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