The Epochalypse: It’s Y2K, But 38 Years Later
The Epochalypse: It’s Y2K, But 38 Years Later
hackaday.com
The Epochalypse: It’s Y2K, But 38 Years Later
27 comments
-
-
Linux kernel has had support for 64 bit time for years. On Debian, packages for the upcoming release were updated to 64 bit time earlier this year. I'm fairly sure the other distributions have done or are doing the same. So basically you now have 2 years to upgrade your OS and to pester the vendors of commercial software to do the same.
Like someone else said, it will be 2 very busy years, but we can survive this.
-
A 64-bit signed integer can represent timestamps far into the future—roughly 292 billion years in fact, which should cover us until well after the heat death of the universe. Until we discover a solution for that fundamental physical limit, we should be fine.
Come on now, heat death will take far more than 10¹⁰⁰ years, not just 3x10¹¹. It's not the point of the article but get your facts right.
I'm not too worried about the year 2038 problem. I suspect it will be similar to Y2K, with a bit of overhyped panic, but with most stuff being patched beforehand to avoid issues.
-
Y2K wasn’t overhyped. It was just successfully planned for. This reeks of the paradox of IT. “Everything is broken, what do you even do” vs “nothing is broken, what do you even do?”
-
Yeah it only felt like it wasn’t a big deal because it became a big deal early enough for there to be plans made. And because good people doing hard work to prevent a problem wasn’t newsworthy after the fact.
-
That's the thing though: It was well-prepared and due to that there was no big issue.
2038 is the same: very well prepared and thus it will not be a big issue.
Of course, if ignored, both would be very problematic, but that's not the point.
-
-
I was at Pepsi for Y2K. In 98, we started with MSMail, W95, and Netware2. We had to also replace all 40k desktops. We worked like dogs for those 2 years and only barely had everything ready in time. Without that work, we would not have been able to continue any business operations. Nothing about it was overhyped.
-
-
MACs will have their Y2K in 2040
-
Did you mean Media Access Controllers, or macOS?
-
HFS has this limitation but isn’t the default file system anymore since several years ago.
-
27 comments
The problem doesn’t concern me as much at how bad we’ve become at maintaining shit that already works.
There is also the fact that during Y2K, we didn’t have as much reliance on computers.
There was also a worldwide effort to fix any potential problems before they happened.
Cobol mavens burned both ends of the candle and made bank, while making banks work.
Many were old enough to retire after that.
Issue 2038 will be easier to fix because many systems are already 64-bit, as 32-bit systems could only handle 4 GB of RAM, and programs need more RAM.
The only issue would be critical issues that run on 32-bit systems and must be fixed before that date.