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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!
Actually we did, but it had nothing to do with integer overflow.
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.
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.