Forget the Mayans and their silly 2012 doomsday scenario. The real end of the world will happen because of that most venerable of operating systems: UNIX.
That’s because next Friday, UNIX time will read 1234567890. Scary! And, it just so happens that this event will coincide with one of the more superstitious days on our calendar, Friday the 13th ( not in our GMT+02 time zone ). Scarier!
Well-known UNIX and Linux personality John Maddog Hall plans on celebrating the event in style:
While our friends at Bell Labs (er, ah, Lucent….O.K. „Alcatel-Lucent“) strive to understand this phenomenon, I will be doing my civic duty by drinking fine beer, and maybe an Islay scotch. This is hard to do while you are holding your breath, but I will suffer through. Who knows, perhaps the U.S. government will give us a „bailout“ to study this issue.
To see when this takes place in your time zone, run this little Perl script, which I promise won’t end the world before next Friday:
perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(1234567890),“\n“;’