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.)"

Comments

OT, but... what do you expect from CNet?

[Artifex]

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?