50g clock bug, what is it?

[DavidM]

(05-21-2014 06:51 PM)HP67 Wrote:  (I don't know who JYA is)

"JYA" = Jean-Yves Avenard, one of the authors of the MetaKernel, eventually hired by HP in Australia to work in the ACO group which produced the 49g and updated several other systems. Let's just say that he was in a better position than the rest of us to know something about the internals of the 49g+/50g.

(05-21-2014 06:51 PM)HP67 Wrote:  I expected the clock to be inaccurate but mine seems to be very stable. I will avoid using alarms though

From my own experience (and others that I've heard from), the clocks on 50g systems tend to be off by 1-2 seconds/day. I have both a 49g+ and 50g, and they are both slow by about 1.5 seconds/day. That's good enough for my purposes.

(05-21-2014 07:31 PM)Tim Wessman Wrote:  The suggested fix was analyzed way back (long before my time) and actually determined that it didn't really fix anything - it just shifted it to another location. There were many people who put a lot of effort into trying to find that and nobody ever was able to identify what was the exact cause. Most likely it was a combination of several that caused some interdependent behavior.

Thanks for the explanation, Tim. I may have missed it before, but that's the first time I've seen that there was actually some serious work put forward to analyze JYA's suggested fix. Glad to hear that it was given some serious consideration.

I will confess that I used to use alarms on my 48sx, but that was at a time when I needed them more (and had fewer options from other devices as a replacement). As such, I haven't really missed them so much on the 50g. The part that bothers me most about it is simply that I can't schedule activities to happen on a regular basis and still count on them actually happening. There's workarounds, sure. But I haven't had a great enough need to warrant putting the energy into programmable fixes -- I just do what I need manually on an occasional basis.