- Unix billennium
The Unix billennium is the point in time represented by a
Unix time value of 109: 01:46:40 UTC onSeptember 9 2001 . Some programs which stored timestamps using a text representation encountered sorting errors, as in a text sort times after the turnover, starting with a "1" digit, erroneously sorted before earlier times starting with a "9" digit. Affected programs included the popularusenet reader KNode andemail client KMail, part of theKDE desktop environment. Such bugs were generally cosmetic in nature and quickly fixed once problems became apparent.The problem also affected many 'Filtrix' document-format filters provided with
Linux versions ofWordPerfect ; a patch was created by the user community to solve this problem, sinceCorel no longer sold or supported that version of the program. [http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/problems.html#FITRIX]The Unix Billennium is sometimes described as "109 seconds after the
Unix epoch ". This is not quite correct, because Unix time is not a purely linear count of seconds: "109 non-leap seconds after the Unix epoch" would be a more accurate description.The name is a
portmanteau of "billion" and "millennium ", recalling theyear 2000 bug . The name is not very logical as billennium should rather mean a billion "years". "Gigasecond " would be a more apt term.External links
* [http://www.electromagnetic.net/press-releases/unixonebln.php UNIX Approaches its One Billion Second Milestone]
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