#unix time

[oqmemphis]

happy unixversary to those who celebrate

[new-components]

unix time is going to be 1700000000 soon!

[thicc-astronaut]

Bad news guys. Turns out that when the universe was created, gender was stored as a 32-bit signed integer. Yeah a few new genders were created last night and we had an overflow error. Currently there's -(2^31) genders and queer rights have been sent back to what they were in 1901.

[thunderboltfire]

I've tried to run BG2 again (I need to finish my modded playthrough) and my laptop is in such a bad state it prectically lags BG2. BG2, which could be run on a determined microwave, on a laptop that has 8GB of RAM! It is heavily used and it has a lot of apps, but I've uninstalled everything I didn't use and cleaned the registry awhile ago. I suspected the antivirus, but the system manager shows it actually doesn't consume a lot of resources. It's not the disk space, since it's got plenty. It turns out it uses 100% of its disk all the time, and the main culprits seems to be.... *drum roll* system and Windows telemetry service! I now have to spend the evening elbows deep in frankly confusing system settings to find a way to turn the telemetry service off, and it may or may not improve the situation.

Once I finish this playthough, I'm definitely switching the laptop to Unix.

[babeluda]

So, we all know humans have a number of different calendars, right? And they all place year 0 somewhere else according to their own very special golden important reason.

Today we're going to look at computers, WHO ALSO HAVE THEIR OWN YEAR 0.

It is called the 'epoch' (which, as a French speaker, I find hilarious). When is the epoch, you might ask? Well, that depends on the operating system. Humans can haz Gregorian, Mayan, lunar, Julian, etc. calendar flavours, computers can haz Unix, Windows, Garmin FIT... epoch flavours.

Mr Unix Epoch (doesn't he sound like a villain in some cyberpunk story) is one of the most widely used, a standard in many OS, programming languages, databases etc. Unix time counts in seconds When is its year 0? Thursday 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UT. Why?

"The current epoch of 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC was selected arbitrarily by Unix engineers because it was considered a convenient date to work with."

Thus, where humans chose their years 0 for its extraordinary events, computers get given their years 0 for the mundane convenience of it. May you live in uninteresting times.

[jbird-the-manwich]

also I never again wanna hear “THE FUCKING PROGRAMMERS” unless you yourself are an expect programmer in that field. Cuz you’re probably actually mad at an executive somewhere upstream who’s running the programmers like dogs to complete a massive featurelist AROUND THE CLOCK that is DAMN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO IMPLEMENT. 

Be nice about them. programmers took a lump of silica and copper and taught it to be Zelda wtf did you do today hater

[clementine-kesh]

compromise that will piss everybody off equally: we start measuring time exclusively in unix time

[roberteospeedwagon]

trying to find posts from various different websites from when holly jolly secrets 2 was airing and jesus christ the internet’s horribly archived wtf

if anyone has any screencaps/advice feel free to tell/show me cuz i rlly wanna see what ppl were saying when the ep first came out

[preciousjoke]

Day one of  Linux infodumping  (Some really dry info on UNIX)

Unix was Developed in 1969 By Ken Thompson at Bell Laboratories which was a division of AT&T Unix was written in assembler Code for a Digital PDP-7 mini computer. The name is actually a pun somehow based on MULTICS which was an earlier project started by the same company, General Electric and of course, MIT. In 1970 Unix was re written in assembly for a newly aquired Digital PDP 11 mini computer with some of the old remnants left kicking around in todays Linux operating systems. A short time later Dennis Ritchie who had worked on UNIX alongside Ken Thompson Developed the C programming language which followed a predecessor known as B. By around 1973 C had matured to a point that almost the entirety of the unix Kernel could be written in the new language. so by that point Unix was the only operating system written in a higlevel programming language. Unix had Six editions First Edition was completed in November of 1971 and included a fortran compiler and a few different programs still in use today. Second Edtiion was completed in june 1972 and was installed on 10 machines within AT&T Third edition was completed in february 1973 which included a C compiler and the first implementation of pipes Fourth edition completed in november of 1973 was the first version to be almost completely written in C Fifth Edition was completed in june of 1974 and was installed across 50 systems at that point. and the Sixth edition was completed in may of 1975 which was the first edition to be used outside of AT&T By 1977 Unix had spread from 10 machines to some 500 sites including 125 universities

[slowrotation]

“In what year will the human population grow too large for the Earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1970, the planet's three and a half billion people were sustainable.”

[lofi-hearts]

I know Tumblr, I've had more than 50 for longer than most people have been on the website

[todays-xkcd]

It's not just time zones and leap seconds. SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time. T2 - T1 = [God doesn't know and the Devil isn't telling.]

DateTime [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[Ponytail is talking to Cueball.] Ponytail: Event #1 happened at time T1. Cueball: Okay.

Ponytail: Then event #2 happened at time T2. Cueball: Mhmm.

Ponytail: How would you calculate how much time elapsed between T1 and T2?

[The comic splits into two paths, each with a caption at the top.]

[Path 1, upper right panel] Caption: Normal person: Cueball: T2 minus T1.

[Path 2, lower right panel] Caption: Anyone who's worked on datetime systems: [Cueball has his arms raised.] Cueball: It is impossible to know and a sin to ask!

[the-herdier]

Being neurodivergent is like you're a computer running some variation of Unix while the rest of the world runs Windows. You have the exact same basic components as other machines, but you think differently. You organize differently. You do things in a way that Windows machines don't always understand, and because of that, you can't use programs written for Windows. If you're lucky, the developer will write a special version of their program specifically with your operating system in mind that will work just as well as the original, and be updated in a similar time frame. But if not? You'll either be stuck using emulators or a translator program like Wine, which come with an additional resource load and a host of other challenges to contend with, or you'll have to be content with an equivalent, which may or may not have the same features and the ability to read files created by the other program.

However, that doesn't mean you're not just as powerful. Perhaps you're a desktop that just happens to run Mac or Linux. Maybe you're a handheld device, small and simple but still able to connect someone to an entire world. Or perhaps you're an industrial computer purposely-built to perform a limited number of tasks extremely well, but only those tasks. You may not even have a graphical user interface. You could even be a server proudly hosting a wealth of media and information for an entire network to access- perhaps even the entire Internet. They need only ask politely. You may not be able to completely understand other machines, but you are still special in your own way.

[commodorez]

If the Commodore 64 is great, where is the Commodore 65?

It sits in the pile with the rest of history's pre-production computers that never made it. It's been awhile since I went on a Commodore 65 rant...

The successor to the C64 is the C128, arguably the pinnacle of 8-bit computers. It has 3 modes: native C128 mode with 2MHz 8502, backwards compatible C64 mode, and CP/M mode using a 4MHz Z80. Dual video output in 40-column mode with sprites plus a second output in 80-column mode. Feature-rich BASIC, built in ROM monitor, numpad, 128K of RAM, and of course a SID chip. For 1985, it was one of the last hurrahs of 8-bit computing that wasn't meant to be a budget/bargain bin option.

For the Amiga was taking center stage at Commodore -- the 16-bit age is here! And its initial market performance wasn't great, they were having a hard time selling its advanced capabilities. The Amiga platform took time to really build up momentum square in the face of the rising dominance of the IBM PC compatible. And the Amiga lost (don't tell the hardcore Amiga fanboys, they're still in denial).

However, before Commodore went bankrupt in '94, someone planned and designed another successor to the C64. It was supposed to be backwards compatible with C64, while also evolving on that lineage, moving to a CSG 4510 R3 at 3.54MHz (a fancy CMOS 6502 variant based on a subprocessor out of an Amiga serial port card). 128K of RAM (again) supposedly expandable to 1MB, 256X more colors, higher resolution, integrated 3½" floppy not unlike the 1581. Bitplane modes, DAT modes, Blitter modes -- all stuff that at one time was a big deal for rapid graphics operations, but nothing that an Amiga couldn't already do (if you're a C65 expert who isn't mad at me yet, feel free to correct me here).

The problem is that nobody wanted this.

Sure, Apple had released the IIgs in 1986, but that had both the backwards compatibility of an Apple II and a 16-bit 65C816 processor -- not some half-baked 6502 on gas station pills. Plus, by the time the C65 was in heavy development it was 1991. Way too late for the rapidly evolving landscape of the consumer computer market. It would be cancelled later that same year.

I realize that Commodore was also still selling the C64 well into 1994 when they closed up shop, but that was more of a desperation measure to keep cash flowing, even if it was way behind the curve by that point (remember, when the C64 was new it was a powerful, affordable machine for 1982). It was free money on an established product that was cheap to make, whereas the C65 would have been this new and expensive machine to produce and sell that would have been obsolete from the first day it hit store shelves. Never mind the dismal state of Commodore's marketing team post-Tramiel.

Internally, the guy working on the C65 was someone off in the corner who didn't work well with others while 3rd generation Amiga development was underway. The other engineers didn't have much faith in the idea.

The C65 has acquired a hype of "the machine that totally would have saved Commodore, guise!!!!1!11!!!111" -- saved nothing. If you want better what-if's from Commodore, you need to look to the C900 series UNIX machine, or the CLCD. Unlike those machines which only have a handful of surviving examples (like 3 or 4 CLCDs?), the C65 had several hundred, possibly as many as 2000 pre-production units made and sent out to software development houses. However many got out there, no software appears to have surfaced, and only a handful of complete examples of a C65 have entered the hands of collectors. Meaning if you have one, it's probably buggy and you have no software to run on it. Thus, what experience are you recapturing? Vaporware?

The myth of the C65 and what could have been persists nonetheless. I'm aware of 3 modern projects that have tried to take the throne from the Commodore 64, doing many things that sound similar to the Commodore 65.

The Foenix Retro Systems F256K:

The 8-Bit Guy's Commander X16

The MEGA65 (not my picture)

The last of which is an incredibly faithful open-source visual copy of the C65, where as the other projects are one-off's by dedicated individuals (and when referring to the X16, I don't mean David Murray as he's not the one doing the major design work).

I don't mean to belittle the effort people have put forth into such complicated projects, it's just not what I would have built. In 2019, I had the opportunity to meet the 8-Bit Guy and see the early X16 prototype. I didn't really see the appeal, and neither did David see the appeal of my homebrew, the Cactus.

Build your own computer, build a replica computer. I encourage you to build what you want, it can be a rewarding experience. Just remember that the C65 was probably never going to dig Commodore out of the financial hole they had dug for themselves.

[abbysimsfun]

Sims In Bloom: Generation 2 Pt. 40 (Spending the Night)

cw: mid-level spice? 🌶️🌶️ (I'd call it low but I don't know people's thresholds. If there's an official simblr threshold for this kind of cw I don't know it, sorry! No actual nudity.)

Conrad's apartment in the Arts Quarter wasn't far from the festival grounds, and when they arrived, Gord greeted the flirty pair at the door with a friendly tail wag.

They took him downstairs and let him run around, ensuring he did his business before returning to the outdated suite Conrad called home. Gord raced to his spot on the small sofa in the open kitchen and living space and Conrad flashed a nervous smile.

He set his keys on a shelf laden with knick-knacks someone might have had in the last century. It looked a bit like a dingy motel room, like the ones Heather and her family stayed in on the way to their vacations in Granite Falls.

"I know the place isn't much," he said. "When he retired, my dad got it furnished from some old lady who used to frequent flea markets every Sunday. Rent's cheap, location's great, but I wasn't a very good son when he was alive. I was back and forth from college, still dealing with my mom's death, hanging out with the wrong people."

"Conrad, I'm sorry. I didn't know both your parents were gone."

He shrugged, masking grief he'd buried well all these years. "It's not easy, but I was looking for any way I could to feel closer to him, so I took over the lease here after he died. But he didn't change anything, and I'm usually too busy with work to spend much time here, as it is. Gord likes the sofa. I do have an old Unix I play around with for fun, but I've never really had to think about impressing company with the place. Until now."

"I don't care what it looks like," Heather said. "I came up to spend time with you tonight, not your apartment."

Still buzzing from the effects of the Sakura tea, she leaned in to kiss him. Her lips travelled softly down his neck. He grinned from her touch, but pulled back. "Wait, wait. This is fast. Just let me catch my breath a minute."

"Sorry." She buried her swooning head in her hands. "I'm usually the one slowing things down. It's just...the tea, and...and you."

His breathing grew heavier. "I want you," he said. "But I also like you. I haven't stopped thinking about you since the day I knocked on your door. I don't want you to think I brought you back here just to do this."

"I don't think that. I like you, too. So much it scares me a little."

"I scare you?"

"No, I'm afraid of myself. I'm the one who makes rash decisions and gets tangled up with the Landgraabs - who despise me."

"The Landgraabs have no taste," he laughed. "Which is all the better for me."

He leaned in for another kiss, dragging her to the sofa while Gord made himself scarce.

A hunger took them over, perhaps drenched in too much Sakura tea, but they gave in to the passion bleeding through their skin. Twice.

They slept soundly for a few hours until sunlight poured over the Myshuno Hills, breaking through Conrad's small bedroom window. As they stirred, he pulled back the covers to admire her in the daylight. She blushed, pulling him in for a kiss before she stood to get dressed.

"I want to see you again soon," he said. "I'll bring Gord to the coast later this week, hang out with you and Ash."

She smiled. "I'd love that."

Before she made it down the elevator, her phone vibrated from an incoming text. Would it be too soon to call you my girlfriend? She grinned.

Not too soon. I like the way that sounds. She took screenshots and sent the texts to Holly, and her sister sent back enthusiastic support with a half dozen heart emojis.

Heather felt like a lovestruck teenager again. But this time the boy on the other end of the phone didn't make her question anything about their connection.

Yet when she picked up her son from Malcolm’s penthouse, she didn’t mention Conrad. They were trying to make peace, consciously, for the sake of their son, but she still didn't trust him. He and Conrad had a history, and Heather didn't want his opinion. Not yet.

For now, at least, she was happy to have something in her life that Malcolm and the Landgraabs didn't know anything about. ->

<- Previous Chapter | Gen 2 Start | Gen 1 Summary | Gen 1 Start

NOTE: Me, tossing Conrad into the cheapest apartment in the city so he'd have more money when he eventually (hopefully) moves in, without considering the aesthetics of this eventual moment? Typical.

WCIF Poses Used: 2 poses from The Kiss by Simmerberlin (as you can tell I used the wrong-sized sofa but I'm not too bothered, I still like how the pose looks even in Conrad's tragic apartment); Confiding in You by StarrySimsie