[HN Gopher] Dave Mills has died
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Dave Mills has died
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 621 points
Date : 2024-01-19 03:27 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (elists.isoc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (elists.isoc.org)
| andrewl wrote:
| More about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._Mills
| m463 wrote:
| I just imagine all the ntp daemons becoming falsetickers for a
| moment
| pushedx wrote:
| We get the news from Vint Cerf himself.
|
| Thanks Dave, rest in peace.
| gala8y wrote:
| Giants. Seriously, I get this vibe when looking at all these
| people, the early internet culture. Sometimes I feel as if I
| was there... or rather really wanted to be.
| ajdude wrote:
| I had the opportunity to meet him at UD earlier last year, very
| bright man who was still actively working on many things.
| thinkerswell wrote:
| His talk on the early internet
| https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?feature=shared
| move-on-by wrote:
| I've recently gotten very into NTP with GPS and PPS as a fun
| personal project. Just a couple weeks ago I was reading about him
| on Wikipedia and I could relate to this quote (as no one else
| I've talked to about PPS has shown any interest):
|
| > he enjoyed working on synchronized time because no one else was
| working on it, giving him his own "little fief"
|
| Debian recently switched to NTPSec, and I was happy to see how
| familiar their website style was to the main NTP site. In the FAQ
| I found:
|
| > [Q] Why do these web pages look so 1990s
|
| > [A] Because that simple look is good for people with visual
| impairments, and as a tribute to Dr. David Mills, the original
| architect of NTP who is himself visually impaired. Dr. Mills has
| very particular ideas about Web visuals, and this site is
| carefully styled to resemble his NTP documentation pages.
|
| I've never had an opportunity to meet him, but he has certainly
| made a positive impact on my life. Rest in peace Dr. Mills.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Same here, getting into PTP, you end up studying a lot about
| timing on computers, and Dr. Mills is one of the main players
| in building up modern timing foundations! RIP, and thanks for
| all your contributions!
| icehawk wrote:
| He really was. I remember encountering him on
| comp.protocols.time.ntp two decades ago and the breath of
| knowledge he had on computers keeping time was astounding,
| both at the time, and now that I look back at it.
| parker-3461 wrote:
| Which NTP site are you referring to? I'm keen to check out some
| examples.
| liamwire wrote:
| ntpsec.org
| corford wrote:
| https://ntpsec.org/accomplishments.html is a good read for
| some fun insight in to what it takes to modernise a 1990s
| pre-git codebase and build chain.
| stormdennis wrote:
| here's that page
|
| https://www.ntpsec.org/FAQ.html
| digging wrote:
| I understand (and endorse) simplicity of design, but that
| page doesn't even have a link back to the home page. They've
| gone too far past accessibility into creating a less-
| accessible page...
| nixgeek wrote:
| Another black ribbon day for HN. RIP Dr Mills. The internet
| wouldn't be the same were it not for you.
| wyclif wrote:
| Ought to be a black ribbon for Dave Mills...
| wannacboatmovie wrote:
| They tried to apply the ribbon for a time, but the server's
| clock was wrong.
| rvz wrote:
| There should be one for Dave Mills. Another legend that
| deserves recognition for the foundations of the internet that
| hundreds of millions use today.
|
| RIP Dave Mills.
| pjsg wrote:
| This is sad news. I worked (a little bit) with him when I added
| the adjtime system call to linux back in the 0.99 days.... He
| built stuff that worked and is run everywhere. That is a great
| legacy. He will be remembered.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Just curious: what is 0.99 in this context?
| eimrine wrote:
| Almost sure this is the linux kernel version.
| ugh123 wrote:
| According to wikipedia, this is circa '92 era
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history
| looopTools wrote:
| Thank you Dave! Rest in peace
| briHass wrote:
| Took a class of his at University of Delaware around the turn of
| the century. He was a great professor that clearly had a love for
| the subject.
|
| NTP was much more complex and nerdy than some of the other
| trivial protocol RFCs, especially by v3 (https://www.rfc-
| editor.org/rfc/rfc1305), which was the first one I read. A
| legend; RIP
| mbrevoort wrote:
| Same, I took several of his classes in the late 90's at UD. I
| remember him fondly. RIP
| 299332jUUdd wrote:
| I had professor Mills in the mid 90s. He knowledge and
| application of hardware and software was truly impressive. A
| true hacker (In the finest sense of the word). RIP
| jimmytucson wrote:
| The New Yorker published a piece on Network Time Protocol a
| little more than a year ago[0] - highly recommend it to anyone
| interested in how the internet works.
|
| RIP Dave, and thank you.
|
| [0] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-
| thor...
| jwilk wrote:
| Discussed on HN back then:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33131195 (41 comments)
| phkamp wrote:
| He influenced my career as much as Dennis and Ken did.
|
| Our "nanokernel" paper brought NTP into the nanosecond domain and
| gave FreeBSD "timecounters".
|
| But our true shared passion was Loran-C
|
| Dave even invented the 16-pulse "tactical Loran-C" during the
| Vietnam War.
|
| I borrowed his ISA card Loran-C receiver (serial #1 & only) and
| later I built two generations of SDR receivers, and he was so
| proud when I showed him this dancing pulse received with a cheap
| ARM chip:
|
| https://phk.freebsd.dk/AducLoran/animation2.gif
|
| And boy was he pissed when USA shut down Loran-C, he really loved
| his "loudenboomers"
|
| RIP
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| What is the difference between Loran-C and tactical Loran-C? I
| googled "loran-c vs tactical loran-c" but did not come up
| anything. Thanks.
| phkamp wrote:
| Tactical Loran, also known as "Loran-D" was a concept Dave
| was involved in during the Korea war. There's a pdf about it
| somewhere on the web.
|
| Remember: This is way before GPS, so pilots could not just
| look at an instrument and know where their plane was, and
| many planes, both civil and military would regularly get lost
| (in the meaning: loose track of where they were).
|
| In friendly skies you could have your own Loran-C, but you
| couldn't expect the enemy to provide that for you, so
| "tactical" meant that you could rig up a naviation chain
| where you needed it, in a matter of days.
|
| (In the end both USSR and China set up Loran-C chains, some
| of them operating jointly with the US chains, and today the
| Rusian "Chayka" and possibly the chinese chains are the only
| ones left.)
|
| So tactical Loran was basically Loran-C transmitters in
| containers or trucks, and because they would be much weaker
| than real Loran-C, being both power constrained and having
| much smaller antenna, they used a 16 pulse code instead of an
| 8/9 pulse code.
|
| Loran-C&D is spread-spectrum transmission, but decades before
| the theory was fleshed out, but it was well understood that a
| longer pattern would improve S/N.
|
| But Loran-C/D was just one of many DoD radionav systems that
| project 621B (=GPS) was supposed to kill, and eventually did
| kill.
| Animats wrote:
| I hadn't heard from him in decades, but I knew him back when
| TCP/IP was starting up and his Fuzzballs were used as routers.
|
| John Nagle
| junon wrote:
| Are you John Nagle, of the Nagle algorithm?
| mrspuratic wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9048947
| fagnerbrack wrote:
| Sad day for the Internet, Rest in Peace David L. Mills , and that
| time keeps going on forever to you and your energy to be felt
| across time and space.
|
| I'm sure the artifacts of your work will never be forgotten.
|
| ----
|
| On a sidenote
|
| Last year I had a chat with one of the members of the early Web
| and we understood there's a serious issue of knowledge transfer
| to future web devs generations.
|
| Few people reads books, and even if they do, the books written by
| technical people are not pedagogical enough as to allow the
| reader to capture the Tacit Knowledge and experience from the
| author as to be able to reproduce new ideas.
|
| We are LOSING fundamental knowledge of the internet for every
| mind who dies. If you think that mailing lists, web archives,
| books and blog posts are enough then you're being naive.
|
| At some point nobody will understand how the Web works. The curve
| where the Web is going is not pretty.
|
| This is extremely troubling to me and I'm trying on the sidelines
| to have some sort of way to run Tacit Knowledge extraction from
| those ppl. Known techniques are ACTA and CTA (Advanced Cognitive
| Task Analysis and Cognitive Task Analysis).
|
| If you have any other idea, please let me know.
| wyclif wrote:
| What can we do to stop this erosion of knowledge?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Reach out to folks who are in the last chapter of their life
| and collect the knowledge, Story Corps [1] meets ArchiveTeam.
| Interview them, create or add to their Wikipedia page and
| upload other artifacts to the Internet Archive.
|
| [1] https://storycorps.org/
| cyberpunk wrote:
| > At some point nobody will understand how the Web works
|
| Sorry to be blunt; but that is absolute weapons grade nonsense
| on multiple levels.
|
| First, we aren't losing any knowledge on how the internet
| works; at least, as far as I'm aware. Can you please explain
| what you mean? What knowledge have we lost? Are we unable to
| write networking stacks because some greybeards aged out?
|
| Secondly, If you think the guys who wrote the first C compilers
| and implemented NTP have much of an idea how the 'modern
| internet' works even today (outside of what you can learn
| reading beej's guide), you're wrong. I'd be happy to be proven
| wrong, again, but I struggle to see how folks like these would
| be useful on the team who implements, for example, the
| distributed caching algorithms used by Akamai..
|
| I get your sentiment, it's definitely sad and a 'passing of the
| guard' sort of feeling when the first engineers pass on, and
| for sure, they know a lot about their domains. But lamenting
| that 'nobody will understand how the web works' because no one
| cares about ISC bind's implementation anymore is kind of
| bonkers.
| mhandley wrote:
| I don't think we're losing knowledge of _how_ the Internet
| works, but we 're almost certainly losing knowledge of _why_
| it was done that way. I remember Bob Braden saying (and I
| paraphrase):
|
| "When we designed the early Internet, we had a huge blank
| space to work in, and we agonized over what the best way to
| do things would be. Ever since, people have been filling in
| all the other parts of that space."
|
| This was 20 years ago, but he's probably even more correct
| today. Of course they didn't get everything right by a
| longshot, but we're definitely losing the rationale for why
| things were done the way they were. As a result, it's quite
| common to stumble into old problems that had been engineered
| around before.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I don't think we're losing the macro "why" at all. We may
| be losing the wisdom of the path they walked to get to
| their design, which is certainly very valuable from a
| pedagogical and historical perspective.
| corford wrote:
| I think that's the point, isn't it? That we're in danger
| of losing a lot of important history & context that
| underpinned the "macro"
| corford wrote:
| I read it more as "losing knowledge of why things are the way
| they are today" i.e. the earlier technical context & nuance
| that caused things to evolve in the way they have.
|
| Nice example from a link in this thread is a Dr. Mill's talk
| at udel: https://youtu.be/08jBmCvxkv4?feature=shared It's
| packed with interesting context and history stretching back
| to 1968
| wbl wrote:
| I see you've never met my coworkers: Akamai does employ a
| number of people with very long experience in the IETF world.
|
| There is quite a bit of bad ideas the people pop up to
| propose time and time again, because they don't get why the
| net looks the way it does or the constraints on evolution.
| The old timers also understand when things have changed
| enough to justify new things.
|
| W3C and IETF both have a paucity of early or middle career
| participants. So where are all these people who understand
| how it works? Not making more standards to solve some real
| problems.
| corford wrote:
| The Powersharing Series is a great first-person resource for
| the 1980s PC era: https://www.thepowersharingseries.com/
| zoobab wrote:
| No NTP means no crypto.
|
| Most of crypto cyphers nowadays relies on having both computers
| in sync clock wise.
|
| I learned it the hard way with openwrt routers disconnected from
| the internet.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Not exactly, timestamps only commonly matter for handling
| certificate expiry, and you'll still be fine if you're a few
| minutes out.
| abricq wrote:
| If someone is interested, here is the Reference and
| Implementation Guide of the latest NTP version (2006, was revised
| in 2010), written by Dave Mills:
| https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/database/reports/ntp4/ntp4...
|
| Quite well written, in my opinion.
| CarRamrod wrote:
| If I could save time in a protocol
|
| The first thing that I'd like to do
|
| Is to save every day
|
| 'Til eternity passes away
|
| Just to spend them with you
| hnwizard wrote:
| Extraordinary wizards. Founding fathers. True legends.
|
| RIP
| mhandley wrote:
| I met Dave a few times in the 90s, first when he was visiting
| Peter Kirstein at UCL. I'd taken network time as simple to get
| right until that evening chatting with him in the pub.
| Fascinating discussion of what can go wrong - and a lot of
| patience with a young networking researcher who didn't know what
| he was talking about. I've had a high respect for the attention
| to detail he embedded in NTP ever since. RIP.
| cornflake23 wrote:
| Truly a sad event. I never met him but found his work to be so
| well explained, even in writing and practice. Wrote him an email
| once and got an informative and kind response. Highly recommend
| folks to read his website to get to know how to write well and
| convey complexity in detail, as a story.
| sremani wrote:
| I took his class @ University of Delaware in 2002.
|
| R.I.P Professor Mills.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Dave Mills was helpful to me as a student. I did some research
| into NTP in 1999. I knew a little bit about it but not a lot and
| I said and did a lot of brash things (including sending query
| packets to every NTP server on the Internet). In response to my
| random poorly written mailing list and questions Dave answered me
| and gave me some useful pointers. I felt a little like I was
| talking to a celebrity.
|
| NTP is a remarkable technology. Getting millisecond
| synchronization out of megahertz computers and barely-megabit
| computers was not easy. Honestly I'm not sure I would have
| thought it was even possible until I read the papers explaining
| how it worked. And Mills didn't just make it on his own, he
| helped create a small community of timekeeping experts on the
| Internet that persists to this day.
| archon810 wrote:
| I at first read this as him being your student and started
| wondering how long ago your 100th birthday was.
| kabdib wrote:
| I enjoyed his writeups about the fuzzballs back in the day, I
| learned a lot and had fun doing it.
| DamonHD wrote:
| I contributed to NTP.
|
| The manufacturers of the cheap device I cajoled within ntpd into
| generating more than an order of magnitude more precision than
| they expected offered me decent money to write them a commercial
| driver. But I pointed out that they could just steer their
| customers towards NTP for most platforms and it was already done!
| dadadad100 wrote:
| I've never looked at NTP so I followed a link here to RFC 1305. I
| found this gem of humility.
|
| > Note that since some time in 1968 the most significant bit (bit
| 0 of the integer part) has been set and that the 64-bit field
| will overflow some time in 2036. Should NTP be in use in 2036,
| some external means will be necessary to qualify time relative to
| 1900 and time relative to 2036
|
| The 2036 problem is fixed in RFC 5905 as there is no doubt it
| will be needed.
| KomoD wrote:
| Was there no black bar? Or did I miss it?
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