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posted by n1 on Friday July 14 2017, @02:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-second-that! dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday July 14 2017, @03:09AM (17 children)

    by isostatic (365) on Friday July 14 2017, @03:09AM (#538951) Journal

    I remember staying up late (uk time), back on 9/9/01, watching the seconds on my 17" 4x3 crt, running on Debian tick over to 1e9 back in September 2001, with slashdot open on the side.
    Now, 500 million seconds later I watched the counter on an ubuntu laptop. Not quite as late as 16 years ago - I'm in Washington DC on business

    It amazes me how much changes, but also how little things change.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 14 2017, @04:08AM (12 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday July 14 2017, @04:08AM (#538963) Journal

    Technology changes. People a lot less..
    The trend to observe. Static humans handling fast developing technology.

    Funny thing is that in the past people were clueless about computers because they lacked exposure. Today they have shiny computers with 4-core gigahertz processor, gigabyte of dram and gigabytes of storage for the price of bicycle. People are still just as clueless.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday July 14 2017, @07:26AM (4 children)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday July 14 2017, @07:26AM (#539004) Homepage
      (minor nit - you probably meant terabytes of storage)

      One might say that people are if anything even more stupid, as there's way more available for them to know, so they know even less of what there is to know.

      And they even know less about some things than people used to know. I bet you an average teenager can't perform the kind of mental arithmetic that a baby-boomer could have done at the same age. I've seen people pull up their cellphone's calculator app to do simple things like multiplying 1.70 by 3, or subtract 5.10 from 10.00, or, worse, subtract 5.10 from 10.10. Frequently. (You may correctly conclude from that that I like giving exact change when I pay by cash.)

      Them youngsters can only come onto my lawn when they've calculated its area using Pappas' theorem in their head!
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday July 14 2017, @02:53PM (1 child)

        by isostatic (365) on Friday July 14 2017, @02:53PM (#539130) Journal

        One might say that people are if anything even more stupid, as there's way more available for them to know, so they know even less of what there is to know.

        Back before 1E9:

        Richard Nixon's Head: That's it! You're all going to jail, and don't expect me to grant a pardon like that sissy, Ford.
        Turanga Leela: You'll never pardon anyone because you'll never get elected president. The voters of Earth aren't the pea-brained idiots they were in your time.
        Richard Nixon's Head: Oh, no? Well, listen here, missy. Computers may be twice as fast as they were in 1973, but the average voter is as drunk and stupid as ever. The only one who's changed is me. I've become more bitter and, let's face it, crazy over the years. And when I'm swept into office, I'll sell our children's organs to zoos for meat, and I'll go into people's houses at night and wreck up the place!

        • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday July 14 2017, @09:04PM

          by Thexalon (636) on Friday July 14 2017, @09:04PM (#539330)

          The average voter is as drunk and stupid as ever. The only one who's changed is me. I've become more bitter and, let's face it, crazy over the years. And when I'm swept into office, I'll sell our children's organs to zoos for meat, and I'll go into people's houses at night and wreck up the place!

          So that's where Trump got his campaign pitch!

          --
          The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 14 2017, @05:31PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Friday July 14 2017, @05:31PM (#539215) Journal

        Actually I meant gigabytes, because that's what mobile phones and flash memories are. And is a technology that is cheap and portable. Sure you can get more using a mechanical disc. The point is however that storage is not a problem. Unlike when you need to do it with 300 bit/s onto flimsy tapes that requires technical skills to get it right and that being demanded by non-adults without any help.
        The real point is that equipment is powerful AND cheap. So there's not real excuse to be clueless on technology.

        That people know less than there is to know is just a consequence of the innovation being faster than any individual. But absolute knowledge levels could be somewhat better one could have hoped. Instead it seems the better opportunities just exposes human nature even better. Because even I noticed the "duh? eh bzz bzz from the wall?" type of humans in the past. Evolution is obviously slow. They exist now too, it's just that the expression of the same mental capabilities will turn out differently, not better.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 15 2017, @01:55AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 15 2017, @01:55AM (#539430)

        > I like giving exact change when I pay by cash.

        You probably have had akin to this scenario:
        Cashier: "$5.15 please"
        You: "Ok, here's a $10 and a quarter"
        Them: "Oh that's too much, here's your quarter back, my machine says from your 10 you get back $4.85"
        You: "Uh, I kind of want bills back."
        Them: "Um." (closes the till) "Next?"

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday July 14 2017, @08:30AM (6 children)

      by TheRaven (270) on Friday July 14 2017, @08:30AM (#539020) Journal
      They still lack access. The sorts of computers I grew up with dropped you in a programming environment as soon as you turned them on. If you wanted to plug in new hardware, it required understanding a chunk of how the OS worked to be able to configure it. Now, they're given computers that either don't come with any kind of programming environment, or act as if they're ashamed of it and hide it, and where 99% of what they want to do can be expected to just work. It's only when they encounter the 1% that doesn't that they might start digging.
      --
      sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @01:06PM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @01:06PM (#539100)

        Thanks to companies like Apple, it has become fashionable to actively lock users out of programming their own machines; it's not just hidden away in shame, but hidden away in malice.

        • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday July 14 2017, @02:50PM (3 children)

          by isostatic (365) on Friday July 14 2017, @02:50PM (#539127) Journal

          Thanks to companies like Apple, it has become fashionable to actively lock users out of programming their own machines; it's not just hidden away in shame, but hidden away in malice.

          In the days of DOS microsoft issued qbasic, which allowed people to play nibbles or gorrila and have a fiddle with the coding. They stopped that in the 90s.

          OSX comes with perl, python, even ruby, by default. Type 'gcc' and it prompts you to install xcode, not sure if that costs money, but it's certainly not as much of a mountain to climb as with microsoft. OSX is also a gateway drug to a real OS.

          • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday July 14 2017, @03:46PM (1 child)

            by tangomargarine (667) on Friday July 14 2017, @03:46PM (#539164)

            but it's certainly not as much of a mountain to climb as with microsoft.

            Download Visual Studio, blindly click "OK" ten or eleven times, and wait twenty minutes? Way too complicated! I need to be able to just beat my face against the monitor until it figures out what I want!

            If you want specifically perl, python, and ruby, that's rather hyperbolic. It's easy to crank out an arbitrary executable on Windows as long as you use C++/C#/VB/etc.

            --
            "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 isostatic on Friday July 14 2017, @10:48PM

              by isostatic (365) on Friday July 14 2017, @10:48PM (#539379) Journal

              I haven't "downloaded" software for wepla decade - that's what apt is for. In the 90s programming certainly wasn't free in Microsoft - you had to pay big bucks for a compiler. I suspect that Vs was made free (if indeed it is) after apple released OS X and what appears to be a one click Xcode installer.

              Having a set of useful easy to program tools to make the novice realise that "automating this computer is actually quite easy" is native in both Linux and OS X. It's Microsoft who consider "developers" to be a different "class" of people form users, have done for years.

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jrmcferren on Friday July 14 2017, @07:12PM

            by jrmcferren (5500) on Friday July 14 2017, @07:12PM (#539275) Homepage

            Xcode is free and can be downloaded from the app store and has support for many programming languages. While the old fashioned BASIC the old time machines started up with isn't included there are a few ways to get BASIC on the Mac..

            For those interested in BASIC:

            Chipmunk BASIC is an interpreter, it is available on multiple platforms. I don't think it is open source. On Mac (and possibly windows as well) you receive two executables, one is for the terminal and the other is for the GUI. The terminal app goes into a folder in the path that you can write to, the GUI file goes into the Applications folder, and I haven't figured out how to handle the manual since I can't write to the manual folder even using sudo, but the idea is you copy that file to the appropriate point and you have the manual as well. Chipmunk BASIC is like the BASIC the old time machines booted with. It does require line numbers unless you use an external editor. It also has some platform specific capabilities, most notably on Mac is Text to Speech and Text to (audible) Morse.

            QB64 requires XCode as if I understand correctly it may be compiled from source on the Mac. QB64 is a Microsoft QuickBasic Clone and is designed to create executables on modern 64 bit systems.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday July 14 2017, @05:35PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Friday July 14 2017, @05:35PM (#539222) Journal

        You have a point. But it also seem many people just lack the curiosity. Even young ones.
        (which some studies have linked to depression and stress)

        It's like assembler on machines with BASIC. You had to do something actively to get there. And assembler would do just about anything to put you off even if you got there.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 14 2017, @05:59AM (3 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday July 14 2017, @05:59AM (#538981) Journal

    back on 9/9/01

    Which of the two nines is the month? ;-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @07:03AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @07:03AM (#539001)

      Which one of the 1s is the year?

    • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday July 14 2017, @10:00PM (1 child)

      by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday July 14 2017, @10:00PM (#539365)

      Mostly, it depends on where you are. Or, in this case, were. And, by "you," I don't mean you, but rather isostatic, unless you were together at the time, in which case I mean y'all.

      I hope that clears it up.

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 15 2017, @01:51AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 15 2017, @01:51AM (#539429)

        +1 to UID#5842 for very rare correct use of "y'all" instead of "one"