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Year 2038 Problem

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LonelyJar
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06 May 2014, 4:26 am

Discuss the year 2038 problem here.

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zer0netgain
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06 May 2014, 8:57 am

So, what's going to happen in 2038?



LupaLuna
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06 May 2014, 6:25 pm

the UNIX clock only had 2 billion(31 bit, 2^31 to be exact.) seconds from the epoch date of jan-1 1970. 2 billion second after that will be sometime in the year 2038.

We survived Y2K so will have no problem surviving this.



kraftiekortie
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06 May 2014, 7:01 pm

Perhaps somebody from this very website might come up with a solution.
A solution is inevitable.

We're still alive after the projected Mayan Disaster of 2013, right?



ruveyn
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06 May 2014, 8:15 pm

LupaLuna wrote:
the UNIX clock only had 2 billion(31 bit, 2^31 to be exact.) seconds from the epoch date of jan-1 1970. 2 billion second after that will be sometime in the year 2038.

We survived Y2K so will have no problem surviving this.


I guess that means the world will end in 2038. The mistaken prediction of The End in 2012 was based on the fact that the Mayan Calender 'ran out" in 2012. But everyone know the Unix calender is more important.

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sliqua-jcooter
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07 May 2014, 11:49 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:
Perhaps somebody from this very website might come up with a solution.
A solution is inevitable.


Just like with Y2k, the solution already exists. Unix epoch time on all 64-bit systems is now a 64 bit integer. The "problem" is that there are plenty of old systems out there that will need to be upgraded before 2038 - which is very likely going to happen on 99% of the current systems out there anyway.


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blunnet
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10 May 2014, 2:32 am

Current hardware and software will be outdated by 2038 anyway, so there is an actual problem?

Did 32-bit systems existed exactly 24 years ago?



Fogman
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12 May 2014, 4:28 pm

blunnet wrote:

Did 32-bit systems existed exactly 24 years ago?


In 1990, Intel 386 machines were 32 bit as were SparcStations and SGI, CRAY,and DEC VAX systems, and I believe a few others that are no longer with us.

To get back to the original question though, I think the only systems that will be vulnerable to the 2K38 problem will be museum pieces when that year begins.


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Rocket123
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12 May 2014, 9:26 pm

LupaLuna wrote:
the UNIX clock only had 2 billion(31 bit, 2^31 to be exact.) seconds from the epoch date of jan-1 1970. 2 billion second after that will be sometime in the year 2038.

We survived Y2K so will have no problem surviving this.


I remember discussing this problem back in the 1990s. At the time, we surmised that the problem would be bigger (i.e. more expensive to resolve) than the Y2K problem. I guess we will see. In any event, we will survive. Just like we did in 2000.



eric76
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14 May 2014, 1:55 pm

blunnet wrote:
Current hardware and software will be outdated by 2038 anyway, so there is an actual problem?

Did 32-bit systems existed exactly 24 years ago?


I'm puzzled by the "exactly 24 years ago". Why 24 years ago?



eric76
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14 May 2014, 2:03 pm

In the mid 1980s, I wrote a system that tracked dates as the number of days since March 1, 1836. The date was chosen so that Texas Independence Day, March 2, 1836, was day 1.

The reason for going back that far was that it had to be able to represent the birthdate of any living person accurately and that would handle anyone up to an age of approximately 150 which seemed to be more than sufficient.

The number of days was stored as an unsigned 32 bit number.



FMX
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14 May 2014, 5:09 pm

blunnet wrote:
Current hardware and software will be outdated by 2038 anyway, so there is an actual problem?


Yes, there is. This is exactly how the Y2K bug happened: programmers writing code back in 1970s thought "come on, there is no way anyone will still be running this code in the year 2000!" And, for the most part, they were right about that. What they didn't count on is backward compatibility: the replacement systems often had to store data in the same format as the old systems. So while the old code was, indeed, replaced, the Y2K problem it introduced persisted - usually until year 2000 was close enough for people to take it seriously. Hopefully we've learnt our lesson from that for the year 2038 problem. Luckily there is also more time to fix that one.


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rapidroy
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20 May 2014, 12:19 am

I was almost 10 when Y2K was an issue, I recall the common fix being the simple reclocking of systems to trick them into thinking they were in an earlier time, without going into the details would that not work with the 2038 issue?



eric76
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20 May 2014, 12:54 am

rapidroy wrote:
I was almost 10 when Y2K was an issue, I recall the common fix being the simple reclocking of systems to trick them into thinking they were in an earlier time, without going into the details would that not work with the 2038 issue?


The principal problem was that a great many dates were stored in 6 digits with 2 digits for the year. This applied to birthdates, order dates, shipping dates, delivery dates, hire dates, firing dates, sample dates, transaction dates, ... . On January 1, 2000, the year rolled over from 99 to 00 and any software that calculated the difference in years by subtracting one from the other would return a very wrong result.

The 2038 issue is a bit different. On UNIX machines, dates are often stored internally as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 as a signed 32 bit integer. In 2038, that integer will roll over from 2,147,483,647 to -2,147,483,649 seconds.

While one could roll back the clock, that would really screw things up. Would you like to charge a meal on a credit card and have it show up on the bill as being years earlier?



rapidroy
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21 May 2014, 12:37 am

eric76 wrote:
While one could roll back the clock, that would really screw things up. Would you like to charge a meal on a credit card and have it show up on the bill as being years earlier?
I know local business owners with very little money in the bank that would likely be OK with that if the choice was to purchase new equipment or use the wrong date. Perhaps a converter of sorts could be used as a patch to display the right dates? I don't really know much on the topic, I just find it interesting and enjoy learning.



eric76
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21 May 2014, 1:13 am

rapidroy wrote:
eric76 wrote:
While one could roll back the clock, that would really screw things up. Would you like to charge a meal on a credit card and have it show up on the bill as being years earlier?
I know local business owners with very little money in the bank that would likely be OK with that if the choice was to purchase new equipment or use the wrong date. Perhaps a converter of sorts could be used as a patch to display the right dates? I don't really know much on the topic, I just find it interesting and enjoy learning.


They might be less happy when the credit card company refused to accept the charges.