Firefox Updates Installed Decades Ago
-
Minor WTF, but it gave me a chuckle none-the-less:
-
Let me guess, your timezone is GMT-06:00?
-
@jnz said:
Let me guess, your timezone is GMT-06:00?
Yep. Can I assume from your response that this is a known bug?
-
@DeepThought said:
@jnz said:
Let me guess, your timezone is GMT-06:00?
Yep. Can I assume from your response that this is a known bug?No, you can assume that the date you display in your image is the Unix epoch in GMT-6. Seeing the epoch in strange places isn't a WTF any more, it's a shrug and a sigh.
-
@Kyanar said:
@DeepThought said:
@jnz said:
Let me guess, your timezone is GMT-06:00?
Yep. Can I assume from your response that this is a known bug?No, you can assume that the date you display in your image is the Unix epoch in GMT-6. Seeing the epoch in strange places isn't a WTF any more, it's a shrug and a sigh.
Epoch fail!
-
thatdude wins the thread.
-
@Kyanar said:
No, you can assume that the date you display in your image is the Unix epoch in GMT-6. Seeing the epoch in strange places isn't a WTF any more, it's a shrug and a sigh.
Someone explain to me then the Mac Snow Leopard bug that's going around where people's folders get corrupted and say they were created in February 1946. I know the Mac epoch works differently but I've forgotten exactly why they chose 1946.
-
@lolwhat said:
thatdude wins the thread.
Regurgitating xkcd does not win you anything.
-
@belgariontheking said:
When I am President of the World, it will win you a one-way trip to the salt mines.@lolwhat said:
thatdude wins the thread.
Regurgitating xkcd does not win you anything.
-
@Nyquist said:
@Kyanar said:
No, you can assume that the date you display in your image is the Unix epoch in GMT-6. Seeing the epoch in strange places isn't a WTF any more, it's a shrug and a sigh.
Someone explain to me then the Mac Snow Leopard bug that's going around where people's folders get corrupted and say they were created in February 1946. I know the Mac epoch works differently but I've forgotten exactly why they chose 1946.
Aren't Macs Unix now? (i.e. 1969 epoch?)
They used to have an 1904 epoch, because that saves a line of code when calculating leap years (the original Mac developers had to fit a *lot* in 128k of memory.) Of course, you need that line they saved when 2000 came along.
What's awesome about Mac Classic is that the year was stored as a separate int value. Meaning, it could track dates from 32 thousand B.C. to 32 thousand A.D. Makes Mac Classic the perfect OS to run your time machine.
-
@blakeyrat said:
What's awesome about Mac Classic is that the year was stored as a separate int value. Meaning, it could track dates from 32 thousand B.C. to 32 thousand A.D. Makes Mac Classic the perfect OS to run your time machine.
Assuming you don't care if memory gets arbitrarily overwritten by other processes and you are confident other processes will yield control of the processor.
-
@morbiuswilters said:
@blakeyrat said:
What's awesome about Mac Classic is that the year was stored as a separate int value. Meaning, it could track dates from 32 thousand B.C. to 32 thousand A.D. Makes Mac Classic the perfect OS to run your time machine.
Assuming you don't care if memory gets arbitrarily overwritten by other processes and you are confident other processes will yield control of the processor.
The sad part is, despite all that, Mac Classic still was more stable and better at multitasking than comparable OSes with memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. I think it's a shame Apple threw it all in the trash. Sigh.
Besides, Classic didn't run on memory protection enabled CPUs until its waning years anyway.
-
@blakeyrat said:
Aren't Macs Unix now? (i.e. 1969 epoch?)
You'd think - but there's a bug in Snow Leopard that is causing people's folders to show as created Feb 1946. Happened to a friend who sent me a screenshot - I'm not enough of a mac person to know what was causing it other than the reports I've found online of corrupting when using a mounted SMB shared drive.
@blakeyrat said:
They used to have an 1904 epoch, because that saves a line of code when calculating leap years (the original Mac developers had to fit a *lot* in 128k of memory.) Of course, you need that line they saved when 2000 came along.
There's also another default date on various early macs (LCIII, Quadra etc) that would default to 1956 (google cache as the page has since been password-protected). It was an easter egg - according to that page, under 'Related Trivia' (which also covers the 1904 epoch):
So why do different Macs reset to different dates?
Most Macs reset to Aug 27th, 1956. As it turns out, this is the birthdate of one of the designers, Ray Montagne, who apparently designed the CUDA microcontroller. This chip controls the PRAM and ADB on many models. Peter Werner found that information on the Nov 95 MacUser Help folder.
By the way, Steve Jobs was born in 1955, so the date is not his birthday. Other Macs reset to the default date - the date that the clock shows when the clock registers are filled with zeros. The date is Jan 1, 1904.
Rick Holzgrafe tells why some Macs reset to that odd year - the question was "What is the default date if the clock contains all zeros?" His answer:
It's midnight, Jan 1, 1904. This was selected because the original Mac's clock (which counts in seconds) can encompass a period of about 136 years. Selecting 1904 as the start means that the 136-year period covered by the clock (1904-2040) includes the birthdate of nearly every Mac user, and extends well past the expected lifetime of the Mac OS. It also means that the simplest rule for leap-years can be used (every fourth year has an extra day), which simplifies day and date calculations. They didn't choose the year 1900 because it was not a leap year, and so would have complicated matters.
Except this doesnt explain the 1946 epoch that is being seen on corrupted files in OS X 6.2 - the only thing I can think of from 1946 is the invention of ENIAC.
-
Well at least you don't get Firefox offering you multiple different version updates. At the same time.
(Seriously, as soon as I connect to the Internet, I get asked if I want to update to 3.5.7, and almost immediately after that, I get another dialog prompting to upgrade to 3.5.8. Never mind that 3.6 has been out for how long now?)
Yes, I know that not updating Firefox is TRWTF. It's not my TRWTF however, because I don't control the software update policy the prevents me from installing updates.
-
3.5.8 was released after 3.6, and [i]should[/i] only be offered if you told Firefox No Thanks to the 3.6 update..
