[OT] impending doom: S1G on sept 8-9
we've had y-2-k, when the first digit rolled over. now we've
got s-1-g where we gain a WHOLE NEW DIGIT. pandelirium shall
ensue -- there will be riots in the streets! the home shopping
channel will stock only batteries!
$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime 1_000_000_000'
Sat Sep 8 20:46:40 2001
that is, on "Sun Sep 9 01:46:40 2001 GMT" (i'm in CDT) we will
have reached ONE BILLION SECONDS (a whole gigasecond) since
Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 GMT.
here's my plan:
- all us debian folk invest in battery companies and canned food
companies
- we call dan rather and barbara walters and imply that this
might be a problem, but not if you hire a debian sysadmin:
"luckily this new-digit syndrome is restricted to only those folks
who use base ten. (for example, 1 decimal billion is 33531600616
in base 7 or 12c23a19c in base 13, and 55e1n2g in base 24.)
that should help ameliorate the problem for the rest of us."
tech talk scares many people and drives the price of our
stocks sky high.
- our friends in the media, who are interested only in informing
us of the facts, start a global panic where businesses hire us
as experts to address the situation
- we reap fat consulting fees where the only thing we spend time
on in our presentation materials (economical use of time)
- we cash in our stock and spend half the proceeds on frivolous
stuff (food, shelter) and the other half on a smear campaign
against the dark lord of the northwest...
whaddya think? we've got a bit more than a week to pull it off...
--
DEBIAN NEWBIE TIP #56 from Vineet Kumar <debian-user@virtual.doorstop.net>
:
Troubled by DOS-FORMAT OR MAC-FORMAT TEXT FILES? Here's another
way to deal with those troublesome ^M characters: a simple
tr -d '\015' < dos.file > reg.file
should do the trick. While we're on the subject, a Mac file
can be converted with
tr '\015' '\012' < mac.file > reg.file
You can do all your CR/LF translations with tr as long as you
can remember that macs use CRs, *nices use LFs, and DOS uses
CR+LF.
Also see http://newbieDoc.sourceForge.net/ ...
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