Items tagged with Unix
Over the weekend, we talked about an issue surrounding AMD's Ryzen-based processors on Unix-based OSes. Today, we learn a lot more about what's going on, as well as which products are actually affected. But first, let's get the upside out of the way: this bug is rare, and requires very specific conditions. The vast majority of users are not going to experience an issue, but it's at least an issue to be aware of. With almost comical timing, SMT issues surrounding both FreeBSD and Linux were outed at around the same time, although it's now been confirmed that the issues are different. Through exhaustive testing, Phoronix discovered that Ryzen under Linux will segfault up and down if a handful of...
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If you are one of the people that happens to be running a bleeding-edge 'alpha 1' version of Ubuntu Linux on your main desktop machine (and who isn't?), you may have noticed a particular change in recent days: OpenOffice has been replaced by LibreOffice for the upcoming (next April) Ubuntu 11.04 release. What is OpenOffice, what is LibreOffice, and what is the difference? For those unaware, both OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free open-source office software suites which include word processor, spreadsheet, presentation apps, graphic design tools, and database systems. Both of these suites are available for multiple platforms, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. LibreOffice itself is a fork of...
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Hot on the heels of "1234567890" day comes Square Root Day. This rare "holiday" occurs when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the current year. So, today can be expressed as 03/03/09 (in Europe or the U.S., for once!). 3 is the square root of 9, so you can see how today would be Square Root Day. The last Square Root Day was (quite obviously) in 2004 ... 2/2/04 or Groundhog Day, in fact. The next one is 7 years off in 2016 or 4/4/16. While there's no luck or superstition associate with the day, there is some cash! Ron Gordon, a Redwood City, CA teacher, is running a contest for the biggest Square Root Day celebration. You can win (wait for it) $339; entries...
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Only technophiles would recognize this event, but at 3:31 PM PST on Friday the 13th, 2009, Unix time reached 1234567890. Unix time is the number of seconds since the beginning of the "Unix Epoch" at midnight UTC on January 1st, 1970 (not including leap seconds). Celebrations abounded (seriously!), but now(!) there is the dread of the Epochalypse. Anyone remember the Y2K scare? While that mostly fizzled, there is a similar scenario scheduled for Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Yep, that year, you'll have the same principle as Y2K. Systems using a 32-bit signed integer will wrap around, and be stored internally as a negative value, meaning that it'll be 1901 (sorta). That's bound to create software...
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