The BBC Looks At Rollover Bugs, Past and Approaching

New submitter Merovech points out an article at the BBC which makes a good followup to the recent news (mentioned within) about a bug in Boeing's new 787. The piece explores various ways that rollover bugs in software have led to failures -- some of them truly disastrous, others just annoying. The 2038 bug is sure to bite some people; hopefully it will be even less of an issue than the Year 2000 rollover. From the article: It was in 1999 that I first wrote about this," comments [programmer William] Porquet. "I acquired the domain name 2038.org and at first it was very tongue-in-cheek. It was almost a piece of satire, a kind of an in-joke with a lot of computer boffins who say, 'oh yes we'll fix that in 2037' But then I realised there are actually some issues with this.

Comments

Ask Mel

[Sarten-X]

It's not a rollover bug; It's a rollover feature!

some that never made the list.

[nimbius]

Minuteman III nuclear missile: Due to an unsigned integer bug, missile resets to the year 1900 and targets Grover Clevelands presbyterian ministry as part of the clandestine war on christmas
US Presidential Limousine: Function call returns a flawed short int that causes the vehicle to lose entropy in its timekeeping, routinely deploying countermeasures and refusing to operate in the presence of a black president.
UCLA Scheduling mainframe: strconv slurps an undersized signed int, causing date/time tracking problems and resulting in comfortable, plausible and very useful class scheduling to occur.
Russian RT-23 Molodets missile: timer returns a null or negative value, resulting in an active launch thats aborted by sergei usually after he has his first cup of coffee...but sometimes after the paper.