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2038: Only 21 years away

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Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#161

Post by [deleted] »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #110
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…

>verifying that the "ancient" Linux system they setup to replace their mainframe 25 years "ago" is safe. The problem with mainframes is that they can't be trivially upgraded or migrated to 64-bit like modern OS's on x86 hardware can be. Vendor lock-in, retirement of OS, bare to the metal coding, etc caused this. If these mainframes were running a modern OS, it would have been trivial to upgrade them to a 64-bit versi…

[deleted]

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#162

Post by [deleted] »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #110
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…

>verifying that the "ancient" Linux system they setup to replace their mainframe 25 years "ago" is safe. The problem with mainframes is that they can't be trivially upgraded or migrated to 64-bit like modern OS's on x86 hardware can be. Vendor lock-in, retirement of OS, bare to the metal coding, etc caused this. If these mainframes were running a modern OS, it would have been trivial to upgrade them to a 64-bit versi…

[deleted]

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#163

Post by narrator »

DannyB2 wrote: post #155
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.

My retirement planning is to work on the Y10K problem. When the year 9997 comes along, everyone is going to start worrying about the rollover to five digit years. In about the year 9995 I will start seriously brushing up on my COBOL.

Yes, I know some of us will never retire. 8000 years in the future career planning is an interesting thing to think of though. 8000 years ago the only thing that was going on was some neolithic agriculture. Domestication of the Jungle Fowl (modern day chicken) in India and the beginning of irrigated agriculture in Sumeria were probably the biggest news items of that millennium. I guess someone from 8000 years ago could have said he'd be raising chickens or doing irrigated agriculture in 8000 years and wouldn't have been wrong had he lived that long. Makes me think of F.H King's book "Farmers of Forty Centuries" about how Chinese agriculture has been farming the same fields without artificial fertilizer for 4000 years.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#164

Post by PeterisP »

ams6110 wrote: post #139
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Financial systems that deal with bonds already have to deal with maturity dates on 30-year bonds that are past 2038.

Those type of systems use various date representations instead of datetime/timestamp fields, they should be mostly immune. Well, until 2038 arrives and some of these dates start being compared with the current datetime.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#165

Post by halcyondaze »

soundwave106 wrote: post #107
halcyondaze wrote: post #93

As a layman here, can someone explain this what the significance of the year 2038 is to me?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem Short summary: Many systems (including Unix) store time as a signed 32 bit int, with the value 0 representing January 1st 1970 00:00:00. This number will overflow on 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.

So a more serious Y2K?

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#167

Post by noselasd »

gbrown_ wrote: post #77
masklinn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is because Linux is just a kernel (not an entire system like BSDs) the syscall ABI is the actual kernel API . If you break it, you break the world. On BSDs, or Window, or most every OS, there's a base "userland" library (e.g. libc) which serves as the kernel API and hides whatever ABI specific syscalls use, Linux doesn't have that.

I know, I'm saying it would be nice if the Linux kernel could set up a method for breaking ABI's in a planned fashion. I'm not saying it would be easy.

Linux has a method - which is to add the new in parallel to the old, and remove the old at a later time when it's certainly no longer needed.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#168

Post by jayflux »

pkulak wrote: post #57

Is 2038 the end of a signed int? If so, can't we just make it unsigned and buy ourselves another 70 years or so? I don't know how much of an issue not being able to represent time before 1970 is, but for timestamps that doesn't seem like it would be an issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem explains pretty well why that wouldn't work and other solutions tried

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#170

Post by PeterisP »

iamgopal wrote: post #28

Call me stupid, but I think computing will be much different to worry about this. ( single chip os or iot to the level that each hardware component is separate, or something else...)

The problem is that if you want to manufacture a device that will last 20 years without updating its software, then you have to fix this issue within a year - otherwise the washing machine, car, stereo or whatever you release with embedded chips and currently standard software can fail in interesting ways in 2038.
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