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You've Got 25 Years Until UNIX Time Overflows
CowboyRobot writes "In 25 years, an odd thing will happen to some of the no doubt very large number of computing devices in our world: an old, well-known and well-understood bug will cause their calculation of time to fail. The problem springs from the use of a 32-bit signed integer to store a time value, as a number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970, a practice begun in early UNIX systems with the standard C library data structure time_t. On January 19, 2038, at 03:14:08 UTC that integer will overflow. It's not difficult to come up with cases where the problem could be real today. Imagine a mortgage amortization program projecting payments out into the future for a 30-year mortgage. Or imagine those phony programs politicians use to project government expenditures, or demographic software, and so on. It's too early for panic, but those of us in the early parts of their careers will be the ones who have to deal with the problem."
The IOS reminder service will fail for the first week in January atleast once before then :)
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Standing before the steam roller....
"Stoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooop".... .... "Stooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooop"....
I understand, we need time to correct the issue, but...c'mon?!
Slow news day?
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
My uptime!
After all, we handily averted Y2K with decades to spare, and the internet has been migrated to IPv6 for the past ten years. :-P
Time overflowing sounds like a good plot, instead of the usual time repeating, or other cliche time related plots. I'm just curious what the effects of a time overflow would be. *ponders* Maybe a break down in causality?
Actually we did, but it had nothing to do with integer overflow.
Mortgage systems using 32-bit time_t (if there ever were any) failed 5 years ago for 30-year mortgages.
Oh, that was what that was. Oh crap.
And here all along I've been blaming greedy mortgage brokers for suckering people into mortgages they couldn't afford and a insanely inflated real estate market.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
History shows us that
Blah blah blah. The parent was not giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. And just FYI the whole football thing was an analogy for sex.
As for the article, I'll sum it up for everyone: "Y2K is coming to get youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!! Hide the children!"
I am quite looking forward to having the option of some lucrative consulting income in my early retirement should I decide I need it. :-)
Then my goal is to thwart your retirement plan. I will contract a low-wage programmer from a yet-to-be-determined developing country to write a piece of software that corrects the issue in any source code and recompiles it for you. I'll sell licenses for $1kUSD a pop, which by 2038 will only be enough to cover the cost of a McDonalds Synthetic Cheeseburger Paste from the Value Menu.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
In the 64-bit ABI, a long is 64-bits, so the 2038 time issue does not exist for 64-bit apps.
Perhaps not, but that Y292e9 bug is going to cause some serious headaches for the Pang-Galactic Empire.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Remind me to tag you as "evil bastard" if I ever look at your profile, alright? Not only do you destroy a future old man's retirement scheme, but you turn my stomach with a future menu item. Evil.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
...And just FYI the whole football thing was an analogy for sex....
And anyway, Peter Griffin took care of that football thing once and for all.
No worries, just serve me a Pang-Galactic Gargle Blaster and I'll get right to work after I recover...
For them the Y2K scenario had many years to be fixed slowly (mostly a continuous updating thing - as things broke, they fixed it) so there was no big rush for them
There's a motorcycle shop in my town where all the receipts are dated "1913". And printed with tractor feed dot-matrix.
So not everybody's in a big hurry.
64-bit time ends on 15:30:08 on Sunday, 4 December 292,277,026,596
you think the programmers in that year will be happy with the mess you left them?
not really planning ahead now are you geniuses?
dear coders of year 292 billion: i'm sorry, we failed you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it