Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @03:18AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 14 2017, @03:18AM (#538955)

    I experienced Y2K. On a cheapie PC with a Cyrix processor (that was supposed to be equivalent to a 486), the CMOS clock would change from 2000 to 1980 after rebooting.

    Some software broke on September 9, 2001 because that was 1,000,000,000 seconds since the beginning of the UNIX epoch. I didn't experience the breakage myself.

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 14 2017, @06:16AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday July 14 2017, @06:16AM (#538988) Journal

    The most stupid Y2K bug was programs that wouldn't recognize the year 2000 as leap year, in devices that would never have to deal with the past (the case I experienced it in was a VCR). The irony is that if they had just gone with the simple divisible-by-4 rule, the first failure would have been in 2100, that is 100 years later.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.