6 Comments

1. 2024-02-05 4:19 pm

   cpcf

   The vast bulk of the human planet is completely ignorant about how things like this affect them, but as we move ever more closer to an AI powered internet of everything, efforts like this are crucial as @Thom mentions. I suppose in maintaining old hardware I’ve become conditioned to look for problems like this, but I find it bizarre that in many cases trained technicians and users of industrial or research equipment can be completely ignorant of time and date issues that can have real world effects. They look at the data, but they don’t look at the timestamp, or they dismiss the timestamp being wrong as irrelevant.

2. 2024-02-05 4:48 pm

   Drizzt321

   Heh, as Vernor Vinge wrote in A Deepness in the Sky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky).

   [quote]Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex – and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely … the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.[/quote]

   Thousands of years from now, if humanity is still around, we’ll probably have Unix time buried somewhere at the bottom of the stack.

• 2024-02-05 4:49 pm

  Drizzt321

  Ugh, how do I do quotes properly here? Clearly not BBCODE. Nor can I edit, even for a tiny amount of time after initially posting.

  • 2024-02-05 6:35 pm

    Drumhellar

    Block quotes can be done with <blockquote> and </blockquote>

    Or, if that doesn’t show up properly, use the blockquote tag between angle brackets

• 2024-02-05 5:47 pm

  Alfman

  Drizzt321,

  Thousands of years from now, if humanity is still around, we’ll probably have Unix time buried somewhere at the bottom of the stack

  Possibly. In principal most applications could still work relative to another newer date, but the date printing/parsing algorithm would need to be updated for this new date range.

2024-02-05 5:41 pm

Alfman

This is problem with a legacy 32bit API on linux, but otherwise 32bit hardware can handle 64bit times just fine.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16521066/is-u-int64-t-available-on-32-bit-machine

It seems like a bad idea to define time_t in terms of an architecture dependent size. But to be fair, a lot of our technology was devolved by people who never expected their work to last this long.