No, not really. I work in finance (HFT, systematic market making) and this industry heavily relies on high precision clock sync. It's even regulated by law (MiFID II); in practice everyone on the street uses PTP because if you don't know how fast you're really going or where your latency spikes you already lost the race, just don't know about it.
There's a couple of other domains where micro- and nanosecond level time sync is of paramount importance. PTP has become much cheaper over the years especially when you are in a data centre and can get it as a service instead of setting up grand-masters, slaves, GPS antennas, etc.
This statement just reads like badly researched topic on their part.
I considered starting a competitor in 2018 when I first saw this company, but I don't have the same connections to customers that these guys do.
My conclusion was that PTP precision with software timestamps would be a good company, but not something between. I hope they can prove me wrong!
If one has such an accurate clock they might be able to accurately plot their position on earth to within 1 ft merely by checking the timed pulses of orbiting satellites.
Hey look we got a GPU to learn the Kalman filter algo.
Many are actually better than 10 ns basically a 1 foot CEP is 1 ns. If they are fixed and always on the accuracy it can build over a day is incredible.
If you arrive to the railway station 10 minutes +-2 minutes before your train leaves you are using time. In a very real sense. In robotics we sync multiple computers on the robot to about miliseconds, that is using time. In a real sense.
Maybe more accurate, cheaper sync will enable more applications. Maybe it is a good business to specialise on it. But saying that nobody excep for Google, CockroachDB or someone doing database things uses time is bulshit and can be called out for what it is.
Why are you in a very specific technical discussion correcting what is obvious? Yes, you're using time. You're not using time at the precision this company is targeting. At that precision, there are few current use cases, but if they make it cheaper, there will be more. What's there to argue here? You're offended you're not being included as users of time?
"We're lunching more accurate satellite imaged maps. The current users are largely nation states and niche industries due to its cost. This will enable more map use cases"
I use Google Maps all the time. I used it for my last trip! How dare you.
Please refrain from personal attacks. It is unecessary and doesn’t add to the conversation. Thank you.
> I use Google Maps all the time. I used it for my last trip! How dare you.
Do note that your example didn’t say “nobody uses maps”. If an imaginary salesperson would say “nobody uses maps” I would call bulshit on that too.
> Yes, you're using time.
Great, so the company representative should simply not say “nobody is using time”. And the commenter I was responding to shouldn’t say that applications which are fine with a lower accuracy “aren't ‘using time’ in any real sense”.
Heck, all I know maybe nanosecond accuracy is where the bees knee is, and everyone is going to be amazed by the awesome new applications it is going to enable. But you don’t need to disregard all the history of timekeeping and all the current applications to make that point.
On 28 April 1789 a mutiny broke out on HMS Bounty. The ship’s former captain, departing on a rowboat, demanded that the mutineers give him K2 the ship’s chronometer. The mutineers refused, because the chronometer was worth about as much as the whole ship, and they needed it for their onward navigation. Somebody should have told them that they are not using time in any real sense. Probably they would have laughed at that idea.
I don't see how something like Kerberos or TOTP, that fails without some sort of synchonization, can be defined as not "using time" in a real sense. (If cluster nodes were drifting by seconds, I'd be checking them, even if that was only going to affect something like make.)
For GPS to work at all, you need very accurate knowledge of the offset between each satellite's signal.
The only way I can think of to have precision but not accuracy is if you design a system where there's a buffer between the antenna and the signal processing and you don't know how long the buffer is. Is a design like that a practical concern?
If these folks can achieve what they want at a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than current prices then you are absolutely going to see a lot more regular use cases show up to take advantage of it.