from Or Botton:
*Happy new billenium, ppl. :)
*(For those who have no clue what i'm talking about:
*The UNIX clock calculate the time and date by counting the
*seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970. Today it have
*just reached 1 billion seconds... ;) )
There probably should be a double n in billennium, comparable to millennium,
but billennium would probably not be in any dictionary.
Computers calculate in the binary system, so (10 ** 9) seconds would have no
special sequence. More significant might be (2 ** 32) seconds, or maybe that
should be 2 ** 31 or 2 ** 30 (Fortran notation, where ** denotes raising to a
power).
As to who reaches the billennium first, that depends on time zone, or does the
Unix clock use GMT everywhere? In that case, everybody should reach the
billennium together.
Abend means evening in German, but in computer technology means abnormal end, or
abort/end, I guess either would fit. "Abend" dates to the pre-PC era of IBM
mainframes.
Noticing a later message about problems with asterisks at the beginning of a
line, I use * instead of > as quoting character. I don't think I have any
problem with asterisk at the beginning of a line, nor do I have any problem with
"begin" at the beginning of a line.
