How I spent my weekend, a short story in four commands.

[theweaselking]

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machine:~# date
Sat Dec 31 20:42:31 EST 2005

machine:~# /etc/init.d/ntp stop
Stopping NTP server: ntpd.

machine:~# ntpdate 132.246.11.229
15 Nov 12:12:48 ntpdate[5330]: step time server 132.246.11.229 offset 279991762.985766 sec

machine:~# date
Sat Nov 15 12:13:19 EST 2014
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(The weekend was all like that. But I am greatly amused by "offset 280 million seconds" being both MEASURED IN SECONDS and MEASURED OUT SIX FIGURES PAST THE DECIMAL.)

Comments

[frith]

At the beginning of the long dash it will be exactly 1 o'clock 0 minutes 0.000000 seconds Eastern Standard Time. Or not. Good luck with that.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Either you're running an atomic clock or a few of those decimal places are precision theater.

(Precision theater is like security theater but for floating-point ops instead of airports)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

NRC is running an atomic clock. 132.246.11.229 is time.nrc.ca, but I was using the IP because DNS was down.

But given networks, a few of those decimal places are precision theatre regardless.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Aye. I believe that some of the most egregious automated trading networks can, by dint of massive electronic expenditure, extensive co-location and sheer network voodoo, get accuracy to approaching the millisecond level. Which is to say, three decimal places.

[thornae.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's a case of a programmer saying "but it might be that accurate, so we'll just leave the extra decimals in there", and then because it's a float, the computer just fills up the last few decimal places with whatever integers happen to be lying around (that's how it works, right?).

[frith]

Yes, the high rollers use automation coupled with a faster connection to some exchanges to catch the deals before everyone else.

[skington.livejournal.com]

One of the best reasons to use a GUI even if you're connecting to remote servers over SSH or what have you is so you can select a ridiculously-long number like that and highlight groups of 3 digits in turn to work out what it actually means.

As I get more and more curmudgeonly about software, I become increasingly convinced that the people who think that a sensible default option is to show text like this (quick, is that 3GB or 30GB?)

Mem:   3038076k total,   744992k used,  2293084k free,   122800k buffers

are the same people who tell you not to enter a space in your credit card number - catastrophically dull jobsworths that I never want to work with in a million years.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That's why you use -h not -k.

(any terminal I use, barring some REALLY weird shenanigans that I usually attempt to work around immediately, happens in a window on a GUI'd environment. So I can easily select/copy/paste.)

[thornae.livejournal.com]

I like those sensible commands that let me use -M or a variation thereof - megs tend to be big enough to easily parse, but means I can still do a quick sort -n.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The only time I'm looking to do that kind of thing it's "-h |grep G | sort -n" - because I figured anything smaller than Gigabytes isn't important for my concerns at the time.

(This unfortunately fails if you're looking at *terabytes*.)

[thornae.livejournal.com]

Also slightly problematic if you have more than a few non-size related 'G' characters in the output, which was the specific use case that first got me annoyed enough to look up other options.
You can also define your own blocksize, but that sounds like way too much effort. No doubt there's plenty of other ways to do it.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

That would be a good way for malware to package outgoing information, in the least significant digits of publicly-visible system outputs. Unverifiable, and it would have no detectable impact on performance.

[skington.livejournal.com]

top doesn't appear to have such a switch, though. (Unlike e.g. ls and df, which have a reasonable -h switch.) Which is absolutely batshit insane, given that top, of all things, is for users and isn't intended to be parsed by other programs, so you could very easily realise "hey, displaying numbers in kilobytes, when most things can be megabytes, gigabytes or even terabytes, is stupid; let's change it" and make a change without having to worry about backwards-compatibility.