[HECnet] Re: How long has your 20 been up?

[Apologies if this is duplicate, I wasn't sure what list was active and when] Thanks for the URL, I'll put it into the enhancement list.  I'm still not sure what I would put into the monitor and what would go into a light weight (or full) NTP client, but I'll have a think about it. Passing on to the Department of Pointless Programming, I 'enhanced' uptime to handle the maximum 70 bit millisecond uptime.  It is: VENTI2 up for 37539161 Millennia, 7 Centuries, 2 Decades, 9 Years, 8 Weeks, 2 Days, 11 Hours, 35 Minutes, 3 Seconds and 423 Milliseconds So 37 million millennia is .../umm/... well it's a long time.  In fact, at well over two and half times the current age of the universe, it may even be long enough for politicians to evolve into decent, caring, thinking individuals. The math was actually unremarkable, I changed an integer divide instruction into a routine to handle single (IDIV), double (DIV) and quadruple intermediate results (DDIV), picking the fastest divide that wouldn't overflow. The harder part was rewriting the grammatical routines to properly inflect plural noun cases.  Once you get past Years, English  numerological noun inflection is no longer agglutanive (like Spanish) but rather fusional, being more akin to Latin and Italian (and considered 'irregular').  So the routine did the wrong thing. A little more than half the systems programming staff at Columbia were bi-lingual, some spoke three or more languages. So it bugged us to see Unix cop-outs like "1 item(s) processed".  I mean, it's a comparison and conditional transfer; an if statement--barely more than 5 minutes' work.