On Nov 18, 2007 5:38 PM, Brinkley Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Stewart Stremler wrote:
> > begin quoting Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade as of Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 09:29:28AM
> > -0800:
> > [snip]
> >
> >> In my experience, the only real-world benefit for the general use case
> >> of most desktop systems is that running 64-bit lets you use more than
> >> 3GB of RAM.
> >>
> >
> > The UNIX 2038 bug.
> >
> >
> That's not a bug -- it's a design feature of the original Unix system
> architecture where the binary time count is in a 32-bit integer and
> referenced to an epochal point causing it to roll over in 2038. If you
> did not change the base type to 64-bit, even recompiling all of the
> library and applications on a 64-bit machine will not correct the problem.
By the way, if you go back to really old PDP-11 Unix, time was kept in
1/60 sec ticks, not in seconds. So 31-bit time overflowed in 414 days
rather than in 68 years. Fixed early on.
carl
--
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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