FACTOID #53: If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again - its land area is only ninety-eight percent ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as "barren rock".
Synchronization has several subtly distinct sub-concepts:
Rate synchronization
Phase synchronization
Time offset synchronization
Time order synchronization
Two different time sequences may be synchronized in one sense without being synchronised in another, or synchronised at one time scale whilst being asynchronous in another.
Systems operating with all their parts in synchrony are said to be synchronous. Some systems may be only approximately synchronised, or plesiochronous.
For some applications relative offsets between events need to be determined, for others only the order of the event is important. The idea of simultaneity has many difficulties, both in practice and theory.
Encryption systems usually require some synchronization mechanism to ensure that the receiving cipher is decoding the right bits at the right time.
Automotive transmissions contain synchronizers which allow the toothed rotating parts (gears and splined shaft) to be brought to the same rotational velocity before engaging the teeth.
Technologies such as GPS and NTP provide real-time access to a close approximation to the UTC timescale, and are used for many terrestrial synchronization applications.
Whilst well-designed time synchronization is an important tool for creating reliable systems, excessive use of synchronization where it is not necessary can make systems less fault-tolerant, and hence less reliable.
Synchronization means never having to read the same feed twice!
One of the things that separates NewsGator apart from the competition is synchronization.
This feature makes sure your feeds follow you wherever you go, and makes sure you never have to read the same content twice whether you read that content online, on your mobile device or on a totally different platform.
When synchronization on the many clocks that make up a corporate network begins to fail even by milliseconds an organization faces multiple risks.
Systems that rely on an external time source open the door to hackers, and administrators may have difficulty tracing security breaches if the time stamps on log files are inaccurate.
Because time is used as a basis for legal contracts, imperfect timesynchronization can open the door to significant legal liability.
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