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Time's Up: 2^30 Seconds Since 1970
An anonymous reader writes: "In Software glitch brings Y2K deja vu, CNET points out a small wave of Y2K-like bugs may soon hit, though it gets the explanation wrong. It will soon be about 2^30 (1 billion, not 2 billion) seconds since 1970 (do the arithmetic). Systems that use only 29 bits of a word for unsigned/positive integers, or store time as seconds since 1970 in this format, may roll back to 1970. (Many systems that do not need full 32 bit integers may reserve some bits for other uses, such as boolean flags, or for type information to distinguish integers from booleans and pointers.)"
This is the biggest computer-related time event since Y2K, which begun on January 1, 19100!
SOCIETY AS WE KNOW IT WILL COLLAPSE!!!! I have to get bottled water and batteries ready! This will be a complete disaster--just like Y2K!
Oops!
My two-bit computer ran out of time the moment it was turned on...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
With some of the fashion's today (bell bottems, et al.)
this has been a problem since 1970. is it news that c-net realizes it?
If 1K = 1024 then Y2K is 2048. We still have a ways to go on that one! :)
...is 2.6 affected by the bug??
The IT section color scheme sucks.
I was born just before 1970.
I'm a billion seconds old.
Holy shit.
How many of you programmers are storing your years using 4 digits? Yeah, that's what I thought, all of you. What happens when it's January 1, 10000? Hmmm? Yes, that's right, your software will fail. It will roll back to 0, which wasn't even a year!
Now, I know what you're thinking. "There's no way someone will be using software I'm writing 8000 years from now." Yeah, and that's what programmers said 30 years ago about the year 2000. Be smart, and play it safe. Use a 5, or better yet, 10 digit year. What's a few bytes?
IIRC, bugger all went wrong. No nuclear weapons randomly fired off in any direction, no computers melted (well, none of mine)
There was no reply, though. His computer probably thought my letter was from a century ago.
So if your still using UnixWare, you may be in trouble.
So that means Linux is affected also, since its mostly copied from Unixware, right?
Its epoch is midnight 01-Jan-1904 and it uses an unsigned 32-bit integer to count seconds since then. That means it will run out at 06:28:15 09-Feb-2040.
:P
But, I'm sure Apple will have released a new Newton by then!
(I don't suppose anyone's ported the Rosetta writing recognition system to other PDA's, just in case?)
I plenty left over from Y2K. For those who did not prepare for Y2K and laughed at all the suckers who stockpiled and hid in bunkers, Ha! I will finally have the last laugh! - going into my bunker now....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Thanks for you're advice, which I will follow from now on.
Can you roll over?
Infuriate left and right
maybe a midlife crisis is just our internal clocks rolling over.
Hmm, it seems that the date that a system's clock overflows is inversely proportional to the date that the system has outlived its usefulness
You expect to have twenty generations of descendents by 2034? Ooh ooh I got it! You're from Alabama, right?
mogorific carpentry experiments
That does NOT count as a sufficient documentation of the above feature!
I shorted A31 to ground with a screwdriver on my Motorola MC68060 board. It blew a pullup resistor on an open collector output driver. Now A31 is always low -- and I'm too lazy to replace the tiny little 100 ohm surface mount. It runs just fine as long as I don't address high memory.
I just want to know: Does that count?
In standard /. fashion, I will overlook factual inaccuracies in the interest of pursuing my goal of correcting everyone's grammar. As such, I must tell you that Y2K *began* on January 1, 19100.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
> I think it'd be much nicer if the language could handle Perl-style returning of arrays.
/* waif, indeed! */ /* no jogging allowed */ /* guiness record */ /* doorway limitation */
/* name of girl */ /* diameter of waist */ /* diameter of chest at most interesting offset */ /* measure are the hips, don't get distracted, you naughty tailor */ /* it's good to hold on to! */ /* if they can't see it, they can't suck it */
The guy who posted above you 8 minutes earlier already understood the solution: return a damned pointer!
Why, oh why, is this so hard to understand? Here, I will provide a contrived, stupid example.
#define MIN_CHEST 25
#define MAX_CHEST 55
#define MIN_WAIST 19
#define MAX_WAIST 65
typedef enum { brown, blue, red, blonde, blue, cmax } colour_t;
typedef struct
{
char *name;
size_t waist;
size_t chest;
size_t hips;
colour_t hair;
colour_t eyes;
} girl_t;
typedef struct
{
size_t count;
girl_t *girls;
} girl_array_t;
void mempanic()
{
write(STDOUT_FILENO, "oh oh\n", 6);
_exit(1);
}
girl_t *createAllGirls()
{
girl_array_t *girlArr = calloc(sizeof(*girlArr), 1);
char name[64];
size_t waist, chest, hips;
colour_t hair, eyes;
if (!girlArr)
mempanic();
for (waist = MIN_WAIST; waist girls = realloc(girlArr->girls, sizeof(*(girlArr->girls)) * (girlArr->count + 1));
if (!girlArr->girls)
mempanic();
sprintf(name, "chick #%i", girlArr->count + 1);
girlArr->girls[girlArr->count].waist = waist;
girlArr->girls[girlArr->count].chest = chest;
girlArr->girls[girlArr->count].hips = hips;
girlArr->girls[girlArr->count].eyes = eyes;
girlArr->girls[girlArr->count].hair = hair;
girlArray->count++
}
return girlArray;
}
There. Everything you need. A single return value, a dynamic sized array of structs. And girls.
Of course, I didn't test it. But if you really need girls that bad, let me know and I'll make sure it builds.
Now, this is just some text to avoid the lameness filter. Doo dah. Tobacco use during pregnancy increases the risk of preterm birth. abies born preterm are at an increased risk of infant death, illness and disability. Health Canada.
L'usage du tabac pendant la grossesse accroit le risque d'un accouchement premature. Les bebes prematures font face a des risques plus grands de mort infantile, de maladies et d'incapacites. Sante Canada.
Okay. Maybe I'll de-indent my code. Stupid piece of shit.Meta-control-Q should fix that.. Oh great! Now I need more characters per line. Comments, here I come...
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Um, not to be quarrelsome or anything, but I'm not sure sure you'll find anyone here willing to make that distinction.
Present company execpted, of course. :)
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
I love you. Seriously, and not the "I won't get it in your eye" type of love, this is the real thing.
The Y2K preparedness team at my company went crazy over the hype. They set up a big "Y2K Command Center" (commandeered a big teleconferencing room) with PCs full of nothing but Excel spreadsheets with all the functionality metrics for our whole enterprise painstakingly listed. Every ten minutes, all of us in the trenches were supposed to telephone this "command center" so they could update their spreadsheets (yes, web site "foobar" is still responding, yes, this database still works.)
About 30 minutes before Y2K hit our time zone, I noticed the maintenance guys firing up the big diesel backup generators in our rear parking lot. I asked my boss about it. "Oh yeah," he said, "They're going to take us off the power grid just in case." No big deal to us: we have UPS's on all our PCs, and the power fails over all the time in the always-spectacular Kentucky summer thunderstorm season. (Half of the building's lighting turns off to conserve power, everyone slightly gasps, but keeps working...we're used to it.)
But not so for the "Y2K Command Center." The "suits" had plugged all their spreadsheet-running PCs straight into the wall, and when we changed over to the generators (on their command) the momentary power drop caused *every single one* of their machines to go down....
We laughed in their faces openly. If that's not being hoist by one's own petard I don't know what is. It almost made it worth it not to be kissing my sweetie on New Year's Eve.
Maybe this is what the Orange Alert is about.....