[geeks] Re: Watches was: hub needed

[Chris Byrne]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: geeks-bounces at sunhelp.org 
> [mailto:geeks-bounces at sunhelp.org] On Behalf Of David Cantrell
> 
> I'll second that, 'twas fascinating even if I doubt I'll be 
> making much
> use of my new knowledge.
> 

Hey, gaining knowledge is a useful thing in and of itself, and you never
know when that sort of thing might come up. Its good trivia if nothing
else.

> The difficult bit for me would be finding a jeweller that's any good.
> 

All to often that's the difficult thing for any of us anywhere. There
just arent a lot of good jewelers left between the discount stores and
national chains squeezing everyone out, the only way for an independent
to survive is to go for the super-high end market, and I don't think any
of us have the kind of cash necessary to play in that market.

> I'm sure if I go up in to town I could find some top-notch
> establishments. 

You certainly can. London is probably the best city in the world to shop
for a watch if you don't care how much they're gonna charge you. But you
pointed out the mayfair markup. It's probably the highest priced city in
the world to buy a watch as well (that includes Tokyo), and with VAT so
high in the U.K. you're pretty well screwed all round. Most U.K. buyers
of high end watches head over to france, or even germany and
switzerland. 

Surprisingly enough the cheapest place to buy a swiss watch isnt in
switzerland, its in quatar and bahrain. You can get a piece in Doha for
less than half of what it'll cost you in london. Of course the customs
people know this so if you come back with a Breguet on your wrist
they're gonna want to see some paperwork on it, wheras if you stay in
the EU, especially France, they don't really bother. They're more
concerned with people taking too much alcohol with them. 

> As for the watch I wear - a cheap piece of shit Accurist 
> quartz thingy.
> It tells the time correctly to within a couple of minutes, and if I
> need better I can use ntp.

The average wrist watch is precise to +-20min/month. The very best wrist
watches are precise to within +-1sec/year. The vast majority of people
don't need a watch that's going to be pricise to the second, or even to
the minute for that matter. The people who do; doctors, chemists,
physicists, pilots, sailors, professional drivers etc... Generally have
adequate substitutes for a watch, or better timers to use then their
personal watches. The real reason to own a very precise watch is the
personal satisfaction that comes with owning something so very well
made. 

And of course bragging rights.

I couldn't tell you how many jokes there are about pilots and their
watches. Most of them involving comparisons to their genitalia, or lack
thereof.

Oh one thing though, I wouldn't trust your computers clock very much.
The same thing applies to phones and pagers that don't receive time
information off the network.  

The RTC on most computers (and other digital devices) can vary by as
much as 5 minutes a day without being out of spec. In my experience most
computers deviate a few seconds an hour. Laptops often diverge even
gaster than desktops. After a few days that can really add up, and can
even cause things to break (logically speaking of course, probably not
physically).

I HIGHLY recommend that if you have any time dependent process or jobs
that all machines involved be automatically synchronized off the same
time source, preferably an NTP source with multiple verifiable inputs so
if one gets poisoned or goes offline you don't lose sync. 

Remember one of the easiest ways to screw with a firewall is by
recording, then altering and replaying a sequence of packets. The only
easy way to ensure against this is to have some kind of time based
replay prevention and if a cracker can screw with your time sync you are
in trouble. 

Remember the important thing here is precision not accuracy. It's more
important that all machines be on the same time, than it is to be close
to the correct time. If you don't understand the difference between
precision and accuracy then you're in more trouble than I can help you
with ;-)

Chris Byrne