6 ms·

Worth a read: > Note that the OpenVMS time display and manipulation routines allow for only 4 digits in the 'YEAR' field. We expect this to be corrected in a

by pintxo 7y ago

Worth a read: > Note that the OpenVMS time display and manipulation routines allow for only 4 digits in the 'YEAR' field. We expect this to be corrected in a future release of OpenVMS sometime prior to 31-DEC-9999.

dylan604 7y ago
They have just enough time to schedule meetings to discuss it, code it, review it, then deploy it. Except they'll discover on 15-DEC-9998 that there's a critical bug, and it'll be known as Y10K. All of the original developers will have been long gone, so there's no way of getting them involved. An entire new development environment will be created so they can run a client based language as a server to handle the new date format
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Don't forget the 64-bit unix time epoch, that'll be a big one. 584 billion years from now, 2^64 seconds will roll over and just cause all sorts of mess.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Which means that 64-bit time_t is a somewhat-ultimate "lossless and future-proof archival format": you could use it to successfully round-trip-encode a reference to any historical or future second between the creation of our universe, and the last time life will be sustainable for carbon-based lifeforms in our universe. Mind you, presumably, some civilizations in our universe will go on beyond that. Referencing this† chart, silicon-based life (e.g. maybe even us humans, if uploaded into computers) might be able to survive about half-way into "the Degenerate Era", before the material substrate we run on just radiates away through proton decay. Representing the last second life could exist would require a continuum of 4e32 seconds, or 108 bits. † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Bang_to_Heat_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Ba... And also keep in mind, computers (including any silicon-based life-forms) think much faster, and so are in want of much more fine-grained measurements than our unit of "seconds" to place events on their own timelines. We already use nanosecond timestamps for our computer-system-internal log events (which would add a 30-bit fractional part to our 108-bit timestamp, to create a combined 138-bit fixed-point representation.) But let's be "safe." We don't know how fine-grained we'll need to get! We might want to record data about the first events of our universe, for example. I would think that a "really ultimate", future-proof, archival format for time record-keeping, would probably be denominated in Planck time units. Interestingly, counting in Planck time units instead of nanoseconds, "only" requires 144 bits for the fractional part! 108 + 144 = 252. Or, rounding up, 256. We could represent any instant of time we could ever care about, in fixed-point encoding††, in a 256-bit word. †† (It wouldn't really be fixed-point encoding. It'd just be an integer number of Planck time units since the Big Bang. But you can right-shift by 144 to get something close to a count of seconds, which is useful.) Finally: you still want more? Any time between the creation and heat death of the universe, even though nothing will be around to experience it? Well, that'd be 333 bits worth of seconds. 333 + 144 = 477, which would fit a 512-bit machine word. One could assume, then, that any Matrix-like universe simulation substrate will have a 512-bit Time Stamp Counter register. ...presuming, that is, that it was built to simulate a universe like our own, and not one that has finer-grained Planck units or which goes on for longer. :) ---- Does all of this have any use? Maybe! If we could figure out precisely what time it is in some objective sense—how many Planck time units have passed here in our reference frame since the creation of the universe—that might be a useful "handshake format" to describe "when" something happened to aliens, when building things like Voyager's Golden Record. (After all, we can teach them about our calendar, but how do we describe+transmit when our calendar began in a way they can measure against in their reference frame, in order to know how to do the math to translate dates back and forth?)
    - Zenst 7y ago
      > One could assume, then, that any Matrix-like universe simulation substrate will have a 512-bit Time Stamp Counter register. Maybe, though you can bet they don't have to deal with leap years and seconds. Let alone have to adjust the clocks as an earthquake slightly changed the speed of the rotation ever so slightly. Makes you wonder what they would use as a reference point of time and what units of measure. Pulsars are great, but on the scale of the universe, maybe not that great.
    - akkartik 7y ago
      But any aliens' frame of reference is almost certain to be non-inertial with respect to our own :) That kills any notion of simultaneity.
      - flingo 7y ago
        You can still line them up with many points of reference. Would be pretty hard on a human timeline though.
      - a1369209993 7y ago
        > That kills any notion of simultaneity. That's not actually true. Assuming there's a distinguished "initial" event [the big bang], and your universe does not contain any closed timelike curves [citation needed], you can define a Longest Proper Time from the initial event to any other event as the (obviously) longest proper time that any object or test particle could experience along a (timelike) path from the initial event to the later event. Simultaneous events have equal LPTs and are always spacelike-separated (if there was a timelike path from A to B then B.lpt (>)= A.lpt + len(path) > A.lpt, so B.lpt!=A.lpt and they aren't actually simultaneous).
    - stanmancan 7y ago
      After all, we can teach them about our calendar, but how do we describe+transmit when our calendar began in a way they can measure against in their reference frame, in order to know how to do the math to translate dates back and forth? Could this be done by sharing the distance between objects in space? No clue how accurately we could measure it, but if they could say hey year 0 was when earth was X LY from andromeda, and they can calculate how far they are now, and the rate of expansion, they might be able to calculate when year 0 was?
- derefr 7y ago
  > An entire new development environment will be created so they can run a client based language as a server to handle the new date format Is this in reference to something? Did some Y2K patches partially consist of putting Node.js-based gateways in front of mainframes to translate dates back and forth?
  - stuff4ben 7y ago
    :%s/Node.js/Java/g All hail CICS Gateway!!!
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure there was no Node.js in 1999/2000.
    - wahern 7y ago
      Not literally, but Netscape released server-side JavaScript a few months after adding it to Navigator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Server-side_JavaScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Server-side_JavaScr...
- TomK32 7y ago
  By 15-DEC-9998 Earth Corp will long be run by extra-terrestial hedge funds which forced theirs slav^employee on our planet to use their homeplanet's 2710.7-days-per-year timesystem...
lukifer 7y ago
One of my favorite touches from LongNow.org is that all the dates on their website render in 5 digits: > The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
- outadoc 7y ago
  This website looks like a cult's homepage
  - linguistbreaker 7y ago
    Can you be more specific about this feedback? What makes it feel cult-like to you?
    - Jestar342 7y ago
      The most prominent feature on that page is labelled with "become a member starting at $8/month". It's reminiscent of an MLM page, and MLMs are arguably (hell, demonstrably) cult-like.
      - smabie 7y ago
        Salvation or triple your money back!
        ohithereyou 7y ago
        Praise "Bob" or kill me!
      - rectang 7y ago
        For those not in the know: MLM = Multi-level marketing, also known as a "pyramid scheme". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing
      - lukifer 7y ago

by pintxo 7y ago

dylan604 7y ago

They have just enough time to schedule meetings to discuss it, code it, review it, then deploy it. Except they'll discover on 15-DEC-9998 that there's a critical bug, and it'll be known as Y10K. All of the original developers will have been long gone, so there's no way of getting them involved. An entire new development environment will be created so they can run a client based language as a server to handle the new date format

colechristensen 7y ago
Don't forget the 64-bit unix time epoch, that'll be a big one. 584 billion years from now, 2^64 seconds will roll over and just cause all sorts of mess.
- derefr 7y ago
  Which means that 64-bit time_t is a somewhat-ultimate "lossless and future-proof archival format": you could use it to successfully round-trip-encode a reference to any historical or future second between the creation of our universe, and the last time life will be sustainable for carbon-based lifeforms in our universe. Mind you, presumably, some civilizations in our universe will go on beyond that. Referencing this† chart, silicon-based life (e.g. maybe even us humans, if uploaded into computers) might be able to survive about half-way into "the Degenerate Era", before the material substrate we run on just radiates away through proton decay. Representing the last second life could exist would require a continuum of 4e32 seconds, or 108 bits. † https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Bang_to_Heat_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Ba... And also keep in mind, computers (including any silicon-based life-forms) think much faster, and so are in want of much more fine-grained measurements than our unit of "seconds" to place events on their own timelines. We already use nanosecond timestamps for our computer-system-internal log events (which would add a 30-bit fractional part to our 108-bit timestamp, to create a combined 138-bit fixed-point representation.) But let's be "safe." We don't know how fine-grained we'll need to get! We might want to record data about the first events of our universe, for example. I would think that a "really ultimate", future-proof, archival format for time record-keeping, would probably be denominated in Planck time units. Interestingly, counting in Planck time units instead of nanoseconds, "only" requires 144 bits for the fractional part! 108 + 144 = 252. Or, rounding up, 256. We could represent any instant of time we could ever care about, in fixed-point encoding††, in a 256-bit word. †† (It wouldn't really be fixed-point encoding. It'd just be an integer number of Planck time units since the Big Bang. But you can right-shift by 144 to get something close to a count of seconds, which is useful.) Finally: you still want more? Any time between the creation and heat death of the universe, even though nothing will be around to experience it? Well, that'd be 333 bits worth of seconds. 333 + 144 = 477, which would fit a 512-bit machine word. One could assume, then, that any Matrix-like universe simulation substrate will have a 512-bit Time Stamp Counter register. ...presuming, that is, that it was built to simulate a universe like our own, and not one that has finer-grained Planck units or which goes on for longer. :) ---- Does all of this have any use? Maybe! If we could figure out precisely what time it is in some objective sense—how many Planck time units have passed here in our reference frame since the creation of the universe—that might be a useful "handshake format" to describe "when" something happened to aliens, when building things like Voyager's Golden Record. (After all, we can teach them about our calendar, but how do we describe+transmit when our calendar began in a way they can measure against in their reference frame, in order to know how to do the math to translate dates back and forth?)
  - Zenst 7y ago
    > One could assume, then, that any Matrix-like universe simulation substrate will have a 512-bit Time Stamp Counter register. Maybe, though you can bet they don't have to deal with leap years and seconds. Let alone have to adjust the clocks as an earthquake slightly changed the speed of the rotation ever so slightly. Makes you wonder what they would use as a reference point of time and what units of measure. Pulsars are great, but on the scale of the universe, maybe not that great.
  - akkartik 7y ago
    But any aliens' frame of reference is almost certain to be non-inertial with respect to our own :) That kills any notion of simultaneity.
    - flingo 7y ago
      You can still line them up with many points of reference. Would be pretty hard on a human timeline though.
    - a1369209993 7y ago
      > That kills any notion of simultaneity. That's not actually true. Assuming there's a distinguished "initial" event [the big bang], and your universe does not contain any closed timelike curves [citation needed], you can define a Longest Proper Time from the initial event to any other event as the (obviously) longest proper time that any object or test particle could experience along a (timelike) path from the initial event to the later event. Simultaneous events have equal LPTs and are always spacelike-separated (if there was a timelike path from A to B then B.lpt (>)= A.lpt + len(path) > A.lpt, so B.lpt!=A.lpt and they aren't actually simultaneous).
  - stanmancan 7y ago
    After all, we can teach them about our calendar, but how do we describe+transmit when our calendar began in a way they can measure against in their reference frame, in order to know how to do the math to translate dates back and forth? Could this be done by sharing the distance between objects in space? No clue how accurately we could measure it, but if they could say hey year 0 was when earth was X LY from andromeda, and they can calculate how far they are now, and the rate of expansion, they might be able to calculate when year 0 was?
derefr 7y ago
> An entire new development environment will be created so they can run a client based language as a server to handle the new date format Is this in reference to something? Did some Y2K patches partially consist of putting Node.js-based gateways in front of mainframes to translate dates back and forth?
- stuff4ben 7y ago
  :%s/Node.js/Java/g All hail CICS Gateway!!!
- m4rtink 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure there was no Node.js in 1999/2000.
  - wahern 7y ago
    Not literally, but Netscape released server-side JavaScript a few months after adding it to Navigator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Server-side_JavaScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Server-side_JavaScr...
TomK32 7y ago
By 15-DEC-9998 Earth Corp will long be run by extra-terrestial hedge funds which forced theirs slav^employee on our planet to use their homeplanet's 2710.7-days-per-year timesystem...

lukifer 7y ago

One of my favorite touches from LongNow.org is that all the dates on their website render in 5 digits: > The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

outadoc 7y ago
This website looks like a cult's homepage
- linguistbreaker 7y ago
  Can you be more specific about this feedback? What makes it feel cult-like to you?
  - Jestar342 7y ago
    The most prominent feature on that page is labelled with "become a member starting at $8/month". It's reminiscent of an MLM page, and MLMs are arguably (hell, demonstrably) cult-like.
    - smabie 7y ago
      Salvation or triple your money back!
      - ohithereyou 7y ago
        Praise "Bob" or kill me!
    - rectang 7y ago
      For those not in the know: MLM = Multi-level marketing, also known as a "pyramid scheme". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing
    - lukifer 7y ago