Interesting stat

[RandyVicar]

In Unix, dates are stored as the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970.

I'm guessing that those profiles dated 12/31/69 were zeroed-out in a conversion from one database to another when the date couldn't be translated for some reason.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

That's a known database issue. It was explained to me once, but I forgot the explanation. Something technical, when we moved to a new database or something.

Sorry! It's actually an alien troll bot army imported from 1969 via time machine for the express purpose of voting in special contests.

Well, 12-31-1969 was some servers default date back in the day. Being three days older than dirt, I have a tendency to remember odd facts.

Like the default date on the first PC's was 1-1-1980.

And the Apollo moon missions actually happened back in 1959, not 69. It was a delayed broadcast, because the home team wasn't sold out.

 

[49greg]

Yesterday, we had 510 new users register.

We've had over 400 new users a day for the last 2 weeks (as far as my stats go back).

Most, of course, are registrations on the main site, and also the chat (which is now integrated with the site membership).

Crazy!

I've been on the new chat a few times and noticed that many, if not most, of the people I checked profiles on, were very new to Lit. I wonder if the new chat is part of the reason for many of the recent memberships - lots of people starting new alt IDs to play in chat rooms with?

 

[Handley_Page]

In Unix, dates are stored as the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970.

I'm guessing that those profiles dated 12/31/69 were zeroed-out in a conversion from one database to another when the date couldn't be translated for some reason.

So how does a Unix machine deal with dates from, say, the second world war ?
A negative number of seconds ?

BTW: How does it deal with leap years and leap seconds ?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

So how does a Unix machine deal with dates from, say, the second world war ?
A negative number of seconds ?

BTW: How does it deal with leap years and leap seconds ?

Yes it would be -nnnnnn. The same with the original PC's. It stored the date the same way using 1-1-1980 instead. (The birth date of the first IBM PC)

Many systems today still use the number of day from a specific date. If you don't have that date, the number is meaningless. Of courser you could treat it as the number of day it had been running as the SMART data on hard drives do.

As for leap years, etc. it is all in the algorithm that is used. I used to know the one they used for PC's but that was so long ago I forgot.