[lug] This Saturday: Unix - one gigasecond since the epoch

[Neal McBurnett]

For more on this world-shattering event, check out:
   http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/07/1819250&mode=nested

or join the Billennium party on IRC at http://openprojects.net/
   http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/09/07/1721209

or wait until the 1 Gis party
 [a gibisecond: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html]:

  $ python -c 'import time; print time.ctime(2**30)' 
  Sat Jan 10 06:37:04 2004

-Neal

On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 01:03:26PM -0600, Neal McBurnett wrote:
> Ahh - the end of the first gigasecond of official Unix kernel
> time is nigh.  This is the time recorded in all your filesystem
> timestamps, etc.
> 
> $ perl -le 'print scalar gmtime 1e9'
> Sun Sep  9 01:46:40 2001	# UTC
> 
> $ perl -le 'print scalar localtime(1E9)'
> Sat Sep  8 19:46:40 2001	# Mountain Daylight Time
> 
> Also:
> $ tcl> clock format 1000000000
> 
> $ echo '0t1000000000=Y' | TZ=UTC adb  # on solaris
> 
> I hope some python fan will step in here....
> 
> A google search for
>    "46:40"  unix epoch
> has more, including speculation that some silly programmers have
> relied on time_t being 9 characters long, resulting in a 1Gs bug
> 
> See also "Critical and Significant Dates":
>     http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/critdate.htm
> 
> But note that this will be celebrated 1,000,000,023 seconds after the
> epoch actually began, because Unix time ignores the 23 leap seconds
> since then....
>       ftp://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/tai-utc.dat
> 
> This should really be celebrated with a party, irc session,
> or something.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>
> http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/      (with GPG/PGP keys)
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