By Most Recent First Bug

[sirbruce]

The built-in clock would be constantly powered, just like your PCs clock is. Obviously if you drain your battery all the way the Kindle could forget what time it was, but there's no need to do so on a Restart.

In any case, that's not what's happening here, either. The Kindle still knows what time it is, as can be verified by accessing the Menu. It's just that when it can't access Whispernet after a while, it stops timestamping files when you access them. According to Windows they aren't timestamped back to 1970; they aren't timestamped at all, but that could be just a Windows display issue.

[Slow_hand]

I believe you've hit on the real problem - it resets itself far too often. I've had this happen numerous times while reading a blog online and it's frustrating. It does have the effect of limiting one's web time - I wonder if that's the intent.

Originally Posted by Thomas Ryan

The Beginning of Time -

The System Time is the number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970 UTC (or more succinctly, the number of seconds since 1969).

http://www.go2linux.org/hwclock-linu...hardware-clock

It think it's 1969 because that is when Unix was invented - http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html

I also recall that the 1969/70 times have not been changed to honor Ken and Dennis, to keep any weird SW that depends on it from breaking, are also now deliberately and obviously left "wrong" and so that a sys admin will notice and fix via the "date(1)" command. It's too easy to miss "off by one hour".

When the system reboots it resets the system time to the "Beginning of Time".

To the person who asked "Why not build in a clock?". Uh, there is a clock (time counter). What time do you suggest the system set the time to be, and when would it do that? Good luck on that one.

You can also probably think of some heuristics that help, such as "don't let time go backwards", but you won't be able to solve every case for every situation. Fly West.

So here is what happens when the time is set correctly, but a reboot happens and there is no WhisperNet (WAN off, no coverage). The system time is set back to 1970. When you next read a book, it's last page read time-stamp is saved as 1970, which means you read it a long, long time ago. The book sorts to the end of "Most Recent", and hangs out there as the last entry of your Home screen pages. Which is exactly backwards and it certainly looks like a "bug".

Ironically, if you never turn on Whispernet (or if you never have coverage), then everything will work fine. The Kindle thinks it's in 1970, but time marches forward from there and nothing is out of order. Until you reboot, oops. BTW - software updates cause at least one reboot.

The "right" answer, of course, is to let users set the time and have this manual setting override any automated setting, unless they choose otherwise. Maybe in Kindle EX 4? (Oh, and don't forget to make Daylight Savings Time work right, especially in Arizona. Settings is going to two pages for sure now, oh no...)

[Kumara]

It's year 2014 and this problem still comes up if you don't have the device connected to the Internet.

Anyway, for me, the problem went away without connecting to the server at all. (I keep wireless off.) The only thing unusual I did was to have it charged till full (light turns green). I can't recall if I turned it off first though.

[HarryT]

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