September 16tn, 2003.

Who needs Time Synchronizing Software?

OK, so who needs time synchronizing software and why is there a need to synchronize time? For some reason, people don't ask each other, why do I need to have a correct time on my wrist-watch? Each person understands that otherwise he or she is risking being too late or too early. The same is true for your computer. The problem is when your computer's time does not correspond to the time other computers and servers display, you are up for troubles. That is why you need to synchronize time with special time synchronizing programs. This is especially important for online business transactions. You decided to pay your bills online at the very last minute. Yet next month you get a late payment fee? Why? Because you don't have time synchronizing software and your time was off. Consider another example. Most bidding on Ebay (and other online auctions) is done within last 10 minutes. If you only knew, how many bids have been missed because the computer time was not synchronized. The people tried to raise their bids while the auction was already closed because their computer clock was a few minutes off. In fact, nowadays there is special software that makes bids within the last 30 seconds. In order to achieve this, one must synchronize computer time with time synchronizing software. Another popular application for using "exact time" software is computer punch-clocks for tracking the time when employees got to the workplace. But by far the largest consumers of time synchronizing software applications are computer networks. That' is the topic of our next article.

Next Week. Network Time Synchronization.