Comments on: I Love the Fri Jul 28 2006 21:27:13 GMT-0400 (EDT)’s http://www.spectrecollie.com/archives/2006/07/i-love-the-fri-jul-28-2006-212713-gmt-0400-edt/ Chuck Jordan's Personal Weblog Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:29:42 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Chuck http://www.spectrecollie.com/archives/2006/07/i-love-the-fri-jul-28-2006-212713-gmt-0400-edt/#comment-947 Chuck Sat, 29 Jul 2006 19:15:09 +0000 http://www.spectrecollie.com/archives/2006/07/i-love-the-fri-jul-28-2006-212713-gmt-0400-edt/#comment-947 Wow, that brings up a thought more depressing than anything I'd been able to come up with: What if the beginning of human history really were midnight on January 1st, 1970? Could they not have picked a more dismal and defeatist starting point? I don't see 2038 being all that big a deal, mostly because it's not as catchy as Y2K. Besides, by that point we'll all be using 1024-bit processors (those of us who are Left Behind, anyway), and when we look at ancient code that refers to 32-bit numbers as "long," we'll just snicker and roll our cyber-eyes. Wow, that brings up a thought more depressing than anything I’d been able to come up with:

What if the beginning of human history really were midnight on January 1st, 1970? Could they not have picked a more dismal and defeatist starting point?

I don’t see 2038 being all that big a deal, mostly because it’s not as catchy as Y2K. Besides, by that point we’ll all be using 1024-bit processors (those of us who are Left Behind, anyway), and when we look at ancient code that refers to 32-bit numbers as “long,” we’ll just snicker and roll our cyber-eyes.

]]> By: Larry Hosken http://www.spectrecollie.com/archives/2006/07/i-love-the-fri-jul-28-2006-212713-gmt-0400-edt/#comment-946 Larry Hosken Sat, 29 Jul 2006 16:22:57 +0000 http://www.spectrecollie.com/archives/2006/07/i-love-the-fri-jul-28-2006-212713-gmt-0400-edt/#comment-946 That's kind of neat. You could attempt a kind of nostalgia by setting your machine's system clock back a few years. Then again, you can't set it very far back. Now that I think about it, I was born before the start of the Unix epoch. Even if I were to try to recapture those days by setting the clock back, the clock won't go back that far. As we approach 2038 and various Unix programmer weenies scramble to update their time code so that their fields don't overflow, there will be a temptation to come up with a new way to represent dates. And when that happens, there will be a strong temptation to make 2000 the base date. If that happens, bam, another 30 years of my life I can never revisit. Thus does the universe sweep my old mistakes under the rug. That’s kind of neat. You could attempt a kind of nostalgia by setting your machine’s system clock back a few years. Then again, you can’t set it very far back. Now that I think about it, I was born before the start of the Unix epoch. Even if I were to try to recapture those days by setting the clock back, the clock won’t go back that far.

As we approach 2038 and various Unix programmer weenies scramble to update their time code so that their fields don’t overflow, there will be a temptation to come up with a new way to represent dates. And when that happens, there will be a strong temptation to make 2000 the base date. If that happens, bam, another 30 years of my life I can never revisit.

Thus does the universe sweep my old mistakes under the rug.

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