
Unix Time = 1234567890 On Valentine’s Day - peter123
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2009/02/unix-time-1234567890-on-valentines-day.html
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ewiethoff
The thought of unusual Unix times brings back memories... or nightmares...

For several years, the company I had been working for used a multi-platform
GUI library called C++/Views. We had the code for the library itself and
compiled it as needed for the various platforms we needed to support. It came
with a handy, yet annoyingly buggy, WYSIWYG GUI-creator tool.

Wouldn't you know, the WYSIWYG tool stopped working in September 2001.
C++/Views was no longer supported, and we didn't have source code for the
WYSIWYG tool. A guy Brian and I experimented around with it awhile and
discovered we could use the tool only if we set the system clock back before
September 8, 2001. So, that became every developer's workaround: _temporarily
setting the clock back_ to use the darn tool.

Nasty billennium (1,000,000,000) bug. Fun, fun.

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reconbot
Do it more than twice and it should be a script.

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furyg3
At least lonely, dateless geeks will also have some reason to celebrate...

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thorax
They can say they had a cool date on Valentine's day.

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riklomas
If you're in the US or UK, then it's on Friday the 13th...

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jacquesm
Good thing we use the decimal system or we would have never noticed this. Wake
me up when it rolls over the 2^31 limit, that should be an interesting day.
Much more interesting than y2k.

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Xichekolas
Well since that is in the year 2038, there isn't exactly a rush to fix it (I'd
be surprised if 32-bit software/hardware is still in use by then). Something
tells me it won't be an issue.

Thankfully a 64bit integer clock gets us past the year 292 billion.

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sgk284
That's the same reasoning everyone used for y2k. There was no way that the
same software and hardware being used in 1980 would still be used in 2000...
and then it was.

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Xichekolas
But the difference is we have (hopefully) learned from our y2k experience.

Also commodity hardware/software is much more common nowdays than before 2000.
Back then you were reluctant to get rid of something you paid millions for
because it was custom hardware running a custom OS with custom Cobol on it.

Nowdays you have commodity hardware running continuously updated OSes with
custom Java on it. Thankfully Sun can update the JVM and MySQL and hopefully
your date problems are solved.

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tlb
If we'd truly learned something, all time values would be 64 bits. Which isn't
hard: every major 32 bit systems supports 64 bit values natively in C and in
only a few instructions.

Or do you mean we learned that planes won't fall out of the sky due to date
problems, and we shouldn't overreact next time?

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hernan7
One way to see the current Unix time:

perl -e 'print time() . "\n";'

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mati
$ date +%s

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blasdel
$ date -d @1234567890 # to convert from epoch seconds

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stuntgoat
I think I am starting to believe in Numerology. I don't know what this means
yet, but I will get to the bottom of this one day ( hopefully before
9999999999 ).

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lunchbox
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy>

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CalmQuiet
@furyg3 & riklomas: Real lover-geeks go by CET to be in sync with hot southern
European ladies: resolving both those problems.

