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posted by janrinok on Wednesday July 24 2019, @05:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the on-the-third-stroke dept.

Telstra pulls the plug on Australia's 'talking clock' which has given 'millisecond precise' time for the past 66 years. The Daily Mail reports that the phone service talking clock is to be shut down after 66 years.

The speaking clock function that gives people the precise time down to the second will be a thing of the past come October.

For the last 66 years, Australians have been able to dial 1194 to hear the old-fashioned voice of a man telling them the exact time. 'At the third stroke it will be 1.10 and 40 seconds,' before a beeping sound plays and the the new time is repeated.

The service still receives about two million calls a year - a lot considering today's technology.

Telstra, which provides the service's network and billing, is pulling the plug on October 1 - saying it's not compatible with their new network technology. It was always the best way of setting clocks, especially since many mobiles don't have visible seconds on their clock. I will miss it.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6936919/Telstra-pulls-plug-Australias-talking-clock-given-millisecond-precise-time.html


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  • (Score: 2) by TheFool on Wednesday July 24 2019, @06:13PM (8 children)

    by TheFool (7105) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @06:13PM (#870793)

    I wonder if they're just using the new technology as an excuse to stop supporting it, or if the machine this is running on is in fact so ancient that it can't be put on the new network without significant modification. It feels like it could be either if it's been up for 66 years.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 24 2019, @06:31PM (4 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @06:31PM (#870805) Journal

    Maybe the new network equipment has too much latency so the clock could no longer be accurate.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 24 2019, @08:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 24 2019, @08:23PM (#870850)

      May be Windows 10.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by pipedwho on Wednesday July 24 2019, @10:19PM (2 children)

      by pipedwho (2032) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @10:19PM (#870888)

      This is probably a symptom of the eternal latency creap that seems to happen on everything these days. Systems go 'digital' and latency seems to go through the roof for anything that involves human interaction.

      The only way to listen to this talking clock these days is over some sort of codec based audio system. And those systems introduce indeterminate coding and network transfer delays to signal. Delays that could be anything from 10 to 100ms (or more in some cases). Australia's new NBN (National Broadband Network) is effectively moving everyone's analog phones over to VOIP systems, which further compounds the problem. They're probably thinking what's the point of a millisecond accurate talking clock when your phone can use NTP to cancel out most of the (symmetrical) network latency anyway.

      I'd like to see Telstra release an App that emulates the talking clock with a nice NTP/GPS synced millisecond accurate clock that could be used in the same circumstances as the 'talking clock'. Keeping the same voice for nostalgia sake of course.

      'Back in the day' ultra low UI latency was a critical design element. Think CD player vs DVD vs Blueray player. Or ATM/point of sale keypad PIN entry delays, phone/TV/smart device cold boot times, drive by wire throttle lag in cars, and just about everything else that prioritises 'software' design over a comprehensive hardware up system design. These days people don't seem to care, so manufacturers just pedal whatever crap they can get away with.

      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday July 25 2019, @07:17AM (1 child)

        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 25 2019, @07:17AM (#870949) Journal

        I understand the point that you are making, but if it is simple a case of latency then ntpd shouldn't work either. However, millions of computers rely on ntpd [wikipedia.org] to keep their clocks sufficiently accurate to communicate with each other. I'm sure that a human would find the speaking clock accurate enough.

        And for those who say people don't wear wrist watches nowadays. I wear one everyday. Many professions (aircrew, armed forces, divers etc) wear watches everyday too.

        • (Score: 2) by pipedwho on Thursday July 25 2019, @09:59AM

          by pipedwho (2032) on Thursday July 25 2019, @09:59AM (#870967)

          The NTP compensates for latency by assuming the delay in both directions is symmetrical and measuring the round trip delay, then halving it. Over time it gets more accurate as the number of samples increases.

          Humans might find the speaking clock accurate enough, but it has always been a bastion of accuracy, which it can no longer satisfy as a simple audio playback over the new style digital codec based listening systems that have almost entirely replaced the POTS.

          My son was using it to update our clocks at the last daylight savings time change, and I jokingly commented that because he used a cell phone all our clocks are now a little late. He went back and checked with a land line, and lo and behold there was an obvious time difference between the beep on the cell phone which matched the clocks, and the beep on the landline which came in just a little earlier (probably 100ms or so). He also noticed the NTP synced digital time on the computer and cell phone was in sync with the beep on the talking clock. He went back and readjusted all the clocks while I sat back laughing at his fastidious dedication to punctuality.

  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday July 25 2019, @01:23AM (2 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Thursday July 25 2019, @01:23AM (#870914)

    It's a custom-built electromechanical Rube Goldberg device from the 1950s, a marvel of homebrew engineering but not something that can simply be plugged into Telstra's current system. So they'd need to replace it with something completely new, which is what I assume they're balking at.

    And before someone leaps in and says you can do it with a Raspberry Pi and some shell scripts, the speaking clock has been running continuously for sixty-six years, so it'd need to be something with similar endurance and longevity.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by driverless on Thursday July 25 2019, @01:32AM

      by driverless (4770) on Thursday July 25 2019, @01:32AM (#870919)

      Here's the 1954 video footage of it being installed [youtube.com], with footage of the crates being unloaded from ships and the multi-ton device being set up. Audio is read optically from glass disks (using 70-year-old technology!), two fully redundant systems run the clock. That's why it's lasted nearly seven decades, why Telsra is phasing it out, and why it can't be easily replaced by any of the peanut-gallery solutions that later posts have suggested.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Thursday July 25 2019, @02:35AM

      by driverless (4770) on Thursday July 25 2019, @02:35AM (#870931)

      They did replace ol'George (the original device) about 30 years ago, but it was still with a custom, high-availability industrial-grade system, nothing off-the-shelf.