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100 Years of Macintosh
Zero seconds on the Mac OS system clock is January 1, 1904. The Mac OS epoch hits 100 years ... now. That's assuming you live in the Pacific time zone, anyway: the Mac OS epoch is unique in that it is time zone-specific. Of course, none of this applies unless you are running Mac OS, and all you Mac users are using Mac OS X, right? (Geek note: the Mac OS epoch is unsigned, which is why it can count over 100 years from 0 seconds, and 32-bit Unix can't, though it can count backward to 1901.)
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Ewwww... I don't think I want to see what a 100 year old Apple looks like.
Life is not for the lazy.
This post doesnt have a real point, and isnt based on an article. It is just stating that today marks 100 years from the point that macs count from. Nothing bad happens from it, it can still cound for another 30ish years (i beleive).
The article confuses epoch and ticks. The epoch is a fixed point in time. Ticks is a number of seconds (or other time unit) since the epoch.
Nya, nya!
Fresnel lens has a small scratch, and vacuum tube port is broken, but otherwise mint. Best offer.
Mac OS epoch is unique in that it is time zone-specific.
It is unique, in the sense that it is crappy.
On Unix, the epoch is an extremely well-defined moment in time, so then is any point in time measured in epoch-seconds is also extremely well-defined.
On the Mac, the epoch-seconds depends on the time zone, meaning that in order for a measurement of time in macos-epoch-seconds to be meaningful, you also need to know the time zone. To me, that kind of ruins the whole point...
1) Who says they model themselves as a hardware company? Companies that do both hardware and the software that runs on it are common in enterprise computing (Sun, IBM, SGI, etc). Would you say these companies have little software experience because they are hardware companies? Apple is much the consumer equivalent of these; they make hardware and software woven very tightly together; the idea behind a Mac is not that you get superior hardware or superior software, but that you get a package. And that in being a cohesive package, it is superior, almost inherently, than a hodgepodge of off-the-shelf components (much like Sun's claim that Solaris is the best OS for Sparc, or SGI and IBM with IRIX and AIX (which are both perhaps on the way out, in favor of custom Linux distros)).
2) Yes, Apple patches are offered as timely as Microsoft (which is to say, perhaps not as timely as they should be). I've seen plenty of reports on Bugtraq of Apple being unresponsive to reported bugs, but then I've seen the same with MS. Presumably, they simply didn't take the issue seriously or deemed it unworthy of addressing for some other reason (which leads us back to just how trustworthy your computing really is, if you can't trust the company that designed it).
3) What ``BSD patching system''? I'm pretty well experienced with administering Open and FreeBSD, and I am totally unaware of some patching system inherent to all BSD-derived OSes (say, Solaris?). Both Open and Free have similar pkg and port systems, but this is more because Open liked the way Free did it, not because they are both BSD's (that is, BSD refers to the underlying OS components--as opposed to, say, GNU--not anything else (certainly not the kernel, which, on OSX, is Mach-, not FreeBSD-based)). I think you are confused.
Since Apple models itself a hardware company, do they offer patches on a similar basis as Microsoft or to they rely more on the BSD patching system?
Closer to Microsoft than anything else. Apple's patches generally come in the form of installer applications that can be downloaded and installed automatically via the bundled "Software Update" application (GUI and command line) or can be downloaded and installed manually from the support section of their website.
Apple does not publish the source of any of their GUI applications or the GUI framework itself. It does however release the source to the rest of the OS under the name "Darwin". Patches and other updates to Mac OS X generally find their way into Darwin and can be browsed at http://developer.apple.com/darwin.
The typical artist/writer/mom-or-dad user can click a couple buttons and have OS X update itself (or even set it to always keep itself updated). More technical users can browse the Darwin website for more details. (This was recently done by several folks wanting to know more about how Panther, Mac OS X 10.3, does its automatic defragmentation and optimizing. They dug around in the Darwin souce until they found that particular part of the HFS+ architecture. Examined the code and made a few posts explaining the process to everyone else).
Note that there's nothing particularly special about hitting 100 years after epoch, being that 100 years is not a technically interesting length of time and the epoch being 1/1/1904 isn't non-technically interesting.
A technically interesting length of time (such as 2^32 seconds) from epoch would be noteworthy, but that's a few decades off.
A non-technically interesting length of time (such as 20 years) from the date the Macintosh was first introduced would also be noteworthy, and that's later this month I believe.
I'm a bit tired; did anyone grok that?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
> Little know fact (or widely known) almost all Macs will reset to January 1, 1969 if the batter is removed.
Removing the batter from most apples will completely ruin the pie. So a reset would seem appropriate.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Ha! Us Windows users don't have this problem. Microsoft won't let us use a Windows OS that old! *SmUG*
"Derp de derp."
Actually it depends on the Mac - there are about 4 or 5 dates they can reset to:
1904, 1956, 1976 , 1984, 2001, depending on the machine.
This was a "Stump the Experts" Question at the 2003 world wide develoepr conference.
"I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer."
Okay, the whole 'Mac users are gay' troll is very stale now. Here's something a little fresher:
"I heard that OSX is based on eunichs!"
(man I hope the mod dudes are in good humor today.)
I seem to remember being amazed at just how many damn dates there were... and being even more amazed that people knew them...
nothing compared to that guy who came up with the internationalisation bug/easter egg that took three minutes just to describe....
I thought WWDC was full of nerds, but then Stump the Experts was like concentrated nerd juice...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Some Macintosh models have clocks that reset to August 27, 1956 (and to a time other than midnight, I believe). This is the birthdate (and time) of Ray Montagne, the Apple engineer and programmer who designed the chip that controlled the PRAM on those models.
As for January 1, 1904, this date was selected because the original Mac's clock (which counts in seconds) can encompass a period of about 136 years. Selecting 1904 as the start date means that the 136-year period covered by the clock (1904-2040) includes the birthdate of nearly every Mac user, and extends well past the expected lifetime of the Mac OS. It also means that the simplest rule for leap-years can be used (every fourth year has an extra day), which simplifies day and date calculations. They didn't choose the year 1900 because it was not a leap year.
~Philly
I agree all those epochs are too random, including the birthday of Jesus Christ. IMHO the only meaningful and universal epoch is a time of the Big Bang. All time should be count from that.
Less is more !
The Macintosh traditionally measured time for most purposes in seconds since Midnight, January 1st, 1904. The call to get this value is GetDateTime() which takes a pointer to a unsigned long and returns the number of seconds by assigning the value to the argument.
Unlike what the article says, GetDateTime() is still available under the Carbon framework in MacOS X. However, there are now other ways of dealing with date/time in the MacOS. Ironically the preferred method, CFDate is also available under MacOS 9. So, I don't really get the point of the write up saying that this works only in MacOS 9.
Frankly this is of little interest to anyone who is not a Macintosh programmer - and only mild interest to those of us who are Macintosh programmers.
It is interesting to note that the Apple Newton also measures time from this reference point. However, it measures minutes since 1904 instead of seconds in dealing with its default date handling routines. On the Newton they had no real reason for picking that reference date other than that the Mac already used it.
On the original Mac, they did have a good reason for picking it. Apparently 1904 is the first leap year in the 20th century and it simplified the algorithm for factoring in leap years by starting at that point. Since they were trying shoe horn a graphical OS onto a 128Kb machine with no HD (but they did have some ROMs), you can't really fault them for taking a few shortcuts.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Actually, in just three weeks there will be a real anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh - January 24th, 1984.
Related comic
:)
"So too, opinion seems to be that security holes are entirely the fault of the attacker, never of the software designers. ... The point is, if software companies were liable for any serious defects, they might try harder. And if they were liable for ignoring those defects, I betcha they'd be able to find someone to get to work on it... We, the public simply need to weigh in with some careful legislation to balance those priorities with stability, reliability, and maturity. "
I'm sorry, but I simply don't agree with this point of view. Your heart is in the right place, but this is not the answer.
First, the hacker *is* guilty. Software is designed for a specific purpose (even general purpose software) and because of that, the creator of that software cannot and should not be held liable for that. Problem #1 is that software is written by humans, who are, by nature, error prone. Problem #2 is that finding defects and using them maliciously requires creativity. Because of this, there's no practical way for a software company to know that their software is 'liability free'. Problem #3 is that there are far too many products out on the marketplace today that can be misused in such a way that a simple modification would prevent that sort of behaviour from happening. Why single out software? Problem #4 is that in cyberspace, monetary damage is very difficult to measure. Problem #5 is that the environments that the software is run on are far too diverse to guarantee any sort of working order. As such, anybody 'relying' on a computer system would be incredibly ignorant without ways of minimizing damage due to loss of functionality or data. (I should pause here a sec to let you know that I'm quite fatigued, and I apologize if what I'm posting is difficult to read.)
Secondly, unloading legislation that says you are liable for an attack that somebody else carries simply because you didn't cover all your bases is going to do more harm than good. The Open Source Community will be hit the hardest. Who would want to contribute spare time to a project only to open the door for being sued because somebody decides to be a git? I mentioned in an earlier point that there's no real scientific way to certify the 'safety' of software. The only real way to approach that would be heavy testing on a very diverse range of platforms and configurations. I can see Microsoft with their 25+ billion in the bank doing this, I can't see a startup company doing that. Nor can I see that startup company surviving their first lawsuit over this. The only way to minimize this negative effect on the industry would be to tightly define very specific rules about very specific exploits, such as the one you mentioned with Apple. Well, what good is this legislation going to have if it only covers a limited scope? Okay, I'm drifting a bit here. Sorry. I just don't see this doing anything but making software development less accessible, and making megacorps like Microsoft stronger. Software could become 'less exploitable', but the cost of that is growth. Even then, defects will not disappear. BS like the Blaster Worm will still happen, it just might take a little longer.
Third, how does one even begin to define effective legislation here? In order to prevent a defect from being exploitable, one has to know every single way that defect can be used. I remember back in the Windows 95 days, you could rename your Windows folder. Doing so meant instantly breaking your system. A shortcut or batch file could be made to do this. If somebody sends out an email tricking people into running a shortcut to do this, how do you define Microsoft's guilt due to damage done? The rename feature works perfectly. Using it to rename your Windows folder is like cruising down the highway at 70mph and shifting into reverse. Sure, the car could be made to prevent that, but why would somebody do that in the first place? Should Honda be partly responsible because of deaths caused by somebody saying "
"Derp de derp."
There are huge similarities between the original PalmOS design and the original Mac OS design. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that some of the same people were involved, or else the Palm OS team were big Mac fans.
Clear, Dark Skies