Yesiree, Bob!
We're soon coming up on the one billionth tick! Those of us on UNIX and UNIX-like systems, get ready for the one billionth rollover tick on your internal clocks!
The epoch, January 01, 1970, is the date from which your clock counts ticks to calculate the time. The system recognizes 1970-01-01, and counts from there. And this year, we will witness the one billionth tick!
Try it yourself! Hit your command prompt, and type:
$ date -ud "1970-01-01 00:00:00 + 1000000000 seconds"
Your computer says "Okay. I'm going to add one billion seconds to the date of January 1, 1970, and spit out the resulting date."
Sun Sep 9 06:46:40 UTC 2001
That's right, kids! On Sunday, September 9th at 06:46:40 in the morning (UTC anyway), pop open a container of the beverage of your choice. It's One-Billion Celebration Time! For those of you on United States Eastern Time, the time to celebrate would be as follows:
Sun Sep 9 02:46:40 EDT 2001
If you happen to live outside the Eastern timezone, here's the command to find the proper shindig time in your local timezone (provided your clock is set correctly):
$ date -d "1970-01-01 00:00:00 + 1000000000 seconds"
Remember to celebrate! This is a momentous event! The two-billionth tick isn't going to show up until Wednesday - May 18, 2033, so make this one count!
Whee!
WARNING - Do not - I repeat,
DO NOT attempt to calculate ticks
beyond 2,147,465,647 seconds. You will cause a
severe temporal anomaly which would cause
space and
time to
collapse in on itself, thus unravelling the
space-time continuum and destroying the very
fabric of the
universe!
Granted, that's a worst-case scenario; the destruction could just be limited to our own galaxy.
You tried it, didn't you? You fuck! I warned you, told you of the severe consequences, and you went ahead and toyed with it anyway!
Actually, it's just a bug in the clock system. Sleep soundly. There won't be any destruction.
You'll probably just end up being transported to the early 1900s or something.