a case of far fr too
many trees for to see the forest. 

For others, I have found a copy at 
http://www.cubinlab.ee.unimelb.edu.au/~darryl/Publications/synch_ToN.pdf



> It was not my intention to describe the entire algorithm in my previous 
> message (it has been done in publicly available papers), but instead give 
> some pointers and general answers to some of the questions raised earlier. My 
> message did not intend to sparkle a heated discussion but instead try to 
> provide honest answers to this group.

I am very confused by your graph comparing ntpd to radclock. The ntp has
huge oscillations while from what I have read it is critically damped
while what I see is a pretty high Q (of the order of 10 or so) in the
graphs. Things I have not seen in my looks at ntpd. (Ntpd does have
problems which I have spent time pointing out in the comparison with
chrony) but oscillations like that I have not seen. Is this really ntpd
or some stripped down testbed?

 
>
> I am happy to receive criticism from people who have interest in improving 
> computer clock synchronisation. Please accept my apologies if my message 
> offended you, I am sure we can pursue this discussion over a more private 
> channel in a constructive way.

_______________________________________________
questions mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions

Reply via email to