Help Today is December 31, 1969?

[death2all110]

Ahh. The LG Ally also suffers from this infamous UNIX Bug where the time is read as being equal to 0 (Epoch Date or January 1, 1970).

Interesting read here:
Real Life Debugged Blog Archive Yo, Today is December 31, 1969?

ScreenShot for proof:

The numbers were masked for obvious reasons.

Crazy huh?

This is fairly common. Google the date.

Some tidbits, for you technical people....

For UNIX, life started on January 1, 1970 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This “Epoch Date” is 0, and UNIX time increments once a second up to the present time. So, ‘0′ in UNIX time-speak equates to January 1, 1970 UTC. (Note: UTC is based on an atomic clock and is synchronized to within about a second of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). GMT was the time standard based on solar observations at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London until about 1925. But UTC and GMT are often used interchangeably.)
Now, I live in the Eastern Time Zone which is 5 hours behind UTC. So at the UNIX bewitching hour in MY HOUSE, UNIX time started at December 31, 1969 at 7:00 PM.
Check it yourself - stick 0 into the UNIX-to-Date/Time machine to see the magic date.
The Old New Thing presents a list of several “sentinel timestamps” like this one, with the variable format and value that lead to these “magic” dates.
So What? Some software applications use 0 to indicate an undefined or NULL date. If this is accidentally assumed to be a valid UNIX time, the value is misinterpreted as … December 31, 1969.

Just thought this was pretty interesting/cool.

Some More:

A “Start of Time” implies an “End of Time” and other Sentinel Timestamps
Now, UNIX time starts at 0 - January 1, 1970 UTC. As the counter increments every second, eventually it gets larger than the variable that holds it. Time is stored different ways on different systems, but the most common is a signed long int, or 32 bits. 31 are available to count from zero, so the largest UNIX number (and hence when UNIX time ENDS) is 2^31 or 2147483648 (in HEX, 0

 

[myfishbear]

too cool! thanks 4 the history lesson as well!

 

[luciusthecanine]

This is why I love computers in general, everything is finite and measureable, which sometimes creates some interesting (albeit, amusing) problrms.

THANKS D2A!

 

[solo65impala]

I noticed that date one time when looking through the system folder on my Ally. I just figured it was a sign for me to get out of there. Pretty neat stuff though.

 

[yohobojo]

I noticed that date one time when looking through the system folder on my Ally. I just figured it was a sign for me to get out of there. Pretty neat stuff though.

Lol. Same here

 

[death2all110]

Yeah. I had the issue on my ipod touch before. wierd thing is, is that its a simple overlooked bug that people do in the os/software. I guess its in android too.

 

[Afteraffekt]

Its in all Linux/Unix based programs

 

[Idunno]

I love cool stuff like this, even though I only understand about 1/2 of it I still find it utterly fascinating.

 

[death2all110]

Its in all Linux/Unix based programs

Yes but some people know about it and fix it. Others dont even notice.

 

[AssertiveBard]

Haha dude that is great. Thanks for posting.