- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor
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03:14:07 UTC, 19 January 2038.
Imagine thinking that’ll be the biggest date-related computing problem for a galactic society.
If you really want to make programmers despair, point out:
- massive variations in day, month and year lengths on different worlds.
- some worlds may not have “months” (no moons, or many moons).
- ambiguous definition of “year” for multi-star systems.
- days may be longer than years (hello Venus).
- communication latency across interstellar distances.
- tine dilation.
Relief point: we will still be using unix timestamp.
Anxious point: we will still be using unix timestamp.
Don’t we technically already have to account for time dilation for things like GPS satellites
That’s easy. We’d just use Greg time.
Greg’s age and mood is highly deterministic, and he has atoms in his body present from the big bang. His sense of time varies, and seems to accelerate as he gets older, and he will tell you about it with extreme detail down to either 2 decimal places or 3 beers. If you call him up and ask him what time it is, the degree of the obscenities used in his reply is usually a good enough correction coefficient when calling over long distances.
Also two of his kids hate him, and his current wife is thinking of leaving him; all countable metrics that one can use to ascertain what stage in his life Greg is at, and thus what the local date/time in your area is, based on all the above Greg stats.
I will just rely on ISO 8602 to introduce a universal time format
Also, interplanetary timezones and leaps.
Don’t worry, we’re not far away from 2038, when 32 bit unix time rolls over 😅
I will be so excited if we make it that far, double if I’m alive to see it.
double
I hope you’re not storing time in floating point.
There is always the assumption that we will colonize the galaxy in 7000 years. When really we will still be on earth and someone is still running and old FreeBSD machine in prod and just doesn’t want to update cause it still works.
While I doubt will be stuck on Earth in 7000 years, there’s absolutely going to be some of those old systems with 7000+ years of uptime. Just throw the nanite repair gel on it every 50 or so years.
With virtualization you might be running a 7000 year old software on the new hardware
Storing the date as offset in seconds from 1970 in 64bit should last to about the end of the universe, after that it’s not my problem.
Bold of you to assume the human race will survive past be Y2038 problem
Y10k’s gonna be wild
