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Not one to let trivia pass unnoticed, the timing of this post has a mildly interesting significance.
Some of you may be old enough to recall the Y2K bug (or may have even helped in avoiding the predicted calamity). Thanks to an incredible effort, the world survived relatively unscathed.
So we're in the clear, now. Right?
Not quite. In the land of Unix timekeeping, there is another rollover bug coming up, when the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch (Jan 1, 1970) exceeds the space provided by a signed 32 bit number: 2147483647 (January 19, 2038 at 03:14:08 UTC). [See Wikipedia's Year 2038 problem entry for more details.]
The timing of this post marks our reaching 75% of that a milestone towards that rollover amount: 1,500,000,000 seconds since the Unix epoch which works out to 2017-07-14 02:40:00 UTC. (Queue Cue horns and fanfares.)
Besides taking note of a mildly interesting timestamp, I'd like to offer for discussion: Falsehoods programmers believe about time.
What memorable time (or date) bugs have you encountered?
I once worked at a company where the DBA (DataBase Analyst) insisted that all timestamps in the database be in Eastern Time. Yes, it would fluctuate when we entered/exited Daylight Saving Time. Even better, this was central database correlating inputs from PBXs (Private Branch Exchanges) across all four time zones in the US. No amount of discussion on my part could convince him otherwise. I finally documented the situation like crazy and left it to reality to provide the final persuasion. Unfortunately, a defect in the design of their hardware manifested at a very inopportune time, and the company ended up folding.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Mykl on Friday July 14 2017, @02:59AM (7 children)
1,500,000,000 / 2,147,483,647 = 69.85%, not 75%.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday July 14 2017, @07:14AM
When we reach 1610612736 seconds past the epoch (that being 3<<29, the real 75%), I might get less than half as excited as I did when 50% went past over a decade ago. Billion? Pah, non-event. Billion and a half? Less than half a non-event.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Friday July 14 2017, @11:51AM (5 children)
Oh? Oh. Doh! Story updated... good catch!
And, for those who might be curious WHEN we will reach 75% for real... http://timestamp.online/countdown/1610612735 [timestamp.online] which, at the time of writing this, reported:
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 14 2017, @03:49PM (3 children)
...and to everybody who is *still* wondering when we'll reach 75%, that's January 13, 2021 :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday July 14 2017, @07:55PM (2 children)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 14 2017, @09:11PM (1 child)
In Chrome I'm getting timeouts, and IE11 just flat-out refuses to load the page. Don't have Firefox installed on the work machine.
If the site worked for you, you could've just pasted the date for us into your comment, was my point.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by martyb on Saturday July 15 2017, @03:55AM
Ahh, I see what you mean now. I had been concerned as to how long a wait until the time passed... you wanted to know what that date/time would be. I apologize for my confusion, and not answering your finally-now-clear-to-me question!
As of THIS writing, the countdown to the 75% completed point reports [timestamp.online]:
AKA: Thu, 14 Jan 2021 08:25:35 UTC.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 15 2017, @04:33AM
However note that this is merely a prediction. Since the site cannot know future leap seconds, they cannot be correctly accounted for.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.