Date: Sat, 25 Sep 1999 22:47:26 +0100 From: Ben Smithurst <ben@scientia.demon.co.uk> To: Arash Farahmand <afarah@mictlan.sfsu.edu> Cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, "Jon O." <netcmd@networkcommand.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Time and history Message-ID: <19990925224726.B1470@lithium.scientia.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95.990925081211.9390B-100000@xolotl.sfsu.edu> References: <19990925173053.F54407@freebie.lemis.com> <Pine.SOL.3.95.990925081211.9390B-100000@xolotl.sfsu.edu>
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Arash Farahmand wrote: > Unix time counter will reset sometime in the year 2037 (again, please > correct me if this is wrong). Although this is relatively far in the > future, People in 1963 were probably saying that about the year 2000, and look at the mess people have got into now. > is there any plan to modify the time counter on Unix machines to cope > with the next time bug? ;-) With any luck, we'll all be using 64-bit machines by then, and this won't be an issue, since time_t can be made a 64-bit value. I make 2^63 seconds to be about 288 billion years, which is almost certainly way beyond the lifetime of our Sun and/or Earth. I can't see Unix's time mechanism changing from secs since 00:00:00 1970-01-01, it would confuse too many people. time_t and friends could probably be made a 64-bit value even on 32-bit machines, but I don't know what this would do to performance. (How do 32-bit machines to 64-bit math anyway? I guess I should find out.) Incidentally, someone the other day mentioned in a newsgroup that when the seconds-since-1970 value hits 10 digits (this isn't very far away, only a couple of years I think), this might confuse some software which has expected 9 digit values (which has been the case since about 1973). I wouldn't be at all surprised if such software existed, it's no more or less stupid than storing two digit years. -- Ben Smithurst | PGP: 0x99392F7D ben@scientia.demon.co.uk | key available from keyservers and | ben+pgp@scientia.demon.co.uk To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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