This is very interesting....

[Fay Starlight]

[Kaylee Romano]

What are we looking at?

[Fay Starlight]

Just the date

[Fay Starlight]

I am sure it was just some random entry at the time, but find it a bit curious as to why that exact date was picked!?

[Fay Starlight]

For that matter, not seen Protected Land -Park either. 

This is a spot in Elderglen housing, called Sunbright

[LittleMe Jewell]

48 minutes ago, Fay Starlight said:

Just the date

 

47 minutes ago, Fay Starlight said:

I am sure it was just some random entry at the time, but find it a bit curious as to why that exact date was picked!?

 

Jan 1, 1970 is the beginning of time on Unix systems.  All dates on Unix start from there.  If you get the "epoch" time on a Unix system, it will be the number of seconds since 00:00:00 on Jan 1, 1970.

 

[Frigga Freidman]

3 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

 

 

Jan 1, 1970 is the beginning of time on Unix systems.  All dates on Unix start from there.  If you get the "epoch" time on a Unix system, it will be the number of seconds since 00:00:00 on Jan 1, 1970.

 

What a great bit of trivia! Must squirrel it away for whenever it appears as a question on University Challenge!

[diamond Marchant]

It gets more interesting when you learn that Unix time "runs out"  at 3:14:07 GMT on January 19 in 2038, less than 16 years from now 😱

Don't judge to harshly.

Quote

the initial Unix implementation was driven by Ken Thompson’s desire to make his ‘Space Game’ program run economically. He ported the game to a little-used PDP-7

The Invention of Unix

Unix was a side project in support of a game 😁

Edited March 26, 2022 by diamond Marchant

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 minute ago, diamond Marchant said:

It gets more interesting when you learn that Unix time "runs out"  at 3:14:07 GMT on January 19 in 2038, less than 16 years from now 😵

I'll be out of the IT world by then, retired and enjoying my life, so I've decided that I don't care.  I had to prep for, and deal with possible problems associated with the Y2K issue (year rolling over to 1/1/2000), which turned out to be a non-event in many ways,.  Someone else can deal with the unix time issue.

[Madelaine McMasters]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

[Love Zhaoying]

How is that different than the "Y2K bug"?

[LittleMe Jewell]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

How is that different than the "Y2K bug"?

That was pretty much all related to application code, where they stored and used dates using just 2 digit years.  This is more OS/file/database related due to usage of 32-bit time fields.

[Beryl Greenacre]

I always wondered why Phoenix Linden's SL birthday was listed this way, I never got up the nerve to ask him. BTW, If you look at Philip Linden's Account info, it says "Exordium;" Bub Linden's says Your Daddy, lol.

[diamond Marchant]

22 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

That was pretty much all related to application code, where they stored and used dates using just 2 digit years.

Yes, and much of that code was Cobol.  Back in the late 1950s Rear Admiral Grace Hopper invented the Cobol programming language to facilitate business data processing. By 1970, a majority of data processing software was written in Cobol. One of its innovations  was machine independence, meaning the Cobol virtual machine could be ported to any mainframe hardware (and later mini computers and microprocessors). Cobol has a fixed point decimal data type. In those days main memory was scarce (measured in kilobytes) and punched cards were a common input device. A punch card has only 80 columns (since 1928) and years were typically allocated only 2 digits to save space. The irony is that because Cobol is not directly tied to arithmetic limits of particular hardware,  years could have easily been 4 digits.

The 2038 problem derives from the (C language) 32-bit signed integer data type that was prevalent in mainframe and some mini-computer (e.g. DEC) architectures of the 1970s. As described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem , various solutions to the problem have been implemented as a consequent of regular operating system and C runtime library updates. Since the early 2000s, microprocessors (e.g. Intel) have supported an 64-bit signed data type.

It's hard to image that there will be much impact on the world in 2038. However, the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) used in Second Life needs to be fixed as the signed integer data type of the LSL virtual machine is 32-bit.  This is mentioned in  llGetUnixTime in the caveat as BUG-4703. Things like fishing series contests will break unless this is addressed.

Edited March 27, 2022 by diamond Marchant

[Prokofy Neva]

On 3/26/2022 at 12:37 PM, LittleMe Jewell said:

 

 

Jan 1, 1970 is the beginning of time on Unix systems.  All dates on Unix start from there.  If you get the "epoch" time on a Unix system, it will be the number of seconds since 00:00:00 on Jan 1, 1970.

 

I get it that 1970 is a computer thing and not real, especially when my files on Mychart EPIC say "AIDS test 1970," when AIDS was not yet discovered nor was there a test for it.

But you know what? 1968 is also a thing. So are other dates, i.e. when there were no computers or Internets so files couldn't possibly be that date if generated by the system, and not a file about that year you labeled. Yet when the Lindens took over my corrupt inventory at one point and sorted it, they generated files with those years that were before the Internet, etc. named "Objects Items 1968" etc. So I renamed them because I figure some central function could delete them as easily as it crazily made them.