2038: Only 21 years away • Hacker News Board

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#331

Post by equalunique » Wed, Mar 22, 2017, 11:52 PM UTC

Surprisingly, when Googling for 2038 & FreeBSD, the 2nd highest recommended search result was:

2038年問題 freebsd

I do not speak, write, or search for things using Chinese characters. Seems as though this problem must have been heavily Google'd for by Chinese speakers - why else would it have popped up in my search recommendations?

Btw: Google Translate tells me 年問題 means "year problem"

Perhaps this information was important for ensuring the safety of Kylin, which started out as a sort of Chinese DARPA-style project to get the state off of MS Windows. Kylin was announced in 2006. It was supposedly based on FreeBSD 5.3.

Strange thing is, Kylin later became known to use the Linux kernel (with a Ubuntu influence). - Google search recommendations, which should be based on a recent volume of searches, if they did suggest anything about Kylin development, should yield "2038年問題 linux" rather than "2038年問題 freebsd" - Maybe some of those FreeBSD-Kylin systems are still being heavily used.

Or perhaps there are a lot of embedded systems being produced in China which use FreeBSD.

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#332

Post by JdeBP » Thu, Mar 23, 2017, 11:56 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #111

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is deploying 32-bit linux now, outside of tiny edge cases and mobile. Mobile devices that go in the trash every 2 years. What do you reasonably expect to be around in 2038 in 32-bit form? Once 64-bit processors became mainstream, the 2038 problem pretty much solved itself. There's only disincentives to building a 32-bit system today let alone in 20+ years. Unlike with Y2k where there was nothing but incentives…

It won't be the same magnitude of issues. However, I'm sure there will be plenty of apps on said 64 bit Linux that have issues. I commented about a mysql problem here that exists on 64 bit MySQL, on 64 bit Linux. It's not much of a stretch that some internal apps at a company would have similar issues. Edit: Ntp has something of a protocol issue to be addressed as well.

There's always TAICLOCK.

* http://cr.yp.to/proto/taiclock.txt

Technically, "always" is a stretch. But it's shorter than "until the age of the universe is well over an order of magnitude bigger than it is now".

Re: 2038: Only 21 years away

#333

Post by JdeBP » Fri, Mar 24, 2017, 12:23 AM UTC

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.

That one, however, will have a catchy little slogan:

   PIC 9(5) for 9995!