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2038: Only 21 years away

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Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#91

Post by jcranmer »

simias wrote: post #62
dboreham wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv4 as designed didn't support anything like a few billion addresses. We had to invent CIDR to get there, years later.

Are you sure about that? If we're talking as IPv4 as specified in RFC 791[0] (dated September 1981) it seems to support billions of addresses already: > Addresses are fixed length of four octets (32 bits). An address begins with a network number, followed by local address (called the "rest" field). There are three formats or classes of internet addresses: in class a, the high order bit is zero, the next 7 bits are th…

It supported billions of addresses, but only millions of networks. The registry could only give out 128 16-million address chunks, 16,384 64k chunks, and ~2M 256 address chunks.

IPv4 was running out of class B's, those 64k address chunks, when CIDR was introduced.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#92

Post by pbhjpbhj »

tyingq wrote: post #63
archgrove wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Databases too. MySQL has a 2038 bug in their UNIX_TIMESTAMP function. select unix_timestamp('2038-01-19') returns 2147472000 select unix_timestamp('2038-01-20') returns 0

Surely these sorts of errors in major systems are already being/have already been addressed - for healthcare for example a search for which members of a GP's practice are going to be pensioners in 2040 is going to error badly? Strikes me that the time to address them was shortly after the millennium bug.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#94

Post by bshimmin »

axlee wrote: post #78
chiph wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were fortunes made in 1999 doing similar work.

It was a good time to be a COBOL developer.

There's always someone on HackerNews who has done something pertinent to almost any discussion (it's one of the best things about being here, in fact) - are there any COBOL guys or gals who made a fortune fixing Y2K bugs who'd like to share their story?

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#95

Post by janwillemb »

axlee wrote: post #78
chiph wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were fortunes made in 1999 doing similar work.

It was a good time to be a COBOL developer.

I never quite understood why the transition from 1999-2000 should be a big deal for a computer system, until I learned about how COBOL works: it stores numbers as its string-representation unless told otherwise, and trying to store 100 in a field of two bytes will happily be stored as "00". Of course we had other bugs, with the same cause, well after the y2k-period.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#96

Post by james_pm »

archgrove wrote: post #3

This 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.

Some good domain options available. .consulting, .guru, .pro, .expert. https://www.hover.com/domains/results?utf8=&q=epochalypse

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#97

Post by gmac »

gregmac wrote: post #29

I wonder how much attention this will get from the general public and non-technical managers? After all, programmers predicted doom for Y2k, and then "nothing happened". This is almost the same situation, except I assume slightly less understandable to a non-programmer (you have to understand seconds-since-1970 and why we'd do that instead of storing the date as text, powers of 2 and the difference between 32 and 64-…

Yeah, I worry that between the less obvious failure mechanics and the sense that Y2K was overblown (probably, ironically, because it was effectively mitigated), the epochalypse may not be all that nice.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#98

Post by cookiecaper »

mikeash wrote: post #65
_uhtu wrote: post #5

Is 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…

If you told the original UNIX developers that there was even the slightest chance their system might still be in use in 2038, they probably would have called in some large, friendly men in white coats to haul you away. Add to that the fact that memory was very much not cheap at the time. Memory for the PDP-7 (the first computer to run UNIX) cost $12,000-20,000 for 4kB of memory. In 1965 dollars. In 2017 terms, that m…

Ironically, there's actually a chance UNIX wouldn't have been in use in 2038, or any time at all, if its designers had insisted on a costly future-proofing like using a 64-bit time type. As you've highlighted, wasting memory like that is a costly proposition, and it would've been an easy black mark when compared against a competing system that "uses less memory".

I think the developers made the right choice.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#99

Post by tyingq »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #92
tyingq wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databases too. MySQL has a 2038 bug in their UNIX_TIMESTAMP function. select unix_timestamp('2038-01-19') returns 2147472000 select unix_timestamp('2038-01-20') returns 0

Surely these sorts of errors in major systems are already being/have already been addressed - for healthcare for example a search for which members of a GP's practice are going to be pensioners in 2040 is going to error badly? Strikes me that the time to address them was shortly after the millennium bug.

That's not been my experience. A lot of companies don't address needs that are farther in the future, because there are nearer term needs and a fixed budget. Also, legacy systems that haven't been patched or updated in decades aren't that uncommon.

And, even if they happen to be safe, they do tend to pay well just for an audit to confirm that.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#100

Post by web007 »

archgrove wrote: post #3

This 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.

This is part of my plan as well, thus https://2038consulting.com/ registered 6 years ago.
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