This was on ctlug a while ago and i should have forwarded then, but its not too too
late.
Jeff
----- Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----
Subject: Billionth Second Bash
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 16:07:27 -0500
Elza brought this to my attention...
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http://geekaustin.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/11/229215
A Billion seconds of UNIX and a GeekAustin party!
posted by LinearB on Saturday August 11, @04:44PM
So, the billionth second of the Unix epoch is coming up in a couple of
weeks. What's that, you ask?
Unix, internally, keeps track of time as a really big integer number representing the
number of seconds since 12am on Jan. 1, 1970. Why? Well, Unix was being born around
then. And, why not? Makes about as much sense as basing a year system around the birth
of a random, long dead jewish carpenter...
So, when is the billionth second since midnight about thirty one years ago?
It's Sat Sep 8 20:46:40 2001. And GeekAustin is throwing it's first party.
GeekAustin Billionth Second Bash
Sat Sep 8, 6:00 at
Opal Divine's Freehouse
700 West 6th St.
Austin, Texas 78701
There will be free food, courtesy of LinearB and co., if you get there early
enough. haha. (Don't come late like you did to Prodigy's Job Fair.) We don't
want your money. We don't want your resume. We just want you to come drink
with us...in a refreshing recruiter-free environment.
Read more for the technical analysis, courtesy of Orion:
So how do you see the Billionth Unix Second for yourself? Perl to the rescue. The
"localtime()" function takes a time in unix epoch format (a big integer) and prints
out the time that number represents in your current locality.
Here's a perl one-liner to pretty print this:
orion@entropy:~$ perl -e "print localtime(1000000000) . \"\n\"" Sat Sep 8 20:46:40
2001
Interesting side effect of this is that Unix will have a Y2Kish number problem when
unix epoch time is X + 1 where X is the max size of a (signed, because unix deals with
negative epoch too for times < 1970) integer of a given "bitness". So the max value of
a 32bit integer that is signed is, IIRC, 2147483647. What time does this correspond
to? Again, perl to the rescue.
orion@entropy:~$ perl -e "print localtime(2147483647) . \"\n\"" Mon Jan 18 21:14:07
2038
So if we're still using 32bit unix in 37 years we'll have a problem (macs, btw,
operate the same way; maybe 'cuz jobs ran a unix company for a while?).
But what about 64bit unix? Ok, so I'm not going to repeat the calculations,
but the 'failure day' for that is over half a trillion years from now (consider that
2^33 is twice as big as 2^32, now think about 2^64)
All technical or math errors are solely my fault, not Linear's. :-)
SO, now that we've established that there is a big round number coming up soon, let's
PAR-TAAAAAAAAAY!!! (hey, this rationale worked for the year
2000)
See you there!
********************************************************
This is not an official Geek Singles Event, but it seems like a cool thing to
celebrate. Join us!
Dawn Janacek
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