Many years ago, I discovered Socket Watch (swatch.exe). It was purchase-ware but relatively inexpensive; I recall it was about $10. The company that developed it -- Locutus Codeware renamed as Robomagic) was based in Canada. In an exchange of E-mails, the company said they would accept Can$10; so I had my daughter (living in Canada) pay them. I reimbursed her about US$7.50, which was the exchange rate for Can$10. That was at least 20 years ago. Through various Windows versions, I still use it.

Robomagic is no longer in business. Before liquidating, they made the last version (3.5b ) of Socket Watch freeware. Fortunately I archived a copy of its installer.

Socket Watch works off a list of over 100 time sources. Some are atomic clocks, and others synchronize to atomic clocks. On initializing after installation, the entire list is queried and scored. The responses are scored according to how quickly the sources respond; low scores are better than high. The list is then sorted by scores, lowest to highest. Socket Watch then takes a subset of top sources and periodically queries them; the size of the subset and the frequency of how often they are queried are user-settable. The responses are scored again, and the response with the lowest new score is used to reset my PC's clock. If any source in the subset has a higher score than a source not in the subset, it is replaced from the total list.

I setup Socket Watch to have a subset of 5 and to query the subset every hour. Since Robomagic no longer exists to distribute updates of the list of time sources, I occasionally visit http://support.ntp.org/bin/vie... to update my total list of servers. Following rules stated at that site, I only use servers that are not restricted to geographical locations that are not mine and for which I do not need prior permission to query. Fudging one rule, I do include Stratum 1 (atomic clock) servers.

I am showing my age here. In 1980, Burroughs bought System Development Corporation (SDC). The CEO and the President of Burroughs did a flashy video in which they praised SDC's reputation for integrity, which they said had actual monetary value. They promised they would not change SDC because such change might impair that value. That promise lasted only 6 months.

Around 1986, Burroughs merged with Sperry Univac to create Unisys. Combined, there were 120,000 employees. As of 2020, there were only 17,200 employees.

For details of my history at Unisys, see my http://www.rossde.com/retired.....

Hell no! I avoid Big Tech, which too often has no regard for my privacy.

Yes, my broadband Internet connection is through Spectrum because AT&T is the only alternative where I live. However, I rarely use the Spectrum E-mail address that came with the account. My primary E-mail account -- and my Web host -- is with a relatively unknown regional ISP that does not offer an Internet connection where I live.

"...an app that lets shoppers scan codes on displayed items..."

Since I have so far avoided having a cell phone, I will not be shopping at Amazon's store.

Some people are trying to avoid eating highly processed foods, possibly for health reasons. They need to be aware that artificial meat is indeed highly processed.

My brother once asked, "If we are not supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?"

Yes, fake interviews happened to me; but they had nothing to do with diversity. I am a white male.

In the 1990s, I was unemployed. I saw a help-wanted ad from Amgen, the biologic pharmaceutical company. The location was closer to my house than any of my prior employment. I was interviewed and then called back for another interview. That second interview left me feeling very positive. However, I never got an offer. I knew someone in a related department and asked her to find out what happened. The hiring manager was on vacation when I interviewed but had already chosen a candidate.

There are other unpleasant job-search situations. In the early 1960s, while I was still a college student, I applied for a summer position with IBM. All the applicants were assembled in a room to take a written test of their intelligence. I did not get the job because I scored too high. IBM wanted mediocre candidates who would not be distracted, saying that highly intelligent employees are too easily distracted.

Then, there was the job interview from Hell, which I documented at http://www.rossde.com/unemploy....

While I was unemployed, I went to a massive job fair at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I was in line to talk to a representative of a company for which I thought I would like to work. I heard the representative tell the candidate in front of me that he could not be hired because he was too highly qualified. Given the decades of experience that I had, I suspected that I would get the same result. Thus, when it was my turn with the representative, I merely told him that I was likely too highly qualified but that I could refer several mediocre candidates to him. Then, I left.

As for complaints about diversity and laws:
True diversity means hiring the best candidate without considering race, gender, religion, national origin, age, or sexual orientation. Too many companies discriminate and do not get the best employees.
The reason why we have so many laws is that not enough people will do the right thing.

The more I read about the search of dark matter -- and dark energy too -- the more I think about the the 19th century search for aether, which never existed and eventually proved not to be necessary to explain anything. Each new hypothesis about dark matter seems to violate ever more widely Occam's razor.

The April 2022 issue of Scientific American has an article "Scanning the Cosmos for Dark Matter". It describes several different hypotheses and suggests how to verify or refute each. The most simple hypothesis -- which thus complies with Occam's razor and the only one that I really understood -- is that dark matter consists of small black holes. However, that had only a very brief mention in the article. Much more print was devoted to hypotheses that I do not understand.

In the meantime, dark matter has become the 21st century's aether.

The article begins by saying the star is "glimmering 28 billion light-years away." It then says "the starlight has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us."

If something is 28,000,000,000 light-years away, light from it takes 28,000,000,000 years to reach us. If starlight takes 12,900.000,000 years to reach us, the star is 12,900.000,000 light-years away. That is how the distance of a "light-year" is defined.

Of course, the star is moving. There is significant red-shift indicating significant speed. Thus, I suspect the observed star was "glimmering" 12.9 billion light-years away but it may have traveled an additional 15.1 billion light-years before its starlight reached us. However, that is speculation. As something as massive as a star cannot travel at the speed of light, it has taken much longer than 15.1 billion years to travel that distance. We cannot possibly know what that star experienced in that time.

Years ago -- before I retired as a software test engineer -- I belonged to the ACM. I had a brief paper published in the Communications of the ACM (CACM) and several reviews published in Computing Reviews.

One day, I happened to browse through the "help wanted" ads in the CACM. I saw an ad containing an explicit statement of discrimination. Thereafter, I browsed the "help wanted" ads in subsequent issues and found several instances of explicit discrimination in almost every issue. For example, some ads indicated only Christians would be hired. Yes, such ads were placed by colleges that were operated by some Christian denomination and thus were likely exempt from anti-discrimination laws. However, the ACM did not have to participate in such discrimination.

I wrote to the executives at the ACM, pointing out the organization's code of ethics (at least at that time) stated "The values of equality, tolerance, respect for others, and the principles of equal justice govern this imperative. Discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, age, disability, national origin, or other such factors is an explicit violation of ACM policy and will not be tolerated." By accepting such ads, the ACM was indeed tolerating discrimination.

I requested that CACM no longer accept "help wanted" ads from employers who discriminate -- even if it is legal -- in employment. I received a reply that said "...it may not be the moral responsibility of the ACM to police non-ACM members or organizations and their ads." I strongly disagreed with this interpretation of ACM's code of ethics. After some 37 years as a member, I resigned from the ACM.

Although it might be ancient, I subscribe to the "Viewable With Any Browser Campaign"; see https://anybrowser.org/campaig.... Thus, I do not use any browser to test my 400+ Web pages. Instead, I test with the W3C test tools: http://validator.w3.org/ for HTML and http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-valid... for CSS. If my pages do not render appropriately in some browser, it is then the fault of the browser.

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64

254,696 files
38,718 folders

Much (most?) of that represents artifacts of Windows, not anything I created.

I began my career in software, programming an IBM 7090 at UCLA. The campus actually had three of them. The one I used was upgraded to an IBM 7094, which was slightly faster. It had other improvements; but over a half-century later, I cannot remember what they were.

When I left UCLA, I went to a commercial software company that was supporting NASA at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). I was still programming an IBM 7094, this time for software used in the Voyager project before either of those two satellites were launched. (They are now beyond Pluto.)

That job did not last long. I then went to the System Development Corporation (SDC) to test software that ran on a CDC 3800. I stuck around for 24 years, eventually testing software in a client-server environment. Meanwhile, SDC sold itself to Burroughs, which did a hostile takeover of Univac and became Unisys.

After a two-year stop at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and a few months at Omnikron, I eventually retired from TRW shortly after it was bought by Northrop Grumman. All that time, I was still testing client-server software.

Yes, my PC has more memory and power than an IBM 7090; even some "dumb" phones have more memory and power. However, much of the computing power today still involves client-server environments. That includes E-mail, the Web, and social networking. When you use Facebook or send a tweet, you are using a client that feeds into a server.

In the first paragraph, the word "remediate" means what you do if mediation fails and you try it again. The correct word is "remedy".

The article might have been written by a teacher. Teachers trying to appear professional often use "remediate" as a jargon for "remedy". When I was a school board member and a teacher in our schools would give a presentation and use "remediate" instead of "remedy", I would cringe. However, I would remain silent in order not to embarrass the teacher.

News reports indicated the Facebook outage severely affected many businesses. That should not have happened. Did not executives and managers ever hear: "Do not put all your eggs in one basket."

Those whose enterprises depend on a single cloud service, on Facebook for communication with distant operations, or entirely on Microsoft are fools. I use a PC with Windows. I do NOT use any Microsoft browser, E-mail client, or anti-malware application. I definitely do not use any Microsoft-related Internet service. For E-mail, I have accounts at two unrelated ISPs; ditto for newsgroup services.

In a family home with mother, father, 2 daughters, and 3 sons -- 7 people -- but only 3 bathrooms, how will individuals be distinguished. Oh, 2 of the sons are twins. It is a large family, but there are more.

There are frequent visits by aunts and uncles, cousins, grand-parents, and of course friends. Not all of them have smart toilets at home. Thus, they are not registered in the system.

Somehow, all this makes me think of facial recognition where someone is a germaphobe and always wears a surgical face mask.