Time's Up: 2^30 Seconds Since 1970

Posted by michael on Sunday December 21, 2003 @11:59AM from the bzzzzzt dept.

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.)"

2 of 675 comments (clear)

Re:Seriously, why can't we fix this damn thing now by Eric+Smith · 2003-12-21 13:08 · Score: 0, Troll

I know that "long long" is common, but it's not part of the official C++ standard yet.

Who cares about C++? Blech!
"long long" is in the C standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E)), but it's much better to use int64_t or uint64_t, which are also defined in the standard ().
Re:Some systems... by Tony+Hoyle · 2003-12-21 22:20 · Score: 1, Troll

WTF? Informative?

Funny, maybe...

Gotta get me some of that crack that the mods are smoking...