> Time SRE has at various points had take measures up to and including calling the USAF and telling them their satellites are fucked up
It's another cute anecdote, but Google culture is full of these, always scant on details and always intended to show how big/smart/important/complex/indispensable their engineering is.
"Had to" is a strong term here, it's made to sound like USAF could not possibly have noticed some deviation they were likely to correct of their own accord as a matter of routine as they had been doing for the 20 years of the GPS project prior to Google being founded.
The reality is drift and bad clocks are and always have been a feature of GPS, one explicitly designed for, one an entire staff exists to cope with, and designs depending on the absolute accuracy of a single clock have never been correct
It's another cute anecdote, but Google culture is full of these, always scant on details and always intended to show how big/smart/important/complex/indispensable their engineering is.
"Had to" is a strong term here, it's made to sound like USAF could not possibly have noticed some deviation they were likely to correct of their own accord as a matter of routine as they had been doing for the 20 years of the GPS project prior to Google being founded.
The reality is drift and bad clocks are and always have been a feature of GPS, one explicitly designed for, one an entire staff exists to cope with, and designs depending on the absolute accuracy of a single clock have never been correct