A disproof of John Titor\'s story
I've spent the better part of two work days reading the posts by TimeTravel_0 and other web-sites' stories about him, and have to say that the stories are enthralling and VERY entertaining...however not true.
The proof I have to offer is this:
His entire reason for time travelling was to get some antiquated hardware in order to fix a Y2K38 UNIX bug, from what I read. Keeping that in mind, why is there a bug in 2038?
Well, 32-bit root servers currently use the FreeBSD 4.7 operating system. As with all Unix and Unix-like operating systems, time and dates in FreeBSD are represented internally as the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch, which was the 1st of January 1970 GMT.
32-bit systems can only store a maximum of 231 non-negative seconds (2,147,483,648 seconds or about 68 years). Which means that 32-bit UNIX systems won't be able to process time beyond 19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM GMT.
The solution is in 64-bit architecture systems; of which you can now own in your own office in an Apple G5. They can store a maximium of 263 non-negative seconds (9,223,372,036,854,775,808 [9.2 Quintillion] seconds or about 292.27 Billion years), which is about 22 times the estimated age of our universe!
As of Wed Oct 15 21:19:11 GMT 2003 there are currently:
1,066,252,751 seconds since the UNIX epoch.
34 years, 3 months, and 3 days until 19 Jan 2038.
That is, of course, in OUR worldline...maybe in HIS worldline 64-bit architectured computing systems were never developed.
I've spent the better part of two work days reading the posts by TimeTravel_0 and other web-sites' stories about him, and have to say that the stories are enthralling and VERY entertaining...however not true.
The proof I have to offer is this:
His entire reason for time travelling was to get some antiquated hardware in order to fix a Y2K38 UNIX bug, from what I read. Keeping that in mind, why is there a bug in 2038?
Well, 32-bit root servers currently use the FreeBSD 4.7 operating system. As with all Unix and Unix-like operating systems, time and dates in FreeBSD are represented internally as the number of seconds since the UNIX Epoch, which was the 1st of January 1970 GMT.
32-bit systems can only store a maximum of 231 non-negative seconds (2,147,483,648 seconds or about 68 years). Which means that 32-bit UNIX systems won't be able to process time beyond 19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM GMT.
The solution is in 64-bit architecture systems; of which you can now own in your own office in an Apple G5. They can store a maximium of 263 non-negative seconds (9,223,372,036,854,775,808 [9.2 Quintillion] seconds or about 292.27 Billion years), which is about 22 times the estimated age of our universe!
As of Wed Oct 15 21:19:11 GMT 2003 there are currently:
1,066,252,751 seconds since the UNIX epoch.
34 years, 3 months, and 3 days until 19 Jan 2038.
That is, of course, in OUR worldline...maybe in HIS worldline 64-bit architectured computing systems were never developed.
