4 ms·

> But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems

> But now we have a single global standard, I think there is a huge amount of inertia against changing it - it is baked into untold millions of computer systems and business processes now. We have two global standards, both from the Western Christian tradition. The Gregorian calendar, and Unix time. Order of magnitude, they're probably baked into the same number of processes.

kragen 1y ago
What's Christian about Unix time? I don't recall ever reading that either Thompson or Ritchie was theist at all, much less Christian. And the division of the solar day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds is not Christian but, mostly, Sumerian: both pagan and Eastern.
- dmurray 1y ago
  It's an offshoot of the Gregorian calendar, being offset from it by a whole number of years. And Thompson and Ritchie grew up and worked in a majority-Christian country: their individual faith doesn't have much to do with it.
  - skissane 1y ago
    The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar Now, the common AD/CE year numbering is obviously Christian in motivation, but that’s technically distinct from the Gregorian calendar-the Julian calendar historically used other year numbering systems too (ab urbe condita, anno Diocletiani aka anno martyrum, anno mundi), and the Gregorian calendar itself doesn’t care what numbers you assign to years beyond modulo 400 - you could replace 2025 with 2425 or 12025 and it would still work fine. But that’s the thing, Unix time doesn’t care whether 1970 is called 1970 or 1570 or 2370 or 11970, only how distant you are from it - so it isn’t really tied to our Christianity-inspired year numbering, only to 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as an instant I think CE + 10,000 - called “Holocene Era” (HE), also sometimes expanded Human Era or Historical Era - is a good proposal - high compatibility with CE (you can just pretend 2025 is missing the leading digit), makes all dates from recorded human history positive. Okay, is ambiguous in that 2025 CE might get confused with 2025 HE (= -7975 CE = 7976 BCE), but in practice that’s unlikely since that’s prehistorical and essentially nothing (outside astronomy) from that long ago can be dated to a year’s accuracy anyway
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  Unix time is explicitly anti-Christian! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon >The copyright on the official BSD Daemon images is owned by Marshall Kirk McKusick, a very early BSD developer who worked with Bill Joy. McKusick has freely licensed the mascot for individual "personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD Daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo)."[ Any use requires both a copyright notice and attribution. Blowtorching a Solaris logo sounds like it's in good taste to me! Just not blowing it without a torch.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Kirk didn't invent Unix time, though; it predates his involvement in Unix by several years.

kragen 1y ago

What's Christian about Unix time? I don't recall ever reading that either Thompson or Ritchie was theist at all, much less Christian. And the division of the solar day into 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds is not Christian but, mostly, Sumerian: both pagan and Eastern.

dmurray 1y ago
It's an offshoot of the Gregorian calendar, being offset from it by a whole number of years. And Thompson and Ritchie grew up and worked in a majority-Christian country: their individual faith doesn't have much to do with it.
- skissane 1y ago
  The Gregorian calendar is essentially non-Christian in origin. Yes, it is named for Pope Gregory, but he just tinkered with the leap year rule, other than that it is essentially the same as the Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar Now, the common AD/CE year numbering is obviously Christian in motivation, but that’s technically distinct from the Gregorian calendar-the Julian calendar historically used other year numbering systems too (ab urbe condita, anno Diocletiani aka anno martyrum, anno mundi), and the Gregorian calendar itself doesn’t care what numbers you assign to years beyond modulo 400 - you could replace 2025 with 2425 or 12025 and it would still work fine. But that’s the thing, Unix time doesn’t care whether 1970 is called 1970 or 1570 or 2370 or 11970, only how distant you are from it - so it isn’t really tied to our Christianity-inspired year numbering, only to 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z as an instant I think CE + 10,000 - called “Holocene Era” (HE), also sometimes expanded Human Era or Historical Era - is a good proposal - high compatibility with CE (you can just pretend 2025 is missing the leading digit), makes all dates from recorded human history positive. Okay, is ambiguous in that 2025 CE might get confused with 2025 HE (= -7975 CE = 7976 BCE), but in practice that’s unlikely since that’s prehistorical and essentially nothing (outside astronomy) from that long ago can be dated to a year’s accuracy anyway
DonHopkins 1y ago
Unix time is explicitly anti-Christian! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon >The copyright on the official BSD Daemon images is owned by Marshall Kirk McKusick, a very early BSD developer who worked with Bill Joy. McKusick has freely licensed the mascot for individual "personal use within the bounds of good taste (an example of bad taste was a picture of the BSD Daemon blowtorching a Solaris logo)."[ Any use requires both a copyright notice and attribution. Blowtorching a Solaris logo sounds like it's in good taste to me! Just not blowing it without a torch.
- kragen 1y ago
  Kirk didn't invent Unix time, though; it predates his involvement in Unix by several years.