2038: Only 21 years away
lwn.net
2038: Only 21 years away
1–10 of 333 posts
Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#2And IPv6 penetration will have hit 20%.
Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#3This is (serious) a part of my retirement planning. I'll be mid-50s when this hits, and have enough low level system knowledge to be dangerous. In about 15 years, I'll start spinning up my epochalypse consultancy, and I'm expecting a reasonable return on investment in verifying systems as 2038 compliant.
Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#4And IPv6 penetration will have hit 20%.
And will be the year of the Linux Desktop.
Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#5Is there a reason why they decided to store time as seconds from 1970? In a 32-bit integer nonetheless. It seems like basic logic would have lead the original designers to make it at least 64 bits so that you'd never overflow it (with a 64 bit time we'd be good til the year 292277026596).
64 bits would also allow you to also cover the entirety of history, all the way back to 13.7 billion years ago when the Universe came into existence, but instead the UNIX time format is shackled to be within ~68 years of 1970.
Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#6Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#7This is (serious) a part of my retirement planning. I'll be mid-50s when this hits, and have enough low level system knowledge to be dangerous. In about 15 years, I'll start spinning up my epochalypse consultancy, and I'm expecting a reasonable return on investment in verifying systems as 2038 compliant.
There is a certain amount of snark embedded in this post, but its not a bad idea at all - I'll be in much the same boat at that time - perhaps I can borrow the same idea...
Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#8Is there a reason why they decided to store time as seconds from 1970? In a 32-bit integer nonetheless. It seems like basic logic would have lead the original designers to make it at least 64 bits so that you'd never overflow it (with a 64 bit time we'd be good til the year 292277026596). 64 bits would also allow you to also cover the entirety of history, all the way back to 13.7 billion years ago when the Universe c…
Back in the 70s RAM was expensive, and 68 years is long enough that they figured they would have a solution in place long before it became an issue.
When your machine has a 16 bit processor and a few dozen kilobytes of RAM you look to save wherever you can. 64 bit number support was primitive and quite slow as well.
Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#9This is (serious) a part of my retirement planning. I'll be mid-50s when this hits, and have enough low level system knowledge to be dangerous. In about 15 years, I'll start spinning up my epochalypse consultancy, and I'm expecting a reasonable return on investment in verifying systems as 2038 compliant.
There is a certain amount of snark embedded in this post, but its not a bad idea at all - I'll be in much the same boat at that time - perhaps I can borrow the same idea...
It wasn't intended to be sarcastic. I suspect there will be a lot of businesses (especially finance) interested in verifying that the "ancient" Linux system they setup to replace their mainframe 25 years "ago" is safe. I lived through the Year 2000, and watched the same thing happen there.
With suitable groundwork, there will be a willing and wealthy market looking for people to assuage their fears - a service I see myself as happy to provide. Much as it was in the "Millennium bug" area, a lot of the effort in getting the business is PR spadework, but I've got 15-20 years of prep time to position myself suitably. I also hope to provide a slightly more useful service than many Millennium consultancies did at the time.
Re: 2038: Only 21 years away
#10Is there a reason why they decided to store time as seconds from 1970? In a 32-bit integer nonetheless. It seems like basic logic would have lead the original designers to make it at least 64 bits so that you'd never overflow it (with a 64 bit time we'd be good til the year 292277026596). 64 bits would also allow you to also cover the entirety of history, all the way back to 13.7 billion years ago when the Universe c…
You are operating under the assumption the extra 4 bytes was an insignificant cost. This was not true for much of early UNIX history.