I remember having a party for the billion seconds, which was on September 8, 2001 -- then overshadowed in my memory by the September 11 attack less than three days later.
I also remember another party for Unix time 1234567890, back in 2009, which got an impressive turnout.
At that party, I made some thyme tea, in honor of time_t. (Later on I learned that thyme tea is actually a thing... I felt like I was just making it up!)
I remember rather quietly celebrating the "binary billion" (2^30), 1073741824 seconds, which coincidentally happened at a memorable time: 2004-01-10 13:37:04.
I was just reflecting back on my billion seconds celebration, and I'm finding it really hard to believe that 500 million seconds have gone by since then. A lot of stuff has happened in my life in the meantime, but that number puts it into perspective.
I didn't think I'd ever find myself in a reflective mood because of a unix timestamp!
> I remember having a party for the billion seconds, which was on September 8, 2001
I was going to ask if anyone did!
My first thought was Oh 2B not far off then, I wonder if there's anything being organised -- oh, 2033, there's still time...
It's also interesting that this is a UTC (or at least, it is universally coordinated, whether you can call it UTC or not I suppose depends entirely on the epoch) event - unlike NYE celebrations which span most of the day throughout the world, Unix 1.5B celebrations all over would be at the same 'time'.
Not only does it taste good (what might get debated) but it is said to help against the common cold and stuff like that. Is being used for centuries now as the "poor man's antibiotics".
A friend later on bought me an Arabic "wild thyme tea", which is labeled as زعتر بري in Arabic. According to Wikipedia, this is thymus serpyllum, which is different from the culinary thyme that we use in the west (although Wikipedia says that kind of thyme is used for tea in Armenia). One more potential source of confusion is that Wikipedia's article on za'atar says that زعتر بري could also be another Middle Eastern thyme (thymus capitatus), or even origanum vulgare (oregano)!
So I'm not positive exactly which herb is in this Arabic tea, but I do like it better than the thyme tea that I made for that party.
You can fiddle with the displayed time (by editing the url) -- it's fun to see that (very) early timestamps have much greater chance to be a prime number.
I think it is just one of the millions of possible coincidences. Yes, it's fun, but nothing weird, because there are other millions of equally weird coincidences that could happen.
Simias, we are surrounded by base 10 lovers in a binary world. These are the same people who gave us terabyte hard drives with 1,000,000,000,000 bytes which doesn't even make sense with sector sizes of 512 and 4096 bytes. I too will celebrate the hex flip and not some shady base 10 shenanigans.
I suspect it's because now I'll be able to quickly glance at timestamps, say in the logs or in data records, and estimate the time better without having to use a script to translate it.
When I watch the constant progress of Unix time and milestones like this, I really feel the passage of time in way I don't otherwise. Sometimes it freaks me out.
Ah interesting. I agree. Wonder if it is because typical 12 or 24 hour clock resets so we sort of get to "try again" during a new day. A continuously increasing value that never resets just has a more ominous feel to it.
Just added current timestamp to my mac os menubar. Not sure why I haven't thought of this before; beyond tonight's celebration, it's going to be very useful for checking against logs and cache-busting urls.
I use an app called bitbar which is very basic but allows you to display the output of a program in the menubar. I'm sure there are similar apps if it doesn't exactly suit you, but give it a try!
edit: to elaborate, how does this help at all, you can memorize the current offset to as many decimals as you find convenient and do this already, a zero pad is nice but the # zeroes that make it easy to read for people who aren't Ramanujan will last for maybe a week
Although the point where we reach 1.5 Ms since the Epoch actually occurs slightly earlier at 2017-07-14 02:39:33 +0000 , as can be seen on a system using Arthur David Olson's "right" timezones.
POSIX time doesn't count leap seconds (i.e., "seconds since the Epoch" are not actually elapsed seconds) and therefore POSIX time 1.5e6 is 2017-07-14T02:40:00 (UTC scale) exactly
right/UTC uses 1970-01-01 00:00:10 (TAI scale) epoch (it is slightly different from 1970-01-01 00:00:00 (UTC scale) -- the Epoch)
2017-07-14 02:39:33 (UTC scale) is 2017-07-14T02:40:10 (TAI scale) i.e., it is 1.5e9 seconds since the epoch used for "right" timezones, not the Epoch.
No. Read the output of the date command and the aforementioned Stack Exchange answer again. The Epoch was the same physical second in both the "right" and the "posix" systems. It is 1.5 Gs (not Ms as I mistyped) since that second at 2017-07-14 02:39:33 +0000.
The fact that you've got a difference of 37 between your two values should be a clue that you've got this wrong. The current difference between UTC and TAI-10 is 27 seconds. Again, read the Stack Exchange answer for details.
And 1.5 Gs since the Epoch will be 2017-07-14 02:39:33 +0000 on both "posix" and "right" systems. A "right" wall clock reads the same as a "posix" wall clock, except at leap seconds of course. 2017-07-14 02:39:33 "posix" is the same point in time as 2017-07-14 02:39:33 "right": 1.5 Gs since the Epoch. It is not the same point in time as 2017-07-14 02:40:10 "right"/"posix", which is 1500000037 seconds since the Epoch.
wrong. Don't confuse TAI and TAI-10. Don't confuse POSIX time [1] and seconds since epoch (time() value) in "right" timezones.
On the "difference of 37": the current TAI-UTC == 37s [2] (10s from 1972 + 27 leap seconds).
On "the same physical second": look at the value of TAI-UTC in the period before 1972 (if you plug the numbers then TAI-UTC is around 8 seconds at 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC, not 10s. The epochs are not the same. They are "slightly different"). The same physical second corresponds to 1972 (by definition), not 1970:
1972-01-01 00:00:00 (UTC scale) == 1972-01-01 00:00:10 (TAI scale)
Note: :10, not :00, note: TAI, not TAI-10.
To reiterate:
POSIX time 1.5e9 corresponds to 2017-07-14T02:40:00 (UTC scale) exactly.
1.5e9 "seconds since epoch" (not the Epoch) for "right" timezones corresponds to
2017-07-14T02:40:10 (TAI scale) == 2017-07-14 02:39:33 (UTC scale).
This page answers a question I was thinking about in the shower this morning: what is the latest date (as a UNIX timestamp) you can store in a regular postgres integer column, which has a max value of 2147483647 per the postgres docs. It turns out that the answer is January 19 2038 03:14:07 GMT.
I'm working on a project that involves sync, and we're keeping track of action numbers by incrementing the last action number, but for various reasons I was thinking, "what if we replaced the action_number field with the corresponding timestamp integer?"
Then I began to ponder which integer format to use -- if I could get a way with just postgres integer, or if I needed to stop up to bigint. It turns out I should probably step up to bigint if I do this :-)
Anyway, I could've just done this in ruby, but by the time I saw this I had forgotten I was thinking about it, and this reminded me.
$ for x in {15..21}
> do
> printf '%2d %s\n' $x "$(
> env TZ=UTC date -d "@$(($x*100000000))"
> )"; done
15 Fri 14 Jul 02:40:00 UTC 2017
16 Sun 13 Sep 12:26:40 UTC 2020
17 Tue 14 Nov 22:13:20 UTC 2023
18 Fri 15 Jan 08:00:00 UTC 2027
19 Sun 17 Mar 17:46:40 UTC 2030
20 Wed 18 May 03:33:20 UTC 2033
21 Fri 18 Jul 13:20:00 UTC 2036
It's neat how they seem to roll around every pi years.
Honestly, I'm going to shrug my shoulders. Not to dampen anyone else's celebrations and enthusiasm. That's just how I am about these kind of things. Like on most Birthdays, the orbital relationship of Earth to Sun isn't even within millions of miles of when I was born, so I'm like "meh". Except for my DD's birthday, but that's because it's special to her.
Thanks for eloquently putting in words how I feel about this. I yearn for a life so uneventful and devoid of stress that I could give two shits about such things.
Time stamp and set a reminder for 7-10 years from now for this comment: Tesla will be the biggest company in the world. See you in 7-10 years when you remember this comment.
The world? That's quite a tall order for a company with such a small product line. They would have to compete with companies like Exxon which have 250B in yearly revenue.
Google does not have 250B revenue. Far from it (50B a few years back).
Apple is in the top ten but then it sells billions of expensive phones. Amazon barely scrapes in the top fifty, while Walmart is number one (Costco,CVS and Kroger easily beating Amazon)
Being a "normal" bricks and mortar company does give more turnover power it seems. Globally.
Don't underestimate Amazon. They have the world's largest (?) server-infrastructure and logistic infrastructure in place. Most of the other companies rely on Amazon.
Could imagine that Google's infrastructure is bigger. Their cloud service is clearly smaller than AWS but they have much more computing demand than Amazon has for their main business. So overall Google could be ahead of Amazon.
Logistics infrastructure of Amazon is not the largest either. In the US, Fedex and UPS will have more infrastructure. Not that many warehouses, but when it comes to distributing items they should be larger. Worldwide, DHL Group could be the largest. They have a substantial freight forwarding business so that they will move far more goods every day than Amazon does.
The important thing, though, is that no one has both of it in one company. We'll see how valuable that turns out to be (maybe not at all, maybe very).
I don't think they will be, but I'm pretty sure various governments will want to start passing laws requiring electric cars somewhere around 2030.
The question is how they will take care of the already existing companies. Maybe Tesla will share more technology, so that the industry can transition as a whole.
Volvo announced a few days ago that all their cars will be either EVs or plug-in hybrids starting from 2019. Toyota is almost there today.
From an end-user perspective, it's pretty obvious that todays plug-in hybrids with 15-30 miles electric range and 600 miles range on fuel will be better than pure EVs. >90% of people's driving is within the electric range, but you can still have a car with a big enough trunk (Try fitting two baby strollers in a Tesla! Or a couple of downhill bikes plus kit. Or scuba gear for two. Or...) that can still get you from SoCal up to Lake Tahoe without wasting time on charging.
As for competition on pure electric: BMW, VW, Ford, Fiat, Kia, Chevrolet/Opel, Nissan, Renault, Peugeot, Mitsubishi, Mercedes - they all have "proper" pure electric cars on the market today that are seeing sales figures within an order of magnitude of Tesla.
(Note that being within an order of magnitude only requires that you sell 7000 EVs globally in a year, that's a pretty easy target.)
Didn't France just announce that they are going to require electric by 2040? I wouldn't be surprised either. We're at a much better point to use them and grow the infrastructure now.
Common English loanword in Japanese, or at least in anime - characters will excitedly say something like "prize GET" (with the "get" in English and shouted, the "prize" in Japanese, but rendered that way by fan translations).
I also remember another party for Unix time 1234567890, back in 2009, which got an impressive turnout.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/estro/3304453623/in/photolist-... https://www.flickr.com/photos/briankusler/3278099542/in/phot... https://www.flickr.com/photos/estro/3305280994/in/photolist-...
At that party, I made some thyme tea, in honor of time_t. (Later on I learned that thyme tea is actually a thing... I felt like I was just making it up!)