Epoch Fail – The UNIX Doomsday
Yesterday was the 13th of February. It was a very special day. Not only was it Friday the 13th, which probably means something unlucky will happen – it just so happens that yesterday was the end of the world for UNIX systems.
Anybody here remember the Y2K bug? Basically they said computers couldn’t understand what would happen after the year 2000 starts, and therefore computers would all fail and we’d be cast into a world of non-high-tech evilness. Or something like that. However the year 2000 came and went, and we all continued the happy people we were. UNIX systems, such as Apple Macs and Linuxes, used the UNIX date timestamp in order to calculate time. This is basically measuring the number of seconds since the last epoch. It’s a 10 digit number, and it just so happens that yesterday, the number of seconds since the last epoch would be exactly:
1234567890
Stunning. That happens only once an epoch.
It’s probably the geekiest event to celebrate, and I myself made a good hot cup of cocoa and drank it in bed doing mathematics on this wonderful occasion. How apt. If you visited Google.com around that second, you would’ve seen that their logo had changed to celebrate it too.
During the Y2K bug, nobody was certain whether or not it would affect them. This is because it was on DOS systems (Windows) and naturally all Windows users are a bit soft in the head. However, us savvy UNIX users know that we do have our own time bomb, and that it’ll happen in the year 2038, when UNIX reaches the end of the epoch – it’s the mark of the doomsday where all our systems would shut down. Well, at least we are certain a disaster would happen instead of causing unnecessary fear.
Of course, we aren’t stupid and we actually did somethign about it – we now run in 64 bit mode and UNIX systems would only fail … let’s say about the time the sun burns out.
So much for the year of the Linux Desktop.
Oh, and in unrelated news, happy Valentine’s day – I guess.
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