Y2K38 Watch Starts Saturday

Jon Masters writes "I just wanted to remind everyone that Saturday, January 19th 2008 will mark the beginning of the 30-year countdown to the Y2K38 bug, when Unix time will overflow 32 bits. Some 30-year loan calculation software might start having problems with this over the weekend."

I can't wait!

[ucblockhead (63650)]

I plan on making a mint using my mad C skillz in 2036 and 2037, just like all those Cobol guys who came out of retirement in 1998.

Now if I can find a bank open on Saturday

[Actually, I do RTFA (1058596)]

I can get a thirty-year $250,000 loan with monthly payments of -$1,200.

Re:Now if I can find a bank open on Saturday

[risk one (1013529)]

Just hope they're using signed ints to store that value.

What loan software uses Unix time?

[corsec67 (627446)]

And, wouldn't 50 years or longer loan terms have shown this before now?

30 years?

[Hatta (162192)]

Remind me again when it's 30 minutes.

Envy

[argmanah (616458)]

I envy the programmers who had the foresight to program their application using a 2 digit year field. They won't have to worry have to worry about this problem until 2099, and by then we won't be using the same systems we do today anyways!

My date of birth

[nogginthenog (582552)]

Is 123456789, Unix time. No shit. 29 Nov 1973. Guess I'm a confirmed geek then?

Re:My date of birth

[scaverdilly (902859)]

Yeah, but 1234567890 comes just short of Feb 14th in a year (Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:31:30 UTC).
It just goes to show that true geeks will only ever almost get close enough to women for romanitc encounters.

January 19, 2038

[Malevolent Tester (1201209)]

Is this going to affect the Duke Nukem Forever release?

Incorrect....

[gweihir (88907)]

Older flavours of Unix will wrap-around on 32 bit int. More modern systems use time_t instead of int and may or may not be affected by the problem. time_t can be unsigend (which gives another 68 years) or long long int/long long unsigned (which are both 64 bit long). In any case, fixing the basis library and recompileing is enough for properly implemented software.

I don't give a shit

[by Anonymous Coward]

I don't give a shit. And I mean that in the most literal, non-idiomatic way. If I had a pile of turds in my back yard, and you were to walk up to me and say, "Excuse me, sir, if you would let me relieve you of one of these useless pieces of feces I could guarantee a resolution to the Y2K38 computer issue," I would simply reply, "I'm sorry, but those are my shits, and I'm not giving one."

   

Re:Hmmmmmm

[nullCRC (320940)]

No, that was me. Sorry.

Re:WTF are you talking about?

[plague3106 (71849)]

Well, its kind of hard to compute payment dates if your date representation ends at 2038, and you have something longer than a 30 year mortgage.

Re:And other things..

[Malevolent Tester (1201209)]

Apocalyptic event? Last time I checked, the world was still here. Epochal, perhaps, as I suspect it will be the defining event for my generation, much like the moon landing or JFK forgetting to duck, but in the grand scheme of things it was no more apocalyptic than the 2005 tsunami.

Re:And other things..

[merreborn (853723)]

I always found it interesting that 1 billion seconds happened 2 days before 9/11.

You can come up with any number of numerological associations for any event. Seriously. Try it some time. Pick any event, and you can come up with a dozen, if you try.

Re:And other things..

[Bob-taro (996889)]

You can come up with any number of numerological associations for any event. Seriously. Try it some time. Pick any event, and you can come up with a dozen, if you try.

Really?! So there are always at least 12 numerological associations with every event in history?! OMG, I'm totally freaking out!!!11!1!

Re:And other things..

[Cajun Hell (725246)]

You can come up with any number of numerological associations for any event. Seriously. Try it some time. Pick any event, and you can come up with a dozen, if you try.

Interesting that of all the numbers you could have mentioned, you just happened to pick dozen: the number of eggs that are most often sold together. This suggests you are a chicken farmer. Your uid is another clue: 853723. 8+5+3+7+2+3=28. 28 % 12 = 4, which happens to be your comment's score at the time I type this. 853723 %12 = 7. You bring your eggs to market every week.

Look at all I have learned about you. And you think numerology doesn't work.

Re:And other things..

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

Yeah, kind of like how Christ was born so close to the changeover from BC to AD.

Re:2048

[Inquisitus (937664)]

Who the hell stores years as 11-bit integers?

Re:2048

[by Anonymous Coward]

Your mom stores years as 11-bit integers.

Re:2048

[Curien (267780)]

Not "real binary"? WTF are you talking about? It's either binary or it's not. And it's binary.

As for your poorly-made argument that computers use words with certain widths, just because you've never used a computer where CHAR_BIT != 8 doesn't mean they don't exist.

Re:maybe vba has a chance to live then

[ari_j (90255)]

The phrase "your an idiot" is one of my favorites almost in the English language.

Re:Unix is made of *FAIL*

[ewilts (121990)]

> VMS has been Y10K-compliant for over a decade.

It's much better than that. It's mostly DCL that has the year 9999 issue. For those of you who like history lessons and how to design real operating systems (and customer support, back when it actually existed), read this article:

  38 Why Is Wednesday November 17, 1858 The Base Time For VAX/VMS?

COMPONENT: SYSTEM TIME OP/SYS: VMS, Version 4.n

LAST TECHNICAL REVIEW: 06-APR-1988

SOURCE: Customer Support Center/Colorado Springs

QUESTION:

Why is Wednesday, November 17, 1858 the base time for VAX/VMS?

ANSWER:

November 17, 1858 is the base of the Modified Julian Day system.

The original Julian Day (JD) is used by astronomers and expressed in days
since noon January 1, 4713 B.C. This measure of time was introduced by
Joseph Scaliger in the 16th century. It is named in honor of his father,
Julius Caesar Scaliger (note that this Julian Day is different from the
Julian calendar named for the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar!).

Why 4713 BC? Scaliger traced three time cycles and found that they were
all in the first year of their cyle in 4713 B.C. The three cycles are 15,
19, and 28 years long. By multiplying these three numbers (15 * 19 * 28
= 7980), he was able to represent any date from 4713 B.C. through 3267 A.D.
The starting year was before any historical event known to him. In fact,
the Jewish calendar marks the start of the world as 3761 B.C. Today his
numbering scheme is still used by astronomers to avoid the difficulties of
converting the months of different calendars in use during different eras.

So why 1858? The Julian Day 2,400,000 just happens to be November 17, 1858.
The Modified Julian Day uses the following formula:

      MJD = JD - 2,400,000.5

The .5 changed when the day starts. Astronomers had considered it more
convenient to have their day start at noon so that nighttime observation times
fall in the middle. But they changed to conform to the commercial day.

The Modified Julian Day was adopted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Obser-
vatory (SAO) in 1957 for satellite tracking. SAO started tracking satellites
with an 8K (non-virtual) 36-bit IBM 704 computer in 1957, when Sputnik was
launched. The Julian day was 2,435,839 on January 1, 1957. This is
11,225,377 in octal notation, which was too big to fit into an 18-bit field
(half of its standard 36-bit word). And, with only 8K of memory, no one
wanted to waste the 14 bits left over by keeping the Julian Day in its own
36-bit word. However, they also needed to track hours and minutes, for which
18 bits gave enough accuracy. So, they decided to keep the number of days in
the left 18 bits and the hours and minutes in the right 18 bits of a word.

Eighteen bits would allow the Modified Julian Day (the SAO day) to grow as
large as 262,143 ((2 ** 18) - 1). From Nov. 17, 1858, this allowed for seven
centuries. Using only 17 bits, the date could possibly grow only as large as
131,071, but this still covers 3 centuries, as well as leaving the possibility
of representing negative time. The year 1858 preceded the oldest star catalog
in use at SAO, which also avoided having to use negative time in any of the
satellite tracking calculations.

This base time of Nov. 17, 1858 has since been used by TOPS-10, TOPS-20, and
VAX/VMS. Given this base date, the 100 nanosecond granularity implemented
within VAX/VMS, and the 63-bit absolute time representation (the sign bit must
be clear), VMS should have no trouble with time until:

      31-JUL-31086 02:48:05.47

At this time, all clocks and time-keeping operations within VMS will suddenly
stop, as system time values go negative.

Note that all time display and manipulation routines within VMS allow for
only 4 digits within the 'YEAR' field. We expect this to be corrected in
a future release of VAX/VMS sometime prior to 31-DEC-9999.

Re:Unix is made of *FAIL*

[WilliamSChips (793741)]

As a coincidence, nobody has actually used VMS in over a decade.

Re:The answer is 64!

[thegrassyknowl (762218)]

Put simply, a lot of software is poorly written and uses int as synonymous with time_t (or somesuch). The two are often interchanged by programmers; particularly those with a Windows background who can't find CTime (or whatever it's called) on non-Windows platforms.

Moving to 64-bit machines won't fix all the magic 32-bit binaries out there but software that's recompiled for 64-bit machines will automagically use 64-bit ints where the programmer held the time in an int.

Of course, I've seen a lot dumber bugs than ignoring to use the operating system's time structures and methods for dealing with time so I don't doubt that there are some bugs that actually will need some serious considerations made.

I guess it's a fault of the Unix people from way back. They made this epoch thing and used a 32-bit number to store the number of seconds since it. I guess they were assuming that all their software would have been replaced by something better on bigger machines. They shouldn't have written such reliable software and then maybe some of it would have been replaced by now ;)