Re: February 30th 2000

From: Mike A. Harris (mharris@meteng.on.ca)
Date: Fri Jan 14 2000 - 05:09:58 EST

On Wed, 12 Jan 2000, Guest section DW wrote:

>Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 23:23:42 +0100
>From: Guest section DW <dwguest@win.tue.nl>
>To: Daniel Lafraia <lafraia@iron.com.br>, svlug@svlug.org
>Cc: linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu
>Subject: Re: February 30th 2000
>
>On Wed, Jan 12, 2000 at 11:40:05AM -0200, Daniel Lafraia wrote:
>>
>> This year we're going to have the day February 30th
>
>Wait! It isnt April 1st yet.

Just wait another week and they'll propose that April 1st doesn't
exist. Instead it will be March 32nd. And oh my God! All the
computers will fail!

Shit, we're going to be dealing with computer date hysteria for
ages to come now.

I say we do away with dates completely, and create a new SI time
measurement that fits into the theory of Relativity well or
Quantum Mechanics. Say some number that is the number of
electrons orbiting a 1 meter rod of pure uranium or something
equaly worthy of an ISO standard due to it's cool geekness
factor. We can begin measuring time in those units after that.
We pick a starting point say a year from now, and from then on we
refer to time in the new metric time units. It would be yet
another elimination of oddball units. Lets say we call the new
units "torvald". Then 10 "torvalds" would be a decitorvald, 100
a centitorvald, a million a megatorvald. Small kernel timing
measurements would be in nanotorvalds.

Metric prefixes would totally control long periods of time, so a
"year" would not be in the new time units. A Gregorian year
would perhaps be 189456 centitorvalds.

You wouldn't have a birthday, it would be a birthkilotorvald or
birthmegatorvald depending on what length of time the base unit
"torvald" was initially given. Actually we should assign it to
something that works well in kernel calculations, and let
everything else in the world work around that. ;o)

Any takers? Kiss goodbye all time keeping problems. We phase in
Torvaldian time in a few years after the standard is passed, and
have a 37 year overlap period (very strategic eh? ;o) - then
after that only Torvaldian time is used.

The only catch is what size int the value should be stored in. I
vote for at least a 64bit signed int if the torvaldian epoch
begins now, or unsigned if we bring it back a few etatorvalds.

Ok... time to go to bed now... You may now rejoin your regularly
scheduled pointless flamewar...

G'nite. 

--
Mike A. Harris                                     Linux advocate     
Computer Consultant                                  GNU advocate  
Capslock Consulting                          Open Source advocate

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