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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: 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
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  • (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?"