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February 13th, UNIX Time Will Reach 1234567890
mikesd81 writes "Over at Linux Magazine Online, Jon maddog Hall writes that on Friday the 13th, 2009 at 11:31:30pm UTC UNIX time will reach 1,234,567,890. This will be Friday, February 13th at 1831 and 30 seconds EST. Matias Palomec has a perl script you an use to see what time that will be for you:
perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";' Now, while this is not the UNIX epoch, Alan Cox does assure us that Linux is now working on 64-bit time, and the UNIX epoch 'roll-over' would happen about the time that the sun burnt out."
Perl, because `watch date +"%s"` is too easy?
So the time is 123456789? That's the stupidest time I've ever heard in my life... It sounds like something an idiot would have on his luggage.
Indeed, it would be hard to find a more stupid era than Nov 1973. It was the height of the Watergate scandal, a time of inflation, energy crisis, bad haircuts, ugly suits, and the quality of pop music spiraling downward. Truly a nadir in modern history.
That is a reasonable, well thought out idea with overall little recourse.
It will never happen.
Yes, it's a slow news day and that's why this is on the front page! It's Sunday afternoon (for most of us), ferchrissakes.
So just enjoy it, it's geeky and novel. I don't think anybody meant for it to be considered a big deal, and if you don't find any fleeting moment of joy from it, just move along.
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Raw unix time is simply a count of seconds since a defined point in time - and has nothing to do with leap seconds. Leap seconds only come into play when converting to human readable display format (along with timezones and DST). Leap seconds have been handled for some time by the zoneinfo library used by most unix and linux distros. Even Java handles leap seconds with my port of zoneinfo to a Java TimeZone implementation.
The tzdata package included in most Linux distros includes leapsecond data in the "right" directory. You can find out the time including leapseconds by setting your TZ environment variable to "right/...". For instance:
$ TZ="right/US/Eastern" date; TZ="US/Eastern" date
Sun Feb 8 17:52:42 EST 2009
Sun Feb 8 17:53:06 EST 2009
The resolution is not the problem. Due to the fact that we are measuring nature, small changes do happen. This is the reason that leap seconds aren't scheduled decades in advance.
See here.
I'd like the metric system to take over our measurement of time, but, disregarding other problems, it won't solve the leap second issue all by itself.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
But here it won't happen until Saturday.
"Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 2009 CET"
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.