Author Topic: 2012... Will The World End?  (Read 41710 times)

Offline Zardox Xheonov

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2012... Will The World End?
« on: December 03, 2009, 04:56:31 PM »
I think:
No it will not; only stupid white people think that will ever happen.
Fact of the matter is, the mayan calender just needs to be replaced; as if we had a big party when it became 2000; the mayans will do the same just at 2012.
So really tis just going to be a big cellabration. :P

Agree(s)? Disagree(s)? Other side of story? Comments?
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Offline CK9

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2009, 06:19:30 PM »
Personally, I think the mayans were saying they couldn't predict any further...or the person in charge of making it got tired of working and just bs-ed an ending knowing he wouldn't be around for anyone to complain when it turned out wrong
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Offline Hooman

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2009, 09:37:53 PM »
Pfft, what a load of nonsense.

From Wikipedia:
Quote
Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a New Age belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 is simply the last day of the 13th b'ak'tun. But that is not the end of the Long Count because the 14th through 20th b'ak'tuns are still to come.


All good computer geeks know we won't be having a huge cataclysm until January 19, 2038. :P
Then your computer will blow up. ... unless maybe you're running Windows. ;) That's right Microsoft, you don't really have to worry about Linux. You just have to wait until 2038.  :lol:  

Offline Sirbomber

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #3 on: December 03, 2009, 10:18:58 PM »
Quote
only stupid white people think that will ever happen.
Way to be racist.
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Offline CK9

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #4 on: December 03, 2009, 10:33:30 PM »
now watch him claim that it isn't racism unless it's talking about non-white races :P
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Offline Spikerocks101

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #5 on: December 03, 2009, 11:14:50 PM »
it's true. raise your hand if your white and you give a dam. any one? i for sure dont care.
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Offline speaker

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #6 on: December 03, 2009, 11:22:23 PM »
i found it rather offensive...
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Offline CK9

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #7 on: December 04, 2009, 12:58:24 AM »
Was there even a point to say a race?  People are people (so why should it be, you and i get along so awefully...), doesn't matter your race, social status, or anything else.  Stupidity is a non-discriminatory problem.
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Offline Hidiot

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #8 on: December 04, 2009, 04:08:41 AM »
Does anyone believe any kind of leadership will announce a disaster before the last minute?

If anything, wait and see.
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Offline Spikerocks101

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #9 on: December 04, 2009, 04:41:12 AM »
I diside to read Hooman's post, and, well, could we expect him to say anything else? I bet his favorite comic is XKCD for that matter, seeing  this.
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Offline Sirbomber

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #10 on: December 04, 2009, 06:38:45 AM »
Quote
Was there even a point to say a race?
That was kinda my point...
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Offline CK9

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #11 on: December 04, 2009, 09:52:33 AM »
I was bringing it to more blunt words so the meaning couldn't be lost.
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Offline Sirbomber

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #12 on: December 04, 2009, 12:59:28 PM »
Ah, okay.

The world ends when death will be UR DETH MORTL.
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Offline Spikerocks101

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #13 on: December 04, 2009, 01:00:37 PM »
Technically, he only said "the stupid white people", so only people from Holly Wood are really included :P
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Offline Hidiot

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #14 on: December 04, 2009, 01:18:08 PM »
You can't deny that different kinds of people have different predispositions that are either social or instinctual (inbuilt). The wrong part is limiting one's opinion to just that.

Also, how do you define "the world"? It could be the universe, it could be humanity, it could simply be the Earth. Only if the universe ended would our end be clear; the Earth needs to be hit hard to extinguish all human life. Studies predict that at least a small amount of humans will live on even after severe disasters (eg. big meteor)
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Offline Spikerocks101

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #15 on: December 04, 2009, 01:44:25 PM »
I always wonder, if we don't know that we are going to die, would we be still so aggressive and bad mannered as an entire human race? Also, if we knew that we would die for sure (100%) on 2012 (at what ever day and month), how would we react? Continue to live life as if it won't happening, or try to survive it, maybe even try to trick it and all die before hand to see what will happen. I think the idea of a dooms day is what cause an end, because there is no actually event, but our own thinking.
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Offline WooJoo

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #16 on: December 04, 2009, 05:51:22 PM »
Quote
Extinction is not an option

thought that had to be said.

also @Hooman

aint 64bit versions got plenty more years bevor they turn into nukes?
i dont remember if they used the 64bit system also on the clocking
« Last Edit: December 04, 2009, 05:57:03 PM by WooJoo »

Offline CK9

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #17 on: December 04, 2009, 07:13:12 PM »
"War would end if the dead could return.”
- Stanley Baldwin

what do you think?
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Offline fighter

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #18 on: December 05, 2009, 01:36:22 AM »
The world will only end for the people that kill themselves in the mass hysteria leading up to this predicted "End of the world".

In other words, Its another Y2K.   <_<  
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Offline Hooman

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #19 on: December 05, 2009, 01:50:03 AM »
A 64-bit counter would certain extend the range well beyond any immediate concern, or possibly even beyond the likely lifetime of the earth or perhaps even the universe. However, the problem stems from the fact that only 32 bits have traditionally been allocated. You can't store 64 bits worth of information in space that has previously only been allocated 32 bits. Sure, for new programs, you could simply extend the length of the fields being used, but for legacy programs you may have a problem. Any data in the older format would have to be converted. Couple that with the fact that a lot of source code has been lost over the years, combined with people generally not even being aware of if or when these old 32 time fields were used, and you basically have a somewhat impossible problem. Keep in mind that this problem stems from storage allocation size, not the CPU register capacity. You can easily deal with 64 bit quantities on a 32 bit CPU. It's just that you'd need to process it 32 bits at a time due to the more limited register capacity, which of course means it's slightly easier and lazier to only use 32 bit fields if you can get away with it... for another few years.

Mind you, in 2038 we're only going to run out of Unix time stamp seconds for signed counters. Remember that Unix time stamps were for file creation/modification times, and it was set to a time before Unix came into use, hence there could be no files with "negative" times. In such a system, it makes sense to treat those time stamps as unsigned, in which case, that extra bit buys you another 68 years. Of course, people have found these counters useful to represent dates before Jan 1, 1970, such as when recording historical information, particularly birthdates of people who are still alive. (You only get to the early 1900's though with 32 bits, so it can't be too historical).


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Offline CK9

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #20 on: December 05, 2009, 04:39:58 PM »
I'm probably vastly misunderstanding how it works, but why not just modify it not to use the time stamps except for backups?
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Offline Hooman

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #21 on: December 06, 2009, 02:24:44 AM »
I'm not sure I even follow what you're getting at.

It's like how people only wrote 2 digits for the year. If you're only writing 2 digits, how do you differentiate between 1970 and 2070? Sure, there are 4 digit systems that can be used, but if you didn't use one to begin with, they're not helping you. Maybe only have space on your user interfacfe to display 2 digits for the year. Maybe you have files were everything is packed tightly, and it's understood that 2 digits are for the year, followed by two digits for the month, ..., and if you try to expand the year field, you overwrite the month field. Or maybe you try to expand in the other direction, and you overwrite something else that was stored before the year. The point is, you can't simply "insert" the extra bytes and expect things to still work. A lot of computer code is positional, and expects things to appear in a certain place. It generally assumes the size of fields are fixed, and their meaning is based on their position, rather than examining the data to see "what it looks like". If you have a text based file, it's perhaps more likely that you can arbitrarily expand fields, and have delimiters between fields (like "," or "-", or "/") but most binary formats use fixed widths.
 

Offline Mez

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #22 on: December 11, 2009, 05:33:14 AM »
In essence if you can come up with a solution and patent / licence it now.  You will be rich in ~20/25 years time when IT managers start to care about the problem.

I would hope that companies will have replaced their 40 year old code by then.  But we do still have mainframe code written in the 1960's / 1970's running unmodified on modern mainframes, I imagine that most of the 40 year old code current in use now will still be running in 40 years time.

It is a very interesting problem.  Given as Hooman has stated the majority of programs can't be tricked into using a new date field and all data will need to be converted, due to the fixed width data size, picked by the compiler at compile time.  A program being dumb doesn't understand what a date field is, it just loads a 32bit value from an address in memory and then manipulates it and compares it against other values.  The program has no idea what it is manipulating it is just following a set of rules and constraints.

There is a saying -> garbage in produces garbage out.  If you put incorrect data into the machine, don't expect it to be correct when it comes out the other end.

If you don't have the source code you can't modify all the timestamp logic to use a 64bit value instead and therefore you get the problem where the program follows its set of rules and the output is wrong because the timestamp has looped back to 0;


So why doesn't everyone get the source code to their applications and pay someone to fix it now?
Well the biggest problem is that companies pay millions to an ISV (Independant Software Vendor) for their business management software.  The ISV goes bust/source code get lost/no one understands it anymore.  The business however will keep using the software and only panic when things go wrong.
« Last Edit: December 11, 2009, 05:34:50 AM by Mez »

Offline CK9

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #23 on: December 11, 2009, 12:51:04 PM »
well, then why hasn't someone developed software that doesn't require source code to function?

What I mean is, it first bakcs up the data, then makes tweaks around the timestamp data.  The user monitors it, and it shows them exactly what has changed and checks for any errors caused.  This allows the user to determine how the timestamp works.  Based on this data, the user then can tell it how to handle the needed changes (copy everything past a specific point and paste it after the change...um...whatever else...)

heh
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Offline Sirbomber

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2012... Will The World End?
« Reply #24 on: December 11, 2009, 08:10:59 PM »
Quote
well, then why hasn't someone developed software that doesn't require source code to function?
Somewhere, a software engineer just died.  And possibly Hooman as well.
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