When is epoch

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However, blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. More information. There are many epochs in use. This choice of epoch is arbitrary. Many granularities Different systems use different granularity in counting time. ISO Because there is so much variance in the use of an epoch reference and in the granularities, it is generally best to avoid communicating moments as a count-from-epoch. Short answer: Why not? There's no great merit in choosing an arbitrary epoch just to be different.

Because Unix was developed in and first released in and it was thus reasonable to assume that no machine would have to represent a system time earlier than As a developer of historical simulation games, it seems pretty silly that the designers of some time objects tend to assume all programs will only want to represent dates in the future or recent past.

Of course, we can program our own representations, or work in an adjustment factor, but still. The same pre-epoch issue applies to "practical" non-game uses, such as business spreadsheets, scientific data presentation, time machine UIs, etc. So it wasn't "silly" to make the most basic thing that worked. OP is correct on a meta-level, the schemes we work out for time have always been fairly arbitrary. The number of days in a year, number of days in the month, year "0", and the rules for leaps year are Every system is just a series of crappy compromises made because it was the best they could do with the available technology and worked well enough for their immediate use-case.

Which is true of all engineering projects : — Indolering. Show 3 more comments. The Overflow Blog. Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Podcast Do polyglots have an edge when it comes to mastering programming Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked Narrative's Data Streaming Platform defaults to using Unix time in milliseconds for all timestamp fields.

January 1st, at UTC is referred to as the Unix epoch. Early Unix engineers picked that date arbitrarily because they needed to set a uniform date for the start of time, and New Year's Day, , seemed most convenient. The year problem is related to Unix time because times after UTC on 19 January will require computers to store the value as greater than bits.

Systems built assuming that the time would always fit withing bits will result in undefined behavior potentially causing those systems to crash, become unusable, or create other undesired effects. The problem is similar to the Y2K problem which arose when developers assumed that years could be stored in two digits instead of four.

Leap seconds are ignored in Unix time. Leap seconds have the same Unix time as the second before it. When this happens, it will disrupt numerous time-bound activities on a system like software licenses, backup operations, etc.

Some people suggested the bit value should be changed to an unsigned integer value. This meant Unix systems would be able to interpret dates up to the year However, this was found to not be effective for dates prior to Developers soon came up with a bit signed integer value to store Unix time. This means Unix time will be valid for approximately the next 14 billion years. This is nearly 22 times greater than the current estimated age of the universe! This should last to the end of the universe estimated to be The Linux kernel introduced this bit value to store the number of elapsed seconds since the epoch from version 2.

By the year , it is believed that bit systems will be out of vogue, so this should not be a problem. This is expected to work until the year That video garnered so many views that it crossed the bit threshold.

YouTube has since begun using a bit value to track the view count for its videos, stating they did not expect the number of views for a video to cross the bit value.