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in celebration of 1.2 million seconds

topic posted Thu, January 10, 2008 - 7:16 PM by  offlineonTonca
hello to all atThouß allwhere, and particularly those in US eastern time zone!

today at 4:20pm EST something highly notable happened.
unix systems represent time using an integer value, which is a count of seconds since beginning of year 1970.
so...... today at 4:20pm EST the unix time was 1200000000 (at time of this posting it's already 1200021160)

1200000000
Thu Jan 10 16:20:00 EST 2008

for comparison, 1100000000 happened at:
Tue Nov 9 06:33:20 EST 2004

and 1300000000 will happen at:
Sun Mar 13 03:06:40 EDT 2011

so this is a pretty big anniversary! we must celebrate!

love,

-onTonca
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onTonca
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  • onTonca
    onTonca
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    Re: in celebration of 1.2 million seconds

    Tue, April 8, 2008 - 12:14 AM
    yes yes i am very phucking deep, and this obviously phew right over everyone's heads.
    my bad.
    please allow me to explain.

    we are speaking of "UNIX time" here.
    UNIX is an operating system family. in the UNIX family there are many heroes like LiNUX and FreeBSD and other lesser known heroes. there are also a number of commercial . these OSes stood against microsoft monopoly and penetrated the business world taking a plenty of vegetables, a good chunk of meat, and some potatoes from the software giant :-)

    so..... UNIX.... it uses a certain date/time representation model called "UNIX time". UNIX time is the count of seconds since midnight (beginning) of January 1, 1970 GMT (aka universal time, which coincides with London time for historical reasons :-) ).

    at that time, at midnight of Jan 1, 2007, unix time was equal to 0.
    1 second later, unix time was 1.
    at 1am Jan 1, 1970 GMT, it was 3600.

    (technically, unix time was probably defined a few years after 1970... so dates in the past could be specified.... but we are now in the future from that moment, and basically who cares :-) )

    if you had made some sense of this, then you have a chance at being a sysadm :-)
    mount -t xkcd /dev/xkcd /dckx
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