Raise a Glass — Time(2) Turns 40 Tonight 114
ddt writes "Raise your glasses of champagne in a toast at midnight. The time(2) system call turns 40 tonight, and is now officially 'over the hill.' It's been dutifully keeping track of time for clueful operating systems since January 1, 1970." And speaking of time, if you don't have a *nix system handy, or just want a second opinion, an anonymous reader points out this handy way to check just how far it is after local midnight in Unix time. Updated 10:03 GMT by timothy: The Unix-time-in-a-browser link has been replaced by a Rick Astley video; you have been warned.
Damn you Slashdot! (Score:5, Funny)
Windows (Score:2, Funny)
The Windows clock starts the second Gates stiffed IBM out of the DOS market.
Re:Unix epoch? (Score:5, Funny)
Why didn't we restart it at 2000 amidst the Y2K mess?
You have a promising career in middle management ahead of you!
That's funny,... (Score:5, Funny)
My clock says today is Setting Orange, Day 73 of the Aftermath in the Year of Our Lady of Discord 3175.
Re:It's not April 1 yet (Score:5, Funny)
You should install the RickBlockPlus [functionalperfection.com] browser addon to prevent this sort of thing happening.
Re:First Post! (Score:3, Funny)
Beware what? Seeing in the new year with Rick Astley seems like a pretty good thing to me. Then again, I am easily amused!
Re:Flash? Seriously? (Score:1, Funny)
It makes sense when the time hits midnight.
Re:It's not April 1 yet (Score:2, Funny)
Oh, you people. It's just an alternative to the usual UNIX epoch [wikipedia.org].
time_rickroll(2) Unix Programmer's Manual time_rickroll(2)
NAME
time_rickroll - get time since 16 November, 1987 [wikipedia.org].
SYNOPSIS
#include
time_t time_rickroll(time_t *t);
DESCRIPTION
time_rickroll returns the time since the Astley Epoch (00:00:00 UTC, November 26, 1987 [wikipedia.org]) measured in seconds.
If t is non-NULL, the returned value is also stored in the memory pointed to by t.
RETURN VALUE
On success, the value of time in seconds since the start of the Astley Epoch is returned. On error,
((time_t)-1) is returned, and errno is set appropriately.
ERRORS
EFAULT t points outside your accessible address space.
NOTES
See time(2) for limitations with regards to leap seconds and other matters of consistency. In addition, the exact timing
of release of "Never Gonna Give You Up" on November 26, 1987 is assumed to be 00:00:00 UTC on that date, even though
it is unlikely that a midnight release party was held. Some purists also believe that the correct Astley Epoch begins
sometime in May 2007 [wikipedia.org], however the possibility exists of
earlier examples of rickrolling, but none can predate November 26, 1987, the Astley Epoch chosen here.
POTENTIAL SIDE EFFECTS
There have been scattered reports of a bug that affects video and sound output when this function is called.
SEE ALSO
date(1), time(2), time_duckroll(2)