[HECnet] How long has your 20 been up?

[Thomas DeBellis]

Funny you should mention that.

Back in 1997, I and a number of technical colleagues from Big Bank went 
to Maynard for a futures presentation based on the Alpha chip and 
Digital Unix.  It was pretty wizzy and they were doing some very 
impressive stuff.  However, some questions just got blank stares, which, 
at the time, we thought remarkable.

One topic was what they were doing about Y2K and how Digital Unix was 
already positioned.  So I asked, "Great, are you using a 64 bit time_t 
struct?" Blank stares...  "You are aware that the default time_t is a 32 
bit struct and will roll over in 2038, right?  As long as you have this 
great 64 bit platform and are looking at everything, why not change the 
definition and avoid the problem altogether?"  Foot shuffling... "Uh, we 
haven't gotten to that, yet"

They had about 15 minute slide deck extolling their enhanced C compiler 
which knew all about optimizations for the Alpha chip and how it 
completely outperformed the standard C compiler, Bench marks, Etc., 
Etc.  A colleague of mine asked, "What kind of speed ups have you seen 
in recompiling Digital Unix?"  Blank stares... I said, "You have done 
this, haven't you?  I mean, it's the one obvious speed up that every 
user would benefit from"  Foot shuffling...

Maybe we were being too snarky...  Technical staff at Big Bank was all 
about risk management.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 1/18/22 7:57 PM, Paul Koning wrote
>
> The Gregorian algorithm is amazingly accurate, I wonder if the earth 
> rotation slowing down is the bigger issue. Then again, I suspect a 
> whole lot of computer date algorithms will get 2100 wrong; I know RSTS 
> has the Julian leap year rule. Not that it really matters given the 
> Y2035 issue...
>
> paul
>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Jan 18, 2022, at 7:48 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>>
>> By then, we probably also need to look at/revise how we compute leap 
>> years... It's well known that the current algorithm will slowly get 
>> us out of phase again..
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.sonic.net/mailman/private/hecnet-list/attachments/20220120/44dfee81/attachment-0001.htm>