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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 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.

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