Forget 2012, Beware: UNIX Time to Read 1234567890 On Friday the 13th

Forget 2012, Beware: UNIX Time to Read 1234567890 On Friday the 13th

i.gizmodo.com

orget the Mayans and their silly 2012 doomsday scenario. The real end of the world will happen because of that most venerable of operating systems: UNIX.

That's because next Friday, UNIX time will read 1234567890. Scary! And, it just so happens that this event will coincide with one of the more superstitious days on our calendar, Friday the 13th. Scarier!

Well-known UNIX and Linux personality John Maddog Hall plans on celebrating the event in style:

(visit the link for the full news article)

To see when this takes place in your time zone, run this little Perl script, which I promise won't end the world before next Friday:

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"n";'

Lol, Y2K all over again. I love superstition and coincidences, makes life so interesting.

And 2012 is just another coincidence in my opinion.




i.gizmodo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by die_another_day


You know what, I read that whole article and I still don't understand what the **** they are talking about. Can you explain?

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'
Fri Feb 13 17:31:30 2009


durn... missed it by 5 hours in my time zone. i must have been left behind!

The real problem with the 32 bit UNIX time number occurs on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. 32 bit systems that are not upgraded will have a time overflow resulting in an unpredictable date in computer applications. This is a real and serious problem. It's currently being worked on, but there are no guarantees that this will be corrected in it's entirety at the time.

[edit on 16-2-2009 by dbates]