[SlugLUG] Daylight Savings Time

[cerise at armory.com]

On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 09:11:22AM -0800, Karl Young wrote:
> Thinking about date and time oddities, and having to dredge up the date -r for the 
> BSD-like Mac reminds me of the next impending Doomsday, Mon Jan 18 19:14:07 PST 2038,
> when "seconds since the epoch" overflows.
> 
> I'd like to take this opportunity to coin the term "S2G bug."

   The usual term I hear bandied about is Y2K+38.
 
> At the time the developers I was working with said that by 2038 we would be using
> 64-bit ints, and could track time in Mitcorseconds for nearly 300K years.
> 
> Another suggested that by 2038 we may not be using years, seconds, or bits.

   As one who attended the recent quantum computing demo at the Computer
History Museum, I'd have to say that the future of conventional computing
looks secure.  This isn't to imply that the technology there wasn't 
breathtaking, but there's a major paradigm shift between using a conventional
computer and using a quantum computer.  The concept of resource sharing and
all the other wonderful things that an OS does for you pretty much goes out
the window as a result.  The company that did it -- D-Wave -- seems to think
of it more as a coprocessor than a computer in and of itself.  It doesn't seem
like there's much of a push to make a total replacement eiher
   Of course, if you believe John Titor, then certain old IBM computers are
quite in demand in the future, so someone'll be using years, seconds, and bits
on a rather limited machine. 8)
   I'd estimate this prediction is good until 2014 -- though there's nothing
I'd like more than to be proven wrong here.

-Phil/CERisE