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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.)"
One of the headlines on the news.com.com home page is "Lost? Hiding? Your sell phone is keeping tabs."
If CNet doesn't even correct glaring spelling errors, how can anyone expect anything reliable from it?
Get off my launchpad!
A one line +5, and you included two of the most common grammer/spelling errors: effects instead of affects, and your instead of you're. Well done!
And you managed to spell "grammar" incorrectly...
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
leave bits and bytes to assembly kernel/driver programming and to compiler programmers. Normal application programmer should work with symbols.
So would an entire game graphics engine be considered a "driver" under your taxonomy?
Besides, with 10GHz 8xCPU 64GB-RAM typical home computers who cares
Multimedia apps will still need every cycle they can get to make a more immersive projection of reality onto a display, no? Radiosity lighting and Monte Carlo raytracing still cost cycles.
Ok lets get my I'm not astroturfing disclaimer out of the way. I'm typing this on a 700mhz iBook running Panther. MMy browser is FireBird. IE:Mac is not installed on my system. My spreadsheet of choice is gnumeric and I use Open Office for my word processing needs on Linux systems at home and Apple Works on my Mac. Now, minus the EULA of Excel and the platform it runs on, WTF is you major problem with it. While those are serious issues, there are a host of applications that have these same issues, and you appear to be singling out Excel people especially. I'd have to say that Excel is number 2 on the list of programs I'd like the source code for from MS. Access is number 1. No spreadsheet out their comes close in terms of programable extenibility and database integration. Sure your stuck with using VBA, but VBA lets you call DLLs and you can write those in any language, using free software compilers!!!
Yes free software is important, yes open source is important. Yes doing anything to hurt the boys at redmond is important. However, your troll seems to attack Excel users in particular. Now, if you can explain why Excel users, and not Word or outLook users need to be sterlized, then go right ahead.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
unless you hire ME! CNET said so.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on