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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: 3, Informative) by gidds on Friday July 14 2017, @12:39PM (1 child)
That's the point. Except that it wasn't just ‘fortunately’…
If all the systems (everything from major mainframe systems down to tiny embedded ones) that were running around 1995 had continued to run unchanged, then there would probably have been widespread disruption: aircraft falling out of the sky, salaries not paid (or paid wrongly), alarms going off for no reason, lifts jamming (or dropping), and tons more. So it's a good thing that a lot of fuss was made: it woke companies up to the dangers, and forced them to expend time and effort checking and fixing things.
Of course, because a lot of fuss was made, most of them got fixed, and so when the time came, there was (thankfully) almost no disruption). So the general public saw it as a damp squib, and thought all the fuss was unnecessary. Which is a shame — but far better than the alternative of making no fuss and suffering terrible consequences!
(I was slightly involved in this, as I'd done some work on mainframe systems around 1994; I got called up a couple of years later and quizzed about the risks. I was able to tell them that yes, I'd used 4-digit years, because I had this amazing ability to foresee the 6 years into the future… Unlike, apparently, many of my colleagues!)
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday July 14 2017, @03:23PM
Well, some people thought about the issues much earlier. [york.ac.uk] :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.