UTC is not the same as GMT, although for humans telling the time they're similar enough.
Set your alarms for 2.40am UTC – so you can watch Unix time hit 1,500,000,000
At 0240 GMT* precisely on Friday, July 14, an epoch-defining moment will happen. And only real nerds – along with Reg readers – will know what that moment is. The Unix epoch will pass its 1.5 billionth second in the small hours. A quick check with everyone's favourite scripting language, Perl, confirms this: $ perl - …
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Friday 14th July 2017 07:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bard metres (preferably sung since the Late Bronze Age Collapse), shurely?
That would be epic. And hellenistic.
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Friday 14th July 2017 12:17 GMT Missing Semicolon
Damn right their not!
For those of us old enough to remember programming with Java1.4, the confusion of GMT and UTC meant that Java programs running in the UK had no DST support. The only +00:00 time zone at the time was GMT, and that (being international) had no summer time.
In the UK, you had to create a new time zone object that had the UK BST rules in it.
For. Every. Bloody. Program.
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Friday 14th July 2017 04:39 GMT Wensleydale Cheese
Re: Already??
"It seems like only yesterday that we had the 'billennium', where Unix timestamps went from 9 decimal digits to 10 and broke some locally-developed stuff."
More than 20 years ago. May 1997.
Even VMS, which doesn't use Unix timestamps itself, needed patches to stuff which had its origins on Unix, like X11.
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Friday 14th July 2017 09:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Already??
I suddenly feel very old...
Try this one if you want to feel extremely old. The period of time between the start of the First World War and your birth, compared with your age.
My age is greater than that. By over 20 years.
(Of course, that works for anyone over the age of 52)
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Friday 14th July 2017 10:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Already??
"Try this one if you want to feel extremely old."
I prefer to feel overwhelmingly pointless since its impossible for me tontruly be old in a universal sense.
For example, consider how many possible planets there are out there and how many might have life, how many had life, and how many existed and continue to exist despite life and whether life was necessary in the process of being a planet.
You at the back there. Put the phone down.
Nothing matters. We're all going to die and ultimately everything we do amounts to nothing.
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Friday 14th July 2017 12:18 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Already??
Nothing matters. We're all going to die and ultimately everything we do amounts to nothing.
On a more positive note - at least that means that all politicians, everywhere, are even more useless than we already thought.
And I'll leave you with the final comforting thought from Del Amitri:
#Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all
#The needle returns to the start of the song
#And we all sing along like before
#And we'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow
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Friday 14th July 2017 12:15 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Already??
Try this one if you want to feel extremely old. The period of time between the start of the First World War and your birth, compared with your age.
My age is greater than that. By over 20 years.
(Of course, that works for anyone over the age of 52)
Well - that means I'm safe (until next Feb)..
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Friday 14th July 2017 10:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Ugh. Timeghost...
@Thommy M.; No idea who modded you down; I was sitting looking at the 1997 date and thinking "hang on, twenty years back has to be way more than a third of the way to 1970"...
@Anonymous coward; Fun fact for baby boomers- Cliff Richard's debut single "Move It" came out in 1958, closer to the final years of the Victorian era and the end of the 1800s than to the present day.
Obligatory XKCD! Plus this.
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Friday 14th July 2017 10:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Ugh. Timeghost...
(Same AC as one who posted Timeghost comment, my editing time ran out...)
@Anonymous coward; Also, at around 61.5 years old, you're still quite a bit younger than my Dad. :-O
Also, Sgt. Pepper came out closer to the end of the First World War than to the present day...
Also also also... for those who (like me) remember "You Spin Me Round" by "Dead or Alive" in the charts as kids, it hit number 1 in the UK 32 years and 4 months ago, closer to the release of the first widely successful rock n' roll record than to the present day.
(Bear in mind that when I was a kid, twenty-year-old black and white footage of (e.g.) The Beatles seemed ancient, and rock n' roll was before that- and to be fair, 30 years *is* a long time, you just forget that "You Spin Me Round" is now that old too... ouch.)
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Friday 14th July 2017 12:20 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Ugh. Timeghost...
for those who (like me) remember "You Spin Me Round" by "Dead or Alive" in the charts as kids, it hit number 1 in the UK 32 years and 4 months ago
I never got the hang of new-fangled music like that..
(I jest - currently listening to Transatlantic live in Tilburg. Fine, modern prog[1] music)
[1] If that's not an oxymoron..
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Friday 14th July 2017 13:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Millenials
One of my Granddaughters friends asked who Jimmy Hendrix was.
My GD sniggered. She's had a proper music education as she's going to study it at Uni.
The friend thought that 1970 was in the stone age. At least then the musicians actually played their instruments and you knew it if they missed a note (no effing auto-tune then).
The friend was amazed at:-
1) That Hyde Park concerts existed then
2) How little a gig cost to go to and that you didn't have to book a year in advance or pay a booking fee.
My how times were much simpler then. And the music was better.
Time for me to get my zimmer frame then.
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Saturday 15th July 2017 06:12 GMT HelpfulJohn
Re: Jesus!
Both of my parents were young children, just pre-teens, when the last soldier to fight in the USAlien Civil War died.
That was in 1938. Just before the Second World War really got its skates on and began to involve the "important" countries.
There was only one long human lifetime between the American Civil War and WWII.
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Thursday 13th July 2017 19:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It can go on
That sounds amazing.
I've toyed with the idea of non-ftl space flight sci-fi and wrote a short story. I skipped commenting on the specifics of space travel, other than the fact it takes 30-60 years for the closest next point of interest (assuming constant 1g acceleration and deceleration to a 1-3ly away star).
If I ever continue the story, there will be little to no external contact for the life off the colony. With the exception of materials/fuel trade (though in reality any system would hold more than enough of either and never need materials/energy trade).
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Saturday 15th July 2017 06:27 GMT HelpfulJohn
Re: If you've mastered that sort of power plant the universe is, indeed, yours.
Some political committee is going to authorise at least one, probably with a submarine probe, probably one not totally sterilised. Then our chance of ever knowing if Europan life existed will be gone forever.
"Europan", not "European". We already know that Brexit has killed the latter.
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Saturday 15th July 2017 06:19 GMT HelpfulJohn
Re: It can go on
Strangely, reaching 1C, (a hair short of) the speed of light takes almost exactly one year at one g.
It's nice when the universe makes the numbers easy.
She doesn't do it very often.
It's also a little spooky that Earth's gravity, Earth's orbital period and the ultimate speed limit are coincidentally related.
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Friday 14th July 2017 07:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It can go on
With the exception of materials/fuel trade (though in reality any system would hold more than enough of either and never need materials/energy trade).
Who is to say what the distribution of elements and materials might be across different systems until we start to explore them. Carbon is abundant on earth, but only a small proportion is present as diamond. Helium-3 is mooted as a handy fusion fuel, but in a system comprised only of rocky earth-sized planets would be scarce.
Good luck with the story telling - there's plenty of scope for fiction out there :-)
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Friday 14th July 2017 09:33 GMT DJO
Re: It can go on
Constant Acceleration at 1G is impossible for more than a few months.
From stationary in 353 days 19 hours 45 minutes 23.004 seconds at a constant 1G you'd attain c which is not allowed.
If you had an engine capable of producing a constant 1G which would also provide the illusion of gravity which would be nice for the crew, the trick would be to keep turning the ship around so you oscillate between (say) 0.75c and 0.9c so you'd still be prety fast but the time dilation would not be excessive and you'd have gravity (except when turning the ship) for the entire journey so no bone or muscle wasting.
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Friday 14th July 2017 09:40 GMT Brangdon
Re: subluminal space flight
You might also be interested in Karl Schroede's Lockstep, Their spacecraft crew spend the journeys asleep, and the colonists adapt the same technology so they sleep during the period of no external contact. (While they sleep, robots mine the resources needed to sustain them when awake, thus allowing them to survive on marginal outer solar bodies.)
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