Unixtime turning 1111111111!

[Richard M]

"Break out your party hats. According to http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm , Unix time is supposed reach 1111111111 on Fri, 18 Mar 2005 01:58:31 GMT That's only 1036372537 seconds from 2^31 (ie Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:08 GMT)!!"

http://slashdot.org/articles/05/03/1....shtml?tid=130

You can watch this happen by making a simple PHP page with the following contents:

PHP Code:

<?php echo time(); ?>

Here you go

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/time.php

[Raistlin]

Ok, I'm not going to pretend that I understand any of this.....

Originally Posted by Raistlin

Ok, I'm not going to pretend that I understand any of this.....

It's really quite simple - unix stores the time as the number of seconds since 00:00 on Jan 1st 1970. This is now approaching 1,111,111,111 seconds.

[Raistlin]

O, IC..... Cool

[Graham M]

geeky but cool

[Gareth]

Heh, neat

Talking of Unix time, Tuesday, January 19th 2038 is gonna be the end of the world.

Originally Posted by http://www.deepsky.com/~merovech/2038.html

What is the year 2038 bug?

In the first month of the year 2038 C.E. many computers will encounter a date-related bug in their operating systems and/or in the applications they run. This can result in incorrect and wildly inaccurate dates being reported by the operating system and/or applications. The effect of this bug is hard to predict, because many applications are not prepared for the resulting "skip" in reported time - anywhere from 1901 to a "broken record" repeat of the reported time at the second the bug occurs. Also, leap seconds may make some small adjustment to the actual time the bug expresses itself. I expect this bug to cause serious problems on many platforms, especially Unix and Unix-like platforms, because these systems will "run out of time". Starting at GMT 03:14:07, Tuesday, January 19, 2038, I fully expect to see lots of systems around the world breaking magnificently: satellites falling out of orbit, massive power outages (like the 2003 North American blackout), hospital life support system failures, phone system interruptions (including 911 emergency services), banking errors, etc. One second after this critical second, many of these systems will have wildly inaccurate date settings, producing all kinds of unpredictable consequences. In short, many of the dire predictions for the year 2000 are much more likely to actually occur in the year 2038! Consider the year 2000 just a dry run. In case you think we can sit on this issue for another 30 years before addressing it, consider that reports of temporal echoes of the 2038 problem are already starting to appear in future date calculations for mortgages and vital statistics!

[punky]

Oh, and how linux users laughed at the windows Y2K bug.

if time is stored as a 32bit variable, can't they re-define the the time as a long (64-bit data type) and re-compile? or wrap it in a a custom 128-bit integer data type?

[Richard M]

It's important to note that 64 Bit systems are not affected by this, only 32 Bit and under and by 203x we'll all be using 512 Bit systems anyway.

[Gareth]

Yeah, that's true but I like seeing people's faces when they realise that we'll be going through another Y2K scare

[zovat]

Originally Posted by Gareth

Yeah, that's true but I like seeing people's faces when they realise that we'll be going through another Y2K scare

The best bit is that windows is going to be the most affected OS (again)...

Most verisions of Unix already Support 64 bit architectures - Solaris, HP(s)UX, TRU64, AIX etc.
Most versions of linux already have the facility as well....

The biggest problem is the chips - no good trying to run a 64 bit OS on a 32 bit chip....

AMD - have a good, working 64bit chip.
SUN - have a good, working 64 bit chip.
INTEL - have Itanium

so windows on Intel is likely to be the worst affected....

That said, the chances of any of us still maintaining mission critical systems on 32 bit architecture in 33 years is pretty slim.
Most likely we will be running 1024+ bit architectures, and this issue will not even be mentioned. (and personally I expect to be retired and to not give a damn )

I will just be pleased if I'm still around to see if anyone cares - since I will not long have celebrated my 75th birthday at that point.