Tim:
> I'm still not convinced a PC clock is deliberately designed
to run slow.
> My experience with flattening BIOS batteries has been peculiar hardware
> behaviour, can't say that I've noticed the time going skew whiff.
Joe Zeff:
Don't forget that most PCs are always online, and adjusting their
clocks
from the various time servers. Mostly, today, you'd see the clock error
after the computer's been turned off for a while, or at least off-line.
Back when most computers were only online occasionally, if at all, it
was more obvious.
To be honest, I think *most* PCs are nearly always switched off. Most
PCs are owned by a vast majority of non-tech-heads, who don't leave them
running 24/7.
Back then, and still now with PCs that are off most of the time and
boot-up with wrong clocks that may get adjusted sometime after going
on-line, I've always put that down to simply bad timekeeping - PC clocks
were infamous for simply being crap. And, no, in those cases, it
definitely was not low batteries. That was one thing I kept an eye on.
That, and people who never bother to set their clocks properly, or at
all, because they simply didn't give a damn about it. People like that
could be a right pain on mailing lists, as it screws things up. Yes, I
know mail should be threaded by message ID headers, but when you get a
post allegedly from two weeks back, my client hides it for not being
current mail, other people's clients misfile it because they're sorting
by subject and date, etc.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is
no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages
posted to the mailing list.
If you are not the intended recipient, why are you reading their email?
You bastard!