Re: [NTLK] Dear Steve Jobs... (your help is needed)

On 13.02.2009, at 16:20, Michael J. Hußmann wrote:

> matthiasm (mm@matthiasm.com) wrote:
>
>> Avi's fix is a good approach, but it has two flaws IMHO:
>>
>> 1: it is too complicated. The introduction of hexades simply won't
>> get
>> us anywhere. Existing software has no clue about hexades anyways.
>
> But does it have to? Most apps don't care what the timebase actually
> is
> and should work just fine; they will display the correct time and date
> anyway. Anyway, I don't see how one might approach this differently,
> short of changing the data type of seconds from signed 32 bit integers
> to something else. But this would probably break much more in the OS
> and
> within apps than Avi's approach does.

Exactly. The OS does not know if 1914 or 2008 is the base for the
seconds counter. Only when we convert from seconds to date and time,
or back, the conversion has to be adjusted to the new base. That's why
propose dropping the Hexade idea and instead writing a ROM patch.

There is no support for 32 bit integers in the system.

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