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linuxmemes @lemmy.world

weird @sub.wetshaving.social

19h ago

Sex on the first date refers to sex on jan 1 1970

12 comments

One thing I've pondered about is the first time unix epoch reached 10 digits, 1000000000. That is 9th of September 2001, 2 days before 9/11. If the terrorists had that in mind hoping for some malfunction in systems around the world only supporting max 9 digits?
... probably not.. but coincidences are fun
- I like conspiracy theories that are utter bullshit, but could conceivably be true just based on the limited information given. It makes the world more interesting.
  
  It's more believable than most conspiracies about 9/11.
- some malfunction in systems around the world only supporting max 9 digits
  That's not how computers work, though. They use binary so they care more about binary digits (powers of two: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc) rather than decimal digits (powers of 10: 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc).
  Very old systems store numbers with a fixed number of digits, but those systems don't use Unix time.
  
  But you could feasibly have conversion that crashes a system.
  Say a log is generated and prefixes the entries by a padded unix timestamp. The field is padded to length 9, so after y2k1 the unsigned integer math specifies to prepend -1 = 2³² - 1 spaces

That would be some epoch sex!

Epoch Millis is my friend
Gregorian calendar is not my friend (at least in java)

12 comments