Florin Iucha wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 09:15:35PM -0600, Mike Miller wrote:
>   
>> My brother's birthday is on November 22.  Once every 7 years, on average, 
>> his birthday falls on Thanksgiving.  I was curious about when exactly that 
>> would occur in the future so I did something like this in the bash shell 
>> on a GNU system:
>>
>> for year in $(seq 2008 2060) ; do date -d 11/22/$year | grep Thu ; done
>>     
>
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2012
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2018
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2029
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2035
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2040
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2046
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 2057
>
>   
>> And if you try it, you'll see what happens -- it fails starting in 2038.
>>     
>
> Works fine here.
>
>   
>> It also fails if you go back before 1970.
>>     
>
> $ for year in $(seq 1776 2060) ; do date -d 11/22/$year | grep Thu>
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1781
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1787
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1792
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1798
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1804
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1810
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1821
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1827
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1832
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1838
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1849
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1855
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1860
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1866
> Thu Nov 22 00:00:00 CST 1877
>
> No it doesn't fail!
>
>   
>> By the way, this method works for any range of years:
>>
>> for year in $(seq 1960 2060) ; do cal 11 $year | egrep -B5 '^18 19 20 21 22' | grep November ; done
>>
>> That is, it shows you every November for the given range of years where 
>> the 22nd of the month falls on a Thursday.  Thanksgiving wasn't on the 
>> fourth Thursday of November until the 1930s -- before that it was on the 
>> final Thursday of the month and therefore would always have been on 11/29 
>> instead of on 11/22.
>>
>> Funny what you can do easily with these GNU programs, eh?
>>     
>
> Mike,
>
> Tell the U admins to install a more modern Linux distro.  And get
> 32 more bits and sprinkle them above the CPU - it works wonders 8^)
> Just make sure they don't fall onto the motherboard, as they might
> short something...
>
> Cheers,
> florin
>
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>   
He must be using a 32 bit Linux distro. All of the UMN ITLabs machines 
are 64 bit Ubuntu or SunOS with very modern hardware. Even the monitors 
are >20" LCDs. I estimate the ones in the Lind lab are 32" which are 
nice for programming or debugging when you have to look at a lot of code 
at once.