What is Really the Best Source of UTC Time?
Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC as it is more commonly known, is now the world’s official global timescale. It replaced the old Greenwich Meantime (GMT) back in the seventies. Greenwich Meantime was based around the movements of the Earth’s sun; UTC is based upon the time as shown by atomic clocks. It is kept “in line” with GMT with the addition of so called “leap seconds” that are used to compensate for such changes as the slowing of the Earth’s rotation at certain times of the year. In the world of computers UTC is used by computer networks across the globe to synchronize to the same exact time, making time sensitive transactions across the globe efficient and reliable. Many computer networks utilize a dedicated network time server (NTP) to carry the precise time across the entire network and ensure there is no drift or disagreement between the machines. While most computer experts agree that the use of a dedicated NTP server is the best course of action for any computer network,
