The BBC Looks At Rollover Bugs, Past and Approaching

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 5, 2015 @02:15AM 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.

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Ask Mel by Sarten-X · 2015-05-05 02:24 · Score: 5, Funny

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

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You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Y2K was -not- a small issue by mccalli · 2015-05-05 04:15 · Score: 5, Insightful

The reason so little went wrong is because people spent ages testing and upgrading/fixing beforehand. Had we left it all to 1st Jan 2000 there would have been issues,

It annoys me to see Y2K trotted out time and time again as a non-event. It was a very big event, and by the large part it was very successfully handled.