Posted on 02/13/2009 6:37:49 AM PST by ShadowAce
OK, geeks and geekesses!! The Unix Time is counting down to a cool epoch moment. On Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 23:31:30 UTC (That's 5:31:30 PM CST for you non-geeks out there), the internal clocks of all Unix and Unix-type machines (ie Linux and Mac OSX), will reach 1234567890.
While this is cool, it doesn't really mean as much as January of 2038 when 32-bit systems will overflow, causing an issue similar to Y2K. Luckily, computers are starting to migrate towards 64-bit OSes, and the 64-bit time clock won't overflow for hundreds of billions of years, so we're safe.
For those of you who would like to watch the countdown, perhaps party while it approaches, or jest generally be geeks at work, you can watch it here.
Have fun!!
See ... I knew I was probably missing something. So a countdown is actually a countup? My knowledge of Unix is limited to a website I had ten years ago and my host utilized Unix, so I bought a manual for a couple of issues that I don’t even remember. [sigh] I’ll leave now so that the people who understand these things can have a serious discussion.
That is pretty cool. Okay -- I'm gone now!
That’s it, just a curiosity in the same way that midnight, December 31, 2000 was a curiosity (or 1999 if you didn’t know how millennia are counted).
They also partied at 1000000000 back in 2001 and 1111111111 in 2005.
Serious discussion? This ain't serious, just a little fun for a Friday the 13th. :)
That is the same link I have linked in the original post. :)
I got a reaction at my work, and from techies, “What, UNIX time is going to roll over? What will that affect?”
Dude computers think base 2, not base 10. No, no rollover. 1234567890 means absolutely nothing. Talk to me in 2038 when it hits 2,147,483,647. That’s the maximum positive value for a signed 32-bit integer, so it’s the 32-bit UNIX date rollover. After that the time will be -2,147,483,648, which will get interpreted as December 1901.
I saw that, too late, of course. I did a find on the URL then made my post. Of course my old eyes did not see your link in my haste. Sorry to clutter the thread. :-)
Good, I should have left this position by then, though the vendor may still hope to have the same equipment still running then.
No problem--just givin' ya a hard time. :)
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