The Year 2038 Problem

[Alan Balmer]

I don't recall you getting anywhere near my coffee machine or volkswagen.

Vastly overblown it was.

What was overblown was Joona's rhetoric, which was why I ignored it. I
presume you didn't see any dogs turning into cats, either.

There were real problems. Most of them were fixed in time to ensure
your comfort.

 

[rossum]

[snip]

My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds since
the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than 1 second.
It won't run out during the life of this universe. The only trouble is,
we don't know accurately when that was.


Gordon L. Burditt

< mode = nitpick >
Not quite accurate. We know precisely when the universe started; at
time = 0. The problem is that we don't know what the time is now.
< mode = whatever_passes_for_normal >

rossum

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds since
the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than 1 second.
It won't run out during the life of this universe. The only trouble is,
we don't know accurately when that was.

You assume a "when" exists; relativity says that's impossible.

Relativity aside, there's nothing preventing time_t from being a
floating-point number whose zero is at a particular epoch. Epsilon of the
chosen type determines the precision of your clock.

S

 

[Roger Willcocks]

My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds since
the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than 1 second.
It won't run out during the life of this universe. The only trouble is,
we don't know accurately when that was.

Given we want to represent times in the past as well as the future, it would
be reasonable to fix 'now' (give or take) as midpoint in the range, so why
not arbitrarily pick

00:00:00.000 on the morning of January First 0001 as
1-followed-by-255-zeroes (256-bit unsigned value).

 

[SM Ryan]

# In 2038 all OS (Unix included) will have 64 bits
# to hold a Date value and with 64 bits the rollover
# will happen 292 billion years after 1/1/1970.

By 2000, OSes could afford four digit years. The problem wasn't new
software that included enough space. The problem was old files, old
databases, and old software (some without source code). If you can
guarentee that changing time_t to 64 bits will automatically convert
32 bit values in existing files, databases, and object code, then
you're right, no problem.

If the conversion is not automatic, then it's Y2K all over again.

 

[Ben Measures]

The time_t might have 64-bit but are you sure that every occurence where
the time is copied or used is as well?

By 2038 opensourced software will be abundant and everyone will laugh at
those still using proprietry software ;->

 

[corrlens]

Hehe, that might happen indeed.
Who knows, maybe they'll want to store dates with a femtosecond
resolution. We wouldn't get very far with 64 bits, then...

LOL ... And then if we ever colonized the moon and mars and then we have
real-time databases with planet earth , what's time and date is at the
moon/mars compared to the earth ..... I'll be dust by that time

 

[Mario Charest]

My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds since
the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than 1 second.
It won't run out during the life of this universe. The only trouble is,
we don't know accurately when that was.

Wouldn't work, time isn't a constant. Doesn't show when your talking about
seconds, but with picoseconds that will need to be taken into account.
Number of picosecondes since creation of the universe isn't the same on top
of mount Everest then at sea level. I wonder how NTP is going to deal with
that LOL.

 

[Jeff Schwab]

Wouldn't work, time isn't a constant. Doesn't show when your talking about
seconds, but with picoseconds that will need to be taken into account.
Number of picosecondes since creation of the universe isn't the same on top
of mount Everest then at sea level. I wonder how NTP is going to deal with
that LOL.

I hereby nominate Bell Labs as the relative center of time, hence forth
referred to as the Origin. The time at which any event occurs is not
the local time, but the perceived time at the Origin "when" the event
occurred, even if the event was not "then" directly observable from the
Origin.

 

[Joona I Palaste]

What was overblown was Joona's rhetoric, which was why I ignored it. I
presume you didn't see any dogs turning into cats, either.

There were real problems. Most of them were fixed in time to ensure
your comfort.

I am quite sure I've heard stories about everything having an
electronic timer stopping working in 2000.

 

[q]

As per Google's Usenet archives
[http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html], the
first discussion of the Y2K problem on the Usenet was on January 18
1985 [http://groups.google.com/[email protected]]. That
is a good 15 years before the problem manifested. Even then, it
turned out, we were scrambling for cover when the D-day was
approaching.

Although the Y2K scare turned out to be vastly overblown, we do have a
massive problem ahead of us ------ the Year 2038 problem. On Mon Jan
18 21:14:07 2038, the Unix seconds-since-epoch count will "roll-over".
After that, the time on the Unix systems will read as Fri Dec 13
14:45:52 1901.

IMHO, if we want to avoid the last minute panic that we witnessed
towards the end of the last millennium (while pursuing the Y2K
problem), we should begin the process of debating the viable solutions
to this problem NOW. It will take a long time for the consensus to be
built, and to come up with a solution that most (if not all) people
find acceptable. We also need considerable time to test out all
possible solutions in the real world, to decide if the solutions
really work as expected. We may also need to develop a suite of
recovery strategies should the problem manifest in some system on that
fateful Monday morning. All this takes time. So, as the late Todd
Beamer would have said: Let's roll.

Bhat

[sarcasm on]
I believe that we should all go out and hunt down these old
Unix boxes and fix them. After all, this is way more important
than getting Windows to stop that Blue Screen of Death during
shutdown, holes in the security systems of servers and reduction
of spam.

No, No, No. These old Unix boxes should be replaced with the latest,
state-of-the-art hardware.
In 2038 these boxes will be as slow as 4.77Mhz x86 processors
from 1980's.

After all, there are at least 33 more years to develop a
good panic. It will probably take that long to find these machines
that are in charge of all the critical activities in the world.
See, smart people don't use machines that say programs have executed
illegal instructions (when it is the operating systems's fault).

Nope, stopping those Cell Phone spammers isn't as important because
these cell phones are not controlling critical systems (and I know
because I've either worked on them or seen them all).

So how will I panic, hmm, I don't know, but I've got a while to
figure it out. I think I will use my computer that requires
rebooting once a day, using appllications that can't communicate
with the operating system, even though they are made by the same
company. Yep, I search those web sites that will download spyware
onto my machine so they can see how I am panicking.

Yep, I've just added another item to my worry list. Someday,
I'll actually review it.

[End of sarcasm]

 

[q]

It took ONE WEEK to verify that ALL systems were Y2K compliant.
No H1b visas were required!!!

 

[AngleWyrm]

In <[email protected]> (e-mail address removed)

Nope, this won't happen. By then, time_t will be a 64-bit type, as it
already is on some 64-bit platforms (e.g. all 64-bit Linux ports):

So, what's the next massive problem we have to worry about, now that we
have just solved this one?

The entire planet's 3 thrillion barrels of oil is about 25% gone, and at the
current rate of 80 million/day, it will be completely gone within the lifespans
of some of the folks walking the earth today.

My solution is that I plan to be dead around 2040 or so.

 

[AngleWyrm]

No need to go into 'panic mode'.
There is time to resolve this issue
in a calm, cool and collected manner.
Certainly 64 bit processors and/or long long
data type will go a long way to resolving the issue.
But there will NOT be any need to import
thousands of H1b visas to fix this problem.
Y2K was definitely blown way out of proportion!
This was done by high priced consulting companies
trying to justify their worth.

Yes, no need to panic. What we need here a small team of specialists, gathered
together in a committee. Over the course of their lives, with the benefit of
government funding, I'm sure this top-notch group of problem solvers will come
forth with a resolution to our problem.

 

[q]

Center of time is the United States Naval Observatory.
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/history.html
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/master.html
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/clocks.html

 

[CBFalconer]

That depends on whether the system considers a time_t to be
signed or unsigned. Some UNIX systems consider the time range
of a traditional 32-bit time_t to be 1970 thru something like
2106, not 1901 thru 2038.

The obvious cure is to switch to the CP/M standard date format,
which is a 16 bit unsigned value expressing the count of days
since 1977-12-31. 0 is 'unknown'. This postpones the problem
until about 2157 or so.

Quite a good troll, he didn't need to prod it further.

 

[Joona I Palaste]

I am quite sure I've heard stories about everything having an
electronic timer stopping working in 2000.

http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_y2k.shtml

 

[Mike Wahler]

My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds since
the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than 1 second.
It won't run out during the life of this universe. The only trouble is,
we don't know accurately when that was.

Sez right in the Old Testament:
"In the beginning".

-Mike

 

[Joona I Palaste]

(e-mail address removed) <[email protected]> scribbled the following

No need to go into 'panic mode'.
There is time to resolve this issue
in a calm, cool and collected manner.
Certainly 64 bit processors and/or long long
data type will go a long way to resolving the issue.
But there will NOT be any need to import
thousands of H1b visas to fix this problem.
Y2K was definitely blown way out of proportion!
This was done by high priced consulting companies
trying to justify their worth.

What's with the obsession about H1b visas then, eh?

 

[Corey Murtagh]

AngleWyrm wrote:

The entire planet's 3 thrillion barrels of oil is about 25% gone, and at the
current rate of 80 million/day, it will be completely gone within the lifespans
of some of the folks walking the earth today.

Last time I heard a prediction on that (which wasn't all that recent,
admittedly), trend analysis on usage vs known (or suspected) supplies
put the run-out point around 2025.

So yeah, I think a /lot/ of folks here will see the end.

My solution is that I plan to be dead around 2040 or so.

15 years after the oil runs out and we're all paying US$20/gallon for
vehicle grade alcohol :>