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Date:      Sat, 08 Jan 2000 07:54:49 -0500
From:      Tom Embt <tom@embt.com>
To:        cjclark@home.com
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: I will never trust NBC news again!
Message-ID:  <3.0.3.32.20000108075449.015f6168@mail.embt.com>
In-Reply-To: <200001061527.KAA19932@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>
References:  <3.0.3.32.20000106081108.015a8e68@mail.embt.com>

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[snip]
>> >
>> >ITYM, "Armageddon." And I thought it was at,
>> >
>> >% date -ur 2147483647
>> >Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 GMT 2038
>> >-- 
>> >Crist J. Clark                           cjclark@home.com
>> >
>> 
>> It would be Armageddon for ankone who is still using a 32bit OS at that
>> time, otherwise it's just a big "rollover" when we start using the next
>> bit.  At least, it sounds good to me..
>
>Being a 32-bit OS really has nothing directly to do with it. You can
>easily write code to handle arbitrarily large numbers. The origin of a
>32-bit counter is the same as the mythical Y2k bug. Thirty-two bits
>seemed big enough at the time (almost 70 years after all), memory was
>at a premium, and it was just kinda convenient.
>
>What it takes to fix this is that every program that assumes time_t
>to be a four-byte int needs to be fixed so that it makes no
>assumptions about time_t other than it is an integer-type. Once that
>is done, a 32-bit, 64-bit, 16-bit, or 12-bit OS will all be happy with
>a counter of whatever size we want.

Quite right.  I mis-thought.

>> BTW, I *think* it would be 2^31-1 not 2^31.  For example, doesn't a char
>> store values from -128 to 127 ?
>
>Yes and yes. But,
>
> ( (2^31 - 1) == 2147483647 )
>
>That is what I had. And just for date(1) trivia buffs, note that,
>
>% date -ur -2147483648
>Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 GMT 1901
>-- 
>Crist J. Clark                           cjclark@home.com
>
>

Now here I'm having a problem.  I can't seem to figure out how I came up
with the 3:14:06 time.  Maybe I just mistyped something.

Cheers,


Tom Embt
tom@embt.com



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