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Y2K38 Watch Starts Saturday

Posted by kdawson on from the not-a-good-day-for-a-loan dept.

Jon Masters writes "I just wanted to remind everyone that Saturday, January 19th 2008 will mark the beginning of the 30-year countdown to the Y2K38 bug, when Unix time will overflow 32 bits. Some 30-year loan calculation software might start having problems with this over the weekend."

4 of 542 comments (clear)

  1. Re:2048 by IdleTime · · Score: 0, Troll

    1 11 11 11 11 11 is not a real binary number, it is handled internally as at least 00 00 01 11 11 11 11 11 which will lead to no problems.

    --
    If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
  2. Re:And other things.. by PIBM · · Score: 0, Troll

    And did you knew that this amount is less than 0.5% of the cost of the war in iraq from the US alone?

  3. Re:...and requires accuracy to the nearest second? by Quadraginta · · Score: 0, Troll

    I doubt it. The QA bug fixing et cetera involved in figuring out how to convert from number of months to years (hint: divide by 12, inasmuch as there's no such thing as "leap months") is going to be dwarfed by any number of other difficulties in making sure your financial software works and (more relevant) can't be diddled by idiots at the other end of the GUI.

    I suspect anyone writing a loan software program is just going to do all the calculations in months, with months an integer, and then, if necessary, convert month #X to a calendar month by adding X to the month and year of the start date of the loan. As mentioned, since a year always equals a duodecimonth, exactly, this conversion is trivial. Your mind-boggling nest of special case rules only occurs when you need things like the date of the month or the day of the week. Months and years are perfectly regular.

  4. Re:And other things.. by HopperUK · · Score: 0, Troll

    Jesus. I hope you're joking.