[ntp:questions] Any chance of getting bugs 2164 and 1577 moving?

David J Taylor david-taylor at blueyonder.co.uk.invalid
Thu Mar 22 19:34:01 UTC 2012


"unruh" <unruh at invalid.ca> wrote in message 
news:uNJar.12581$QC3.8535 at newsfe16.iad...
[]
>> Most likely I would be looking at a histogram of the reported offsets, 
>> and
>> see whether it was gaussian, flat, or whatever, and how wide.  I might
>> learn something from that.
>
> No. Not if it is just noise.

.. but until I see I won't know.

[]
> precision is not accuracy.

and where did I say it was?

> In science we teach students not to report unwarranted precision-- the
> precision should reflect the accuracy of the measurements. We keep
> getting measurements to the mm and reported precision to angstoms
> because that was what the calculator spit out.

I hope you teach error estimation as well.

> I am not averse to reporting with a precion maybe up to a factor of 10
> better than the accuracy, but any more is just silly and misleading (as
> you are demonstrating in believing that a greater precision would convey
> some extra information.

Should you read what I wrote, including the bug report, perhaps you would 
see that I was quite happy for the number of reported digits to depend on 
the precision which NTP reports, but to keep things simple I suggested 
using the same reporting precision as is used in the loopstats,  The 
present integer microseconds are no longer adequate for the faster and 
better of today's NTP systems.

David 



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