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The BBC Looks At Rollover Bugs, Past and Approaching

Posted by timothy on from the ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.

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.

4 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. OpenBSD is 2038-ready by QuietLagoon · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since the OpenBSD 5.5 release a year ago, the OS is fully ready for the onslaught of 2038.

  2. Windows one is my fave by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 2, Informative

    There was a counter in Windows that rolled over after 28 days I think (like the 787 bug, but 1000 ticks.second not 100).

    Even Microsoft knew that no Windows box could stay up that long.

    (And before you mod me as a troll, think about it and know that MS could have made a bigger counter, but didn't feel the need to)

    1. Re:Windows one is my fave by singularity · · Score: 3, Informative

      The version of Windows was Windows 95, and the number of days was 49.7.

      https://support.microsoft.com/...

      --
      - (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
  3. So Is Mac OS X. by tlambert · · Score: 4, Informative

    So Is Mac OS X.

    I converted time_t to 64 bits on 64 bit systems (which include the most recent iPhones) as part of the changes for 64 bit binary support on the G5 when I wrote the 64 bit binary loader support into exec/fork/spawn, and again as part of UNIX Conformance. It's basically been fixed since Tiger.