Shoutbox

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Originally posted by Svip

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Originally posted by aNILEator

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Originally posted by L. Coyote
64-bit will be old by then.

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64 Bit is old now, it's only recently been adopted into teh consumer market that's all

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But do we really need any more than 128bit?  I mean, with 128 bit, we can have more RAM than there are visual objects in the Universe.

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I don't think so. In all honesty, this UNIX time-stamp problem only occurs in implementations which use signed integers rather than unsigned.

For those who don't get it: UNIX time is basically just the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 01-Jan-1970 UTC. So on whatever the date is they're going on about, 2^31 seconds will have elapsed since that date (2^32 for implementations using unsigned integers).

If we migrated to a 64-bit signed integer, there would be a hell of a lot more time available [292,279,025,208 years (that's what, 20 times the age of the universe?), by my calculations], the only problem being, as someone mentioned, that 32-bit processors don't do 64-bit integer operations as quickly as 32-bit ones.