There's a nice countdown here: https://epochconverter.com/countdown
Or keep it local:
(TZ=GMT0; t=1600000000; while :; do s=$(date +%s); echo $(expr "$s" - "$t") $(date -Iseconds -d @"$s") $(date -Iseconds -d @"$t"); sleep 1; done)
The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
121–130 of 214 posts
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#122I make a bold prediction that we'll run out of digits rather soon.
2037 is a potential overflow, I believe. I imagine only pre 2000 systems would likely be affected.
That is just when signed 32 bits rolls over. Unsigned takes us all the way to 2106.
Nervous nellies worried about rollover, and insisting we switch to 64-bit timestamps everywhere, are a nuisance. You can keep one 64-bit epoch, such as boot time or most recent foreign attack on NYC, and as many 32-bit offsets from that as you like, and always be able to get a 64-bit time whenever you need it. Most often you only need a difference, so one epoch is as good as any, and you can work purely in 32 bits.
Pcap format is good until 2106 assuming the 1970 epoch. A bit of one of the now-unused header fields could be repurposed to indicate another.
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#123When 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.
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.
How? And what would be the place/value measured against? And would all "timekeepers" need to get signals from that place to get their offset? If so would we need to take lensing from gravitation into account?
How do you even measure a global value when the local perspective by definition changes the value?
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#124The 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.
Also crazy to think of, is:
If you have a billion (i.e., 1E9) dollars, or any other currency, and you spend $86,400 dollars a day, it will take you more than 31 years and 8 months to spend the entire billion.
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#125I have a twitter bot called time_t_emit that tweets palindromic seconds since the epoch. (somewhat inspired by the now defunct @megasecond)
https://twitter.com/time_t_emit
It's going to tweet twice tomorrow at lunch time (in my time zone) either side of the rollover.
I fondly remember the gigasecond party I went to with a load of friends - it happened in the small hours on Sunday morning, ideal party time for a bunch of geeks in their 20s, like an extra new year's eve!
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
2037 is a potential overflow, I believe. I imagine only pre 2000 systems would likely be affected.
There may be a lot of embedded systems affected though! Most embedded C uses 32 bit integers, especially for the Real Time Clock peripherals!
But what self-respecting embedded-system coder would use a signed 32-bit value?
Various libc choices in use probably have time_t signed.
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"A Deepness..." also used SI multiples of seconds to denote something approximating 24 hours, a week, a month etc.
A megasecond is a useful quantity: it's a bit less than 12 days. I mentally approximate it to a fortnight, partly because of the VMS bootloader which used microfortnights as an approximation for seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...
Another handy time_t approximation is that a year is about 2^25 seconds, or 32 megaseconds.
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#128When 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.
He should have said what that difference is.
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#129I 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 "while(sleep 1); do date" loop, There's always "xclock -d -update 1 -strftime %s -face Inconsolata-190:bold "
Upvoting for Inconsolata.
Re: The Unix timestamp will begin with 16 this Sunday
#130I 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…
(guenine curiosity) Why do you wait for these events ? Myself I consider these to be complete non-events.
it's like any holyday, it's a rendezvous for the community that recognizes it. it strengthens the social bonds