discontinuity.net

Sunday, April 21, 2019

discontinuity.net is home to Davin Potts who has, at times, been associated with projects involving theoretical chemistry, distributed computing, numerical methods, high performance massively parallel computing, mathematical physics, number theory, and other forms of torture for really big computers. Not limited to these subjects, any and all content Davin finds vaguely interesting is game here.

Random daily discontinuity quote:

The UNIX systems standard timekeeping mechanism and library function calls contain a Year 2000 trap. It is not a bug but a discontinuity in the number of digits returned by specific functions for dates after 31 December 1999. Application programmers may not have accounted for this thus setting the trap. This paper reviews the details of the subject functions and demonstrates the trap.

[Ref: Quote from "UNIX Systems have a Year 2000 Trap!" by Richard A. Painter of Painter Engineering, Inc.]

Davin M. Potts
davin-website@discontinuity.net