I have some rgb on, laptop has back lightning that is brighter than my lamp though so that’s never on unless I need a torch and for some reason don’t have my phone.
But if time travel is a thing, imagine the whole new time nightmares! Oh you went back a year with your phone? Now all your TLS root certs are invalid because you’re before the start date. Or you have files/emails/whatever that are dated in the future. I guess you can get to that state by just setting your clock forward but I imagine some stuff would break.
I worked on a project that had a few spots where we compare a saved timestamp to the current time. During testing, the client would randomly change their device time a few days forward or backward and complain that things weren’t working as expected. I had to explain to them multiple times that they were basically time traveling, and the program was actually handling it fairly well all things considered.
I’m not even that old, born in 2000, but I have never enjoyed the rgb bullshit on computers. I even specifially got my keyboard without backlight so I could have a wirelles one with decent battery life
I’m also oldish. But man, I freaking love lights. Of all kinds. I just love making shit out of lights or doing weird things. LEDs and neopixels are amazing. I have permanently installed lights on the house, and entire (small) room in the house dedicated for a honelab with RGB everywhere. It’s cool as shit (to me).
But not on my work systems. That would be really annoying. Soft lights and elegant design for me.
I work at a small computer shop and I love putting all those RGB lights in for people. Especially when I can do a full aRGB setup with a SignalRGB layout so patterns can move across the whole machine. For my own computer the only lights are the tiny power and hard drive activity lights, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. RGB lights belong only in other people’s computers.
Side by side most of the time. I put them on arms so I can move them around and swivel them. It’s ridiculous having two 34" Ultrawides. But, I can. So I Do. I also run a 3rd 40" 4k display when I need it or want to sit further back.
I just made the switch from 3 24 inch monitor to a single 49 inch super ultrawide. It’s basically 3 monitors with no bezels. A lot of things are annoying though like full-screening videos/games but there are workarounds.
Yeah I went from 1 32" 1440p and two 1080p side monitors to just a single 4k 43" and I’m saying that the time of multi monitor setups has come to an end.
Worked on a project where devices just magically froze, but only during the month of February!
Turned out the people who had written the firmware had decided to do their own time math to save space and had put in an exception in the code for leap year values. Except instead of February 29th, it kicked in for the whole month. And the math was wrong so you ended up with negative values.
The product was due for launch in March of that year and was headed to manufacturing. It was by sheer luck that someone ran a test on February 1st and caught the problem.
Embedded portable device with a teeny ARM processor. Sadly, no room for linux anything or even an RTC. Every time it connected to a phone, the phone would set its clock so the timestamps were somewhat close to being accurate.
However, if you swapped out the AAA battery and DIDN’T connect it to the phone at least once, all your subsequent readings would go back to zero epoch and would be forgotten 🤷🏻♂️
If it had been up to me, I would have included a proper real-time-clock in the design and done things a lot differently.
But the device was designed by one company and the BLE and processor module by another. For some ungodly reason neither trusted each other, so nobody was given access to the firmware source on either side. I worked for a third company that was their customer paying the bill. I was allowed to see the firmware for both sides, but only read only, on laptops provided by each company, one at a time, in a conference room with their own people watching everything. Yeah, it was strange.
I was there because the MCU and the BLE processor sometimes glitched and introduced random noise. Turned out the connection between the two parts were unshielded UART with no error detection/correction 🤦🏻♂️
It was concidental that we hit the date glitch. Took all our effort just to get them to add a checksum and retry. The tiny MCU was maxed out of space. No way to fit in any more code for date math.
Thanks. On the plus side, I got to try ‘soup dumpling’ – still the best I’ve ever had. And Kaoliang, the most gut-busting distilled beverage known to mankind. OTOH, the product shipped, won lots of awards, and got national coverage for the company.
Nothing to do with timezones, but still, fun times.
Unix time doesn’t help with timezones… It’s always in UTC.
Unix timestamps also get a bit weird because of leap seconds. Unix timestamps have no support for leap seconds (the POSIX spec says a Unix day is always exactly 86400 seconds), so they’re usually implemented by repeating the same timestamp twice. This means that the timestamp is ambiguous for that repeated second - one timestamp actually refers to two different moments in time. To quote the example from Wikipedia:
Unix time numbers are repeated in the second immediately following a positive leap second. The Unix time number 1483142400 is thus ambiguous: it can refer either to start of the leap second (2016-12-31 23:59:60) or the end of it, one second later (2017-01-01 00:00:00). In the theoretical case when a negative leap second occurs, no ambiguity is caused, but instead there is a range of Unix time numbers that do not refer to any point in UTC time at all.
Some systems instead spread a positive leap second across the entire day (making each second a very very tiny bit longer) but technically this violates POSIX since it’s modifying the length of a second.
Aren’t timestamps fun?
Luckily, the standards body that deals with leap seconds has said they’ll be discontinued by 2035, so at least it’s one less thing that developers dealing with timestamps will have to worry about.
Don’t try to write your own date/time code. Just don’t. Use something built by someone else.
Unix time doesn’t help with timezones… It’s always in UTC.
Unix timestamp is always in UTC which is why it’s helpful. It’s seconds since Jan 1st 1970 UTC. Libraries let you specify timezone usually if you need to convert from/to a human readable string.
Don’t try to write your own date/time code. Just don’t. Use something built by someone else.
…yes that’s why UNIX timestamps are helpful, because it’s a constant standard across all the libraries.
Some systems instead spread a positive leap second across the entire day (making each second a very very tiny bit longer) but technically this violates POSIX since it’s modifying the length of a second.
Unix timestamp is always in UTC which is why it’s helpful.
Any time you show the time to a user, you have to use a timezone. That’s why the unix timestamp has limited usefulness - it doesn’t do a lot on its own and practically all use cases for times require the timezone to be known (unless you’re dealing with a system that can both store and display dates in UTC). Even for things like “add one week to this timestamp”, you can’t do that without being timezone-aware, since it’s not always an exact number of seconds as you need to take Daylight Saving transitions and leap seconds into account.
Then that system should be trashed.
A lot of systems just don’t handle leap seconds well. Many years ago, Reddit was down for four hours because their systems couldn’t deal with leap seconds. Smearing the extra second across the whole day causes fewer issues as software doesn’t have to be built to handle an extra second in the day.
If I remember correctly, they’re updating the standards to allow for more deviation between UTC time and “actual time”. They’ll likely replace leap seconds with a leap minute that happens much less frequently, implemented by spreading it across the whole day, similar to the leap second workaround I mentioned.
… server/enterprise level HDDs are loud af, I swear some brands are dedicated to it.
That leaves us only with the tiny WD Red Plus (but not Red Pro), above 20TB afaik only Exos (from X21 onwards) doesn’t alert the neighbours.
But in (second half-ish?) of 90s HDDs differed a lot in terms of loudness. I was one of those nerds with custom (fully home made) water loop just to achieve some level of quietness.
Professionally similar; 1024x768 here (might have had an 800x600 laptop or thereabouts).
But when people today complain about how how anything less than 4k x 60fps on some game is unplayable, I remember playing Doom in 320x200 on a 14" monitor, and still having to shrink the screen into an even tinier window, so I could get 10fps.
programmer_humor
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.