PTP requires support not only on your network, but also on your peripheral bus and inside your CPU. It can't achieve better-than-NTP results without disabling PCI power saving features and deep CPU sleep states.
You can if you just run PTP (almost) entirely on your NIC. The best PTP implementations take their packet timestamps at the MAC on the NIC and keep time based on that. Nothing about CPU processing is time-critical in that case.
Well, if the goal is for software running on the host CPU to know the time accurately, then it does matter. The control loop for host PTP benefits from regularity. Anyway NICs that support PTP hardware timestamping may also use PCI LTR (latency tolerance reporting) to instruct the host operating system to disable high-exit-latency sleep features, and popular operating systems respect that.
PTP does not require support on your network beyond standard ethernet packet forwarding when used in ethernet mode.
In multicast IP mode, with multiple switches, it requires what anything running multicast between switches/etc would require (IE some form of IGMP snopping or multicast routing or .....)
In unicast IP mode, it requires nothing from your network.
Therefore, i have no idea what it means to "require support on the network".
I have used both ethernet and multicast PTP across a complete mishmash of brands and types and medias of switches, computers, etc, with no issues.
The only thing that "support" might improve is more accurate path delay data through transparent clocks. If both master and slave do accurate hardware timestamping already, and the path between them is constant, it is easily possible to get +-50 nanoseconds without any transparent clock support.
Here is the stats from a random embedded device running PTP i just accessed a second ago:
Reference ID : 50545030 (PTP0)
Stratum : 1
Ref time (UTC) : Sun Dec 28 02:47:25 2025
System time : 0.000000029 seconds slow of NTP time
Last offset : -0.000000042 seconds
RMS offset : 0.000000034 seconds
Frequency : 8.110 ppm slow
Residual freq : -0.000 ppm
Skew : 0.003 ppm
So this embedded ARM device, which is not special in any way, is maintaining time +-35ns of the grandmaster, and currently 30ns of GPS time.
The card does not have an embedded hardware PTP clock, but it does do hardware timestamp and filtering.
This grandmaster is an RPI with an intel chipset on it and the PPS input pin being used to discipline the chipset's clock. It stays within +-2ns (usually +-1ns) of GPS time.
Obviously, holdover sucks, but not the point :)
This qualifies as better-than-NTP for sure, and this setup has no network support. No transparent clocks, etc. These machines have multiple media transitions involved (fiber->ethernet), etc.
The main thing transparent clock support provides in practice is dealing with highly variable delay. Either from mode of transport, number of packet processors in between your nodes, etc. Something that causes the delay to be hard to account for.
The ethernet packet processing in ethernet mode is being handled in hardware by the switches and basically all network cards. IP variants would probably be hardware assisted but not fully offloaded on all cards, and just ignored on switches (assuming they are not really routers in disguise).
The hardware timestamping is being done in the card (and the vast majority of ethernet cards have supported PTP harware timestamping for >1 decade at this point), and works perfectly fine with deep CPU sleep states.
Some don't do hardware filtering so they essentially are processing more packets that necessary but .....
Panics about how oil is being traded in non-USD terms are as old as the internet and, in all likelihood, even older than that. You can find usenet slop from 20-30 years ago about the petro-euro and the "tehran oil bourse". Here's an old site that is/was daily panics about the fall of the dollar, from 15-25 years ago. http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/
Nobody is panicking. BRICS has gotten steadily larger and is gaining as an alternative banking system. This is competition. This just requires more thoughtful strategies.
I would say it's a mystery. The US has corporations that are better funded than many nations. These corporations are also rationally managed and operate globally. As a patriot I hope that the US starts to utilize rational thought.
The steady building up of alternatives will happen until one day the reserve currency status will change hands all of a sudden.
I think the Fed could stem the whole thing by just issuing a stable coin itself pegged to the dollar and re-assert itself as the dominant currency/arbiter... but who knows. Maybe then it'd have insight into every transaction and be able to stem things with even more power than it can now.
Nobody stays king forever. Maybe it's time the US is forced to balance its books and stop riding on cheap credit. Losing the power of the reserve currency and the power that that gives to SWIFT and things will take a lot of soft power away from the US. Without allies the US couldn't stop a united China, Russia, insert-other-would-be-ally-of-theirs in a world conflict.
As another commenter said there's no leadership at teh top just chaos. People, countries, banks don't invest in chaos.
> steady building up of alternatives will happen until one day the reserve currency status will change hands all of a sudden
This is not how it has ever happened. Instead, we’ll see a gradual erosion as the world switches to multi-polarity and spheres of influence. (And, with decreasing international trade, every country’s reserve mix will vary.)
I agree that the next wave may not be dominated by a single currency. I also think that is a superior system. I think the BRICS system is based on honoring multiple currencies rather than using a single currency for settlement.
It’s more robust and less efficient. Transaction costs—and opportunities for middlemen—will increase. But the chances that your country’s economy is entirely shut down on the whim of one man in Washington is reduced.
> the BRICS system is based on honoring multiple currencies
The BRICS system is nonsense, as evidenced by basically nobody using it beyond a totem amount. Both the PBoC and RBI have superior settlement systems they could open up if they wanted to. Neither does because neither wants an unrestricted capital account.
I agree that it has been unused but disagree that it will always go unused. I think that China is using the US current global antagonism to encourage others to participate.
I think the Fed is under powered without consistent planning from our executive office. Erratic behavior does not instill confidence for people trying to rationally plan.
I also think the US used the banking system to punish enough nations that an alternative became viable.
Batteries can make use of the atmosphere as well (eg aluminum air batteries/ or venting hydrogen in lead acid batteries) although I don’t know of any rechargeable chemistries off hand that use environmental oxygen. All that to say the trick is available for batteries even if the best current chemistries by mass density don’t make use of it.
One I'm familiar with (but don't know deeply about) is Iron-air batteries [1]. Form Energy [2], an interesting grid-storage startup uses them. They're not energy-dense whatsoever, but very cheap, which makes them economical for that application.
Considering this customer's gripes, I might suggest the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14. It's even lighter than their X1 Carbon, has great battery life, is silent, and has a spectacular display.
PWM is the only useful way to drive an LED and the people who deny this are, to me, hilarious. In fact for the author's stated use case of low light conditions PWM really is the only way to do it without wrecking accuracy (and efficiency).
My no PWM laptops look fine to me for watching movies. Sure, less efficient. But if I can't look at it for more than 30 seconds without my eyes burning then what's the point?
Why is it a useful property that everything is always "in sync"? I propose this is not possible anyway. These systems are always asynchronous, and the time of check is always before the time of use, and it is always possible that a revocation occurs between them, and this problem cannot be eliminated.
Funny that the article only obliquely references the compression issues. The OCI users that I have seen are using gzip due to inertia, while zstd layers have been supported for a while and are radically faster.
I looked into switching to zstd recently however at least crane the utility that rules_oci uses to upload containers does not yet support uploading zstd layers.
Issue is over two years old. Man it is so sad how hard it can be to upstream work to big open source projects. I have a number of PRs open on both the kubernetes and etcd projects and it is almost impossible to get anyone to review them, and since nobody will review my PRs I cannot get enough work under my belt to be a committer. Sometimes I feel like if you don’t have an @redhat or @google account people just ignore you.
Do you actually pay for all these or are you basing your judgement on the free models (Gemini Fast, etc)?
Anyway the way to succeed in this task is to ask the model to write the program that analyses your bank statements, then read and check the program, and use it.
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