Alan J. Wylie

VMS got it right

VMS (since 1977) has stored time as 100ns clock ticks since 17 November 1858 (the start of the Reduced Julian Day (an astronomical timescale, the "reduced" variant was introduced by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1957 to record the orbit of Sputnik). It will run out of bits in the year 31,086.

Evil Auditor

Re: VMS got it right
...and about 29,000 years from now, someone will have discovered an ancient calculation machine and will have figured out how it worked. And they will see that its clock stops in the year 31,086. And some of them will start a cult that believes the end is near for an ancient civilisation allowed their calender to run until then...

Phil O'SophicalSilver badge

Re: VMS got it right

VMS got most things right.

There is, though, a well-known bug filed against VMS for a related issue. The standard message display only permits 4-digit years, so even if the clock is fine until 31,086 there will be a display error when it ticks over on Dec 31st 9999. Last time I saw that bug in the DEC tracking system it was in an 'accepted' state, with a note that it will be fixed "in a future major architecture". Sadly unlikely now...

Feeling old yet? Let the Reg ruin your day for you. We are now substantially closer to the 2038 problem (5,849 days) than it has been since the Year 2000 problem (yep, 8,049 days since Y2K).

Why do we mention it? Well, thanks to keen-eyed Reg reader Calum Morrison, we've spotted a bit of the former, and a hint of what lies beneath the Beeb's digital presence, when he sent in a snapshot that implies Old Auntie might be using a 32-bit Linux in iPlayer, and something with a kernel older than Linux 5.10, too.

That 2020 kernel release was the first able to serve as a base for a 32-bit system designed to run beyond 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. //

Like Y2K, it's easy to explain and fairly easy to fix: traditionally, UNIX stored the time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 ­– but they held it in a signed 32-bit value. That means that at seven seconds after pi o'clock in the morning of January 18th, 2038 (UTC), when it will be 2,147,483,647 (2³¹) seconds after the "epoch", the next time will be -2³¹: 20:45:52 in the evening of December 13th, 1901.

It has already been fixed in Linux and any other recent UNIX-ish OSes. The easy way is to move to a 64-bit value, giving a range of 292 billion years either way. That'll do, pig.

The fun bit is finding all the places it might occur, like this fun (and old and long-fixed) MongoDB bug. MongoDB stores the date correctly, Python stores the date correctly, but dates were passed from one to the other using a 32-bit value.

vtcodger

Re: Attitude problem
YOU may have spent New Years Eve 2000 at a great party. I and many others I'm sure, spent New Years morning,2000 booting 100-plus PCs to make sure they at least sort of worked -- never a certainty with Windows-98 even on normal mornings.

MiguelC

Re: Attitude problem
I was on duty that evening. At midnight we nodded, saluted each other, and went to work checking everything was running smoothly. Having had no alerts whatsoever, at around 1AM I went to the nearest ATM and checked my balance and latest account movements (an account in another bank than the one I was working for at the time). There was an interest credit of around the equivalent of 3000€. Resisting the urge to spend it there and then, I went back, showed the slip to my co-workers and pondered on what would happen from there on. At 8 AM, after an uneventful night on the job, I went down and checked my balance again. Without a trace of that earlier payment, it now showed the correct and, unfortunately, much smaller interest deposit...

Someone's night was indeed a lot more eventful than mine ;) //

Bill GraySilver badge
Reply Icon
Re: The bug is in the support library code (libc?) of a 1982 C compiler?

I suspect most time library code of this vintage also omits the year 2000 leap year (as I recall SGI Indigo Irix 4 did) and would be a day out after 2000.02.28.

I dunno how common that particular error would be? To screw things up that way, you have to simultaneously know that (in the Gregorian calendar) "century" years are not leap years, but also not know that years evenly divisible by 400 are leap years. That is to say, you have to be a little ignorant, but not completely ignorant.

If you're completely ignorant of the problem, you'll say that 2000 should have a leap day, and be correct for the wrong reasons.

Museum boffins find code that crashes in 2037

A stark warning about the upcoming Epochalypse, also known as the "Year 2038 problem," has come from the past, as National Museum Of Computing system restorers have discovered an unsetting issue while working on ancient systems.

Robin Downs, a volunteer who was recently involved in an exhibition of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) gear at the museum, was on hand to demonstrate the problem to The Register in the museum's Large Systems Gallery, which now houses a running PDP-11/73. //

"So we found bugs that exist, pre-2038, in writing this that we didn't know about."

The Year 2038 problem occurs in systems that store Unix time – the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970) in a signed 32-bit integer (64-bit is one modern approach, but legacy systems have a habit of lingering).

At 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, the second counter will overflow. In theory, this will result in a time and date being returned before the epoch – 20:45:52 UTC on December 13, 1901, but that didn't happen for Downs. //

zb42
As the article is specifically about date problems that occur before the 32bit unix time rollover, I think it should be mentioned that:

32bit NTP is going to roll over on the 7th of February 2036.

Perseid Meteors from Durdle Door

The limestone arch in the foreground in Dorset, England is known as Durdle Door, a name thought to survive from a thousand years ago.

Maximum-Stretch® is a white, elastomeric, acrylic, rubberized roof coating & sealant with 650% elongation to resist cracking & peeling. With 88% light reflectivity, the bright white finish reduces surface temperatures resulting in lowered cooling costs.

• Use on metal, built-up roofing, rolled roofing, concrete, EPDM & wood
• Designed for low-slope roof maintenance 
• Non-toxic, eco-friendly, low VOC & made in the USA

The Preamble

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Made by a pharmacist whose son was sick with croup, Vicks VapoRub saw skyrocketing sales during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak.

For most people, memories of childhood coughs and colds are synonymous with a menthol-smelling ointment in a dark blue jar with a turquoise cap.

For more than a century, Vicks VapoRub has been a household name across continents. How it became one has roots in the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 20th century.

America’s lower judiciary is out of control — and Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is putting it on notice.

In a Thursday order, the nation’s highest court granted (in part) a request by the Trump administration to temporarily pause a lower court blockade on the National Institutes of Health’s bid to terminate DEI-related grants totaling nearly $800 million. The ruling was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s Democrat appointees saying they would have denied the administration’s application in full. //

In addition to signing onto the majority’s Thursday decision, Gorsuch penned a concurring opinion in the case in which he ripped into the lower judiciary’s out-of-control behavior. While noting that “[l]ower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions … they are never free to defy them.”

Citing a related case recently before the Supreme Court (Department of Ed. v. California), the Trump appointee highlighted how the high court “granted a stay [in that case] because it found the government likely to prevail in showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction to order the government to pay grant obligations.” He wrote, “California explained that ‘suits based on “any express or implied contract with the United States”’ do not belong in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but in the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act.”

“Rather than follow that direction, the district court in this case permitted a suit involving materially identical grants to proceed to final judgment under the APA,” Gorsuch wrote. “As support for its course, the district court invoked the ‘persuasive authority’ of ‘the dissent[s] in California‘ and an earlier court of appeals decision California repudiated … That was error.”

Gorsuch went on to underscore that “the promise of our legal system that like cases are treated alike means that a lower court ought not invoke the ‘persuasive authority’ of a dissent or a repudiated court of appeals decision to reach a different conclusion on an equivalent record.” More to the point, however, he noted that the district court’s apparent rebuke of the precedent very recently established by SCOTUS in the California case is not an isolated incident among the lower courts.

“If the district court’s failure to abide by California were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it. But two months ago another district court tried to ‘compel compliance’ with a different ‘order that this Court ha[d] stayed,'” Gorsuch wrote. “Still another district court recently diverged from one of this Court’s decisions even though the case at hand did not differ ‘in any pertinent respect’ from the one this Court had decided … So this is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case ‘squarely controlled’ by one of its precedents.” //

“All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress,'” Gorsuch wrote.

Making original films for young men isn’t that hard, but you have to quit pushing gay race communism and appeal to masculine virtue. //

If you understand that this is what appeals to young men, then the movie scripts pretty much write themselves. Make movies with masculine heroes — not necessarily muscle-bound meatheads or ridiculous superheroes, but real men who are heroes because they’re willing to suffer and deny themselves for a greater good, detach from their own desires to pursue justice, and lay down their lives to protect those under their charge.

Smart filmmakers understand this intuitively. Christopher Nolan is reportedly working on an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, due out next summer. It’s probably going to be a blockbuster. Mel Gibson is now finally filming “The Resurrection of the Christ,” a two-part follow-up to his 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” which grossed nearly $610 million worldwide. Gibson is also working on a limited TV series about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, when a small contingent of knights and Maltese citizens repelled a vastly superior Ottoman force.

These are the kinds of films and TV shows young men want to see. If Disney, or any other production company, wants to appeal to young men and not just lecture at them, then make films that are unapologetically American and Christian.

Make films about crusaders in which the crusaders are the heroes (unlike Ridley Scott’s botched effort in 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven). Make films about the American Revolution (there are precious few good ones). Make sympathetic films and TV series about the great European explorers and conquistadors, the pioneers who settled the American continent, and the soldiers who fought in the Civil War — on both sides. Revive the great tradition of the American western that gave us the catalogues of Sam Peckinpah and John Ford. Make a TV series based on the Hardy Boys — one that actually resembles the original books. Make sci-fi action films about America competing against China to colonize the moon or Mars — in which China is the villain, just like in real life.

And don’t worry about the Chinese market at all, or any international markets. Just make films for American audiences that are pro-American. One of the reason’s Tom Cruise’s 2022 film Maverick was so successful is that it wasn’t preaching woke nonsense. It was just a fun, patriotic action film with awesome stunts, a great cast, and a compelling storyline. Just do that.

If Disney wanted to — and it doesn’t, not really — it could make countless films and TV shows that deeply appeal to young men. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do. But to do that, Disney would have to repudiate its woke ideology and quit trying to lecture young men about how masculinity is toxic, America is bad, Christianity is oppressive, and everything should be gay. And let’s be honest: Disney is incapable of doing that.

The fiery furnaces are there by God’s direct permission. It is misleading to imagine that we are developed in spite of our circumstances; we are developed because of them. It is mastery in circumstances that is needed, not mastery over them.
The Love of God—The Message of Invincible Consolation, 674 R

You wouldn’t believe this if you saw it in a movie

If you were watching a movie and saw a 737 swerve to avoid a truck on the runway and have it narrowly pass between the nose and main landing gear, you'd think the script writers had gone too far. But that’s exactly what happened this February in Brazil. On this week’s AvTalk we walk through the incredible sequence of events. https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/avtalk-podcast/avtalk-332/

Putin en route to Anchorage

Russian president Vladimir Putin is en route to Anchorage, Alaska to meet with US president Donald Trump at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. https://www.flightradar24.com/RSD539/3bbf7fe8

Roku SoundBridge Legacy Proxy
Let the Music Play...Again!

And so, after a long wander looking for an “ism” to explain what’s wrong with her love life, in the final paragraph, she turns to the words of a friend: “’The old way of mating is dead,’ said my friend at our colloquy of female complaint over dinner, ‘and the new one has yet to be born.'”

Garnett and her friend believe this may give some comfort in their relational wasteland, but in truth, the old ways are alive. Plenty of people still get married and remain happily and faithfully married. But she is right that the old ways are not alive for everyone — not for as many people as they should be. And that’s the big picture explanation that Garnett struggled to identify.

Garnett’s present unhappiness is a result of the ideology and behaviors she has promoted. The immediate cause of her unhappiness is that she’s a middle-aged woman hooking up with noncommittal men. The more comprehensive cause is the culture she has marinated in and furthered. She obviously yearns for the “old-fashioned man-woman stuff” she wants to dismiss. And she should — she was made for it. But our culture encourages people to give their bodies quickly and their hearts slowly, if at all. This divides the person and precludes genuine love, which requires the gift of the whole self. This is why Christian sexual morality — and the marital sexual exclusivity it requires — is not a killjoy. Rather, it is a protector and promoter of human well-being. It directs us toward our good and the good of others.

Let the Music Play...Again!

If your home router links to the right IP address...

To enroll your PC in the ESU program, you'll need to meet Microsoft's list of requirements and anti-requirements, which we'll summarize here for convenience:

• A PC running Windows 10 Home, Pro, Pro Education, or Workstation with all available update installed.
• An administrator account.
• A Microsoft account. Even if you usually sign in with a local account, you need a Microsoft account to acquire the ESU license.
• The PC can't be in kiosk mode, joined to an Active Directory domain, joined to Microsoft Entra, or enrolled in any kind of mobile device management (MDM), which will cover a lot of workplace PCs. Microsoft has separate ESU programs for businesses, schools, and other large organizations.

If your PC meets those conditions, you'll enroll in the ESU program by opening the Settings app and clicking Windows Update. You should see a status message telling you that Windows 10 updates end in October of 2025, with an "enroll now" link you can click to enroll in the Extended Security Updates program.

Cracker Barrel wasn’t just a company or a restaurant. It represented a slice of Americana that millions would desperately like to return to. A time where people worked with their hands, and prayed before meals, and didn’t bother locking their doors at night. The old soda signs reminded us that our money wasn’t always worthless and our country wasn’t always run by greedy bankers. We used to be a country that built things and conquered the frontier.

That’s the feeling that Cracker Barrel used to evoke, and it’s what made its customers so loyal. It’s why people would stop there for lunch during a long road trip instead of just grabbing fast food and getting back on the highway. It’s why people were happy to wait 30 minutes for a table after Sunday School and happily mill about the store until their table was ready.

And it’s that feeling and that America that the woke parasites in charge of Cracker Barrel deliberately sought to maliciously destroy. They refused to fix the actual problems and instead decided the real problem was their own customers, whom they set out to reeducate.

I hope they had their fun, because Cracker Barrel is done. They killed it, wrapped the corpse in a rainbow flag, and then made it do a little puppet show in New York City for the entertainment of all their woke little friends.

I can’t believe I caught THIS on camera… a bee having a wee! 🐝👇

Yep, it turns out that bees do wee, well kind of – but not like we do. Apparently they’ve got a clever little system that gets rid of wee and poop in one go, usually mid-flight, so they don’t mess up the hive (that’s very well trained!)

It’s normally such a blink-and-you-miss-it thing… but while I was filming the echinops in full bloom at @fieldgateflowers this week, one bee just went for it right in front of me.

On 12 September,1983, the Rev. William Still, Gilcomston South Church, Aberdeen, universally recognized as the senior parish minister, both in years and influence, among evangelicals in the Church of Scotland, gave the following address to some fifty ministers at an In-Service course of his denomination, convened at St Andrews. The address was published in The Banner of Truth magazine in 1984, and was drawn to the attention of the men at the 2010 US Ministers’ Conference in Grantham, PA, by Craig Troxel, one of the speakers, who comments:

When I first read this article it helped to forge in my mind an all-important distinction. When it comes to the stewardship of the Gospel, there are two basic choices before the Church of Christ. Either the Church will be content to apply itself to God’s ordinary means and trust him for their extraordinary ends; or, the Church will pursue extraordinary means and content itself with ordinary ends. In his reflection of four decades of ministry William Still describes the extraordinary fruit that God brought about through one congregation’s simple devotion to God’s appointed means of grace: Word, sacrament and prayer. In a day when there are so many voices calling for the church to do ‘something more,’ here is a plea for the church to pursue ‘its own native activity’ in the power of the Spirit. One need not claim membership in the Stillite clan to feel a deep kinship with our brother and his (still) timely word. //

He says that he found, that apart from the Early Fathers and the Reformers, any such systematic teaching and preaching of the Scriptures was short-lived, and even the Puritans, who certainly covered the Scriptures in depth, used textual rather than systematic expository preaching. One is not saying that our practice has not been done by preachers throughout history and even today, but I think you will agree that it is far from the accepted form.

However, the abundant fruit of this form of ministry, which I have documented in a book called The Work of the Pastor, is such that only a lunatic would have abandoned it despite all that was said against it. //

Now, I wonder if any are saying, ‘How incredibly narrow this is as an example of congregational life! Such intense spirituality!’ Perhaps you think you could not stand it, let alone your congregation! Well, all I can say is that from that fount of praise, prayer and Bible Study every conceivable kind of outreach goes on into the wider church and the community. //

I take the opposite view, having seen the dissipation and dilution of effort by such all-inclusive activities on the part of the different denominations I have been in. I felt that my time as Pastor could best be employed by concentrating almost wholly on feeding the sheep and tending the lambs in their spiritual growth through a corporate life of prayer and the ministry of the Word. Then let the congregation go out – and encourage them to do so – with an absolutely free commission to be leaven throughout the community and to live their life out there amongst the people as the good Lord guided. //

You see, you could get crowds to come to pie suppers You see, you could get crowds to come to pie suppers and dances in the hall, but precious few to church on Sunday, until things were so bad that old J. T. Cox – the compiler of our Church Law Book, who was Presbytery Clerk back then – twice tried to close our congregation down because it could not pay its way. Serve it right, too!

I hope you see what I am saying: let the church be the church, and let it not incorporate into its fundamental constitution anything but its own native activity, and let all the rest be as much in the nature of an unofficial activity and outreach as possible. //

I was saying that in our experience the whole future of young folk attending church – to put it no higher than mere attendance, although I can put it higher – right up to early adulthood, has hung on getting them to attend regularly, preferably in the family pew, during childhood. To say that we cannot do this in our modern age is surely the most pathetic admission of failure in our elementary responsibility as Christian parents. //

But instead of arguing with people that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God and presenting a wealth of apologetics, as many conservatives have spent their time doing, one has felt that the way to press people into the kingdom, especially thinking young people, is to preach the Word and teach it, and let it do its own work by the Holy Spirit in their consciences, ‘precept upon precept, line upon line’ (although I know that these phrases were perhaps first used by Isaiah for a different purpose). I mean preaching in a dogmatic way, not in the aggressive sense of the word but in the positive sense of it. And it is axiomatic and essential that we must present the truth with that backing of prayer and that dependence upon the Holy Spirit (in both the study of the Word and in the declaration of it) which releases the latent power of the Word to reach not only the minds, but the consciences, hearts and wills of the hearers. Our purpose must be nothing less than life transformation and, consequently, the calling of many into the Lord’s service. //

William Still (1911-1997) was the Minister of Gilcomston South Church of Scotland, Aberdeen, from 1945 until his death. This article was previously published in The Banner of Truth magazine, No. 244 (January 1984),

When I switched to a locally compounded all-natural testosterone cream, the issue was solved. And the FDA has made it clear that it is interested in taking compounded creams for testosterone and estradiol off the market, as well. The FDA would prefer I inject myself with improved synthetics than allow me to opt for an organic alternative. //

Big Pharma loathes the idea of local providers and compounding pharmacies, because there is no money in such things. Something similar to this issue may one day affect you or someone you love. After all, there is more money to be made and more power to be had in treating sick people than in actually seeing them get better. There is more money to be made and more power to be had in forcing people to take synthetic medications than in allowing them to choose a natural alternative.