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The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

unixtimestamp.com

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Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#51

Post by iso1210 »

city41 wrote: post #28
browserface wrote: post #18

The crazy thing is there has only been 1.6 billion seconds since 1970. There have been more babies since 1970 than there have been seconds. Which is crazy. Back then, Earth's population was on 3.7 billion. Now it's 7.8 billion. That means that (ignoring deaths) 2.5 babies have been born for each unix second. Or roughly 1 baby every 400 milliseconds.

I don't think that's too crazy. Seconds are serial, babies are parallel :)

Yet while one woman can generate 1 baby in 9 months, 9 women can't do it in 1 month

Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#53

Post by beagle3 »

iso1210 wrote: post #49
BoppreH wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very good reason to eventually abandon it: leap seconds. Unix time goes back one second whenever there is a leap second on Earth. It's extremely weird and IMHO completely ruins the purpose of a timestamp, but it's a compromise for backwards compatibility, since Unix time was created before leap seconds. This hack ensures that the number of seconds in a day remains fixed, an assumption of many systems at th…

Why would someone on Mars, or an asteroid, or orbiting venus, care about leap seconds on earth? Number of seconds since a given time seems fine until we're travelling significantly outside of a common reference plane.

That’s exactly why op said we should abandon Unix time. The “who cares about leap seconds” standards is called TAI, and the difference between TAI and Unix time changes every time a leap second is introduced.

Unix time decrees every day has exactly 86400 seconds. But the introduction of leap seconds means that While most days have 86400, some earth days have 86401 seconds and potentially there could also be days with 86399

TAI makes sense everywhere, Unix time only on earth.

Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#54

Post by moralestapia »

fred256 wrote: post #41

I hope you are running an up-to-date Splunk version: Beginning on September 13, 2020 at 12:26:39 PM Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), un-patched Splunk platform instances will be unable to recognize timestamps from events with dates that are based on Unix time, due to incorrect parsing of timestamp data. https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/ReleaseN...

I'm always left wondering how something like this could happen. I kind of get Y2K and stuff like overflows ... but this one? Really? Did someone put a regex like /^15... to "match" dates?

Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#55

Post by divbzero »

shantara wrote: post #44
jezze wrote: post #37

When we one day become a space faring civilization we will probably stop using the gregorian calendar because why would you use that on say Mars? But there really is no reason to get rid of the unix timestamp as a measure of time and this measure may stay around for a long time. This may mean that people in the future might consider 1970 as year zero where modern civilization began.

In "Deepness in the Sky" a spaceship's computer is still running on Unix time many thousands years into the future. It is generally believed that the calendar starts with the first Moon landing, and only the main character as a "programmer-archeologist" discovers a small difference between it and true Unix time 0.

Little is known about “Unix” but it is believed he or she was a charismatic spiritual leader who brought hope, healing, and comfort to countless humans on Earth and inspired numerous disciples including “BSD”, “Linux”, and “System V”.

Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#56

Post by BoppreH »

iso1210 wrote: post #49
BoppreH wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very good reason to eventually abandon it: leap seconds. Unix time goes back one second whenever there is a leap second on Earth. It's extremely weird and IMHO completely ruins the purpose of a timestamp, but it's a compromise for backwards compatibility, since Unix time was created before leap seconds. This hack ensures that the number of seconds in a day remains fixed, an assumption of many systems at th…

Why would someone on Mars, or an asteroid, or orbiting venus, care about leap seconds on earth? Number of seconds since a given time seems fine until we're travelling significantly outside of a common reference plane.

Because that's not how Unix time is defined. The leap second hack is hardcoded into it:

Unix time is [...] the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Unix epoch, minus leap seconds.

- Wikipedia

If you are on Mars you'll have to update your computer time every ~6 months when Earth release a new table of leap seconds caused by e.g. earthquakes.

Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#57

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

jezze wrote: post #37

When we one day become a space faring civilization we will probably stop using the gregorian calendar because why would you use that on say Mars? But there really is no reason to get rid of the unix timestamp as a measure of time and this measure may stay around for a long time. This may mean that people in the future might consider 1970 as year zero where modern civilization began.

With Earth's day length becoming irrelevant, the 24 hour clock becomes irrelevant too, and the length of the sleep cycle may shift.

We could eventually arrive at stardates with one starday being 100000 seconds. Of course, that would be just as arbitrary as simply keeping the 24 hours of 60 minutes each.

Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#58

Post by komali2 »

remram wrote: post #47
NGC404 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next iteration of unix-time should include the concept of local time in context of relativty if we are going to travel or communicate over significant distances.

You mean that from a remote place or fast-moving ship, the time on Earth would appear to go at a different speed? So local time would not just have a constant offset?

Yea, but if we're going to use a "number of seconds since ..." Type system like Unix time, SOMEONE has to be the origin point, so I don't think this is a knock against Unix time.

Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#59

Post by iso1210 »

I remember staying up late (UK) at the Billenium (2:46 AM Sunday Sep 9th 2001), thinking that was bound to be the most newsworthy event of the week, watching the seconds tick past on a "while(sleep 1); do date" loop, with slashdot in one window, IRC in another, all running on an enlightenment window manager.

500M seconds later I was in Washington DC in a hotel, watching it tick up on an rxvt on my laptop, with HN in a window.

Who knows where I'll be in 2033, hopefully not in Europe as I'll be too old for night shifts, but wherever I am, I suspect it will have a bash prompt.

Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday

#60

Post by m-p-3 »

BoppreH wrote: post #46
jezze wrote: post #37

When we one day become a space faring civilization we will probably stop using the gregorian calendar because why would you use that on say Mars? But there really is no reason to get rid of the unix timestamp as a measure of time and this measure may stay around for a long time. This may mean that people in the future might consider 1970 as year zero where modern civilization began.

There is a very good reason to eventually abandon it: leap seconds. Unix time goes back one second whenever there is a leap second on Earth. It's extremely weird and IMHO completely ruins the purpose of a timestamp, but it's a compromise for backwards compatibility, since Unix time was created before leap seconds. This hack ensures that the number of seconds in a day remains fixed, an assumption of many systems at th…

Or lets say we colonize a planet with a significant time dilation (ie near a supermassive blackhole), how do you deal with this? Who has the canonical time?
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