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The Epochalypse Project

epochalypse-project.org

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Re: The Epochalypse Project

#41

Post by lambdaone »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #19
stuaxo wrote: post #3

(Not) Looking forward to 2038 onwards as people ignore the fact we coordinated to fix this and start saying it was all a big hoax.

Will people use planes falling out of the sky as the reason the fix must be priority 1 this time?

Even though it might seem unlikely, you absolutely can't eliminate the possibility of planes falling out of the air unless you have thoroughly audited and tested all their systems in advance. Not having planes in the air at the exact moment of rollover - just in case - might be a good idea too. Similarly financial markets and other key infrastructure.

13 years is plenty of time to make a start on all of this, and will allow the costs to be spread over that time period without undue hurry. It's also long enough that it will be possible for much software to be allowed to reach end-of-life without being audited, while applying rigorous testing to new software. Procrastination, though, is not a good option.

Re: The Epochalypse Project

#42

Post by mkj »

Are they doing anything to fix it or just raising awareness?

Here's an example of measuring packages that report warnings for software that has suspicious conversions. Compile with `-Wconversion` with both 32-bit and 64-bit time_t, and see what the difference is. https://github.com/mkj/yocto-y2038

That is using yocto, but you could probably do something similar with other less-embedded distros too, if you can rebuild the world.

FWIW I didn't find much interesting with that apart from busybox dhcpd.

Re: The Epochalypse Project

#43

Post by lambdaone »

eastbound wrote: post #30
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will people use planes falling out of the sky as the reason the fix must be priority 1 this time?

Planes will still be using floppy disks. Or they will have upgraded to the worst brand of Android, as usual.

Why should floppy disks be a problem? Even if they are fantastically out of date, if they can be maintained as a niche legacy technology, they're not a problem. They won't suddenly stop working, it will just slowly get more and more expensive to get the parts. Supply chains are magic - at the right price, someone will always be willing to make more floppies or drives. Of course that price might be $500 per floppy and $50,000 per drive...

Re: The Epochalypse Project

#44

Post by Henchman21 »

net01 wrote: post #4

The fact that it's not common knowledge and not taught in schools and universities is concerning.

Is it? I was starting my career during Y2K. It was widely regarded as a bust, and I’d anticipate people expecting the same damned thing?

Re: The Epochalypse Project

#45

Post by tomsmeding »

Thorham wrote: post #36
fmbb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the year 287390 (285420.9 years after 1970) according to my calculations using DuckDuckGo’s calculator. If you ask ChatGPT it’s: = 285,616 years after 1970 = Year 285,616

That seems a bit small seeing how doubles can represent 53 bit integers accurately.

    >>> 2**53/(1000*3600*24*365)+1970
    287586.41472415626
There's a lot of milliseconds.

Re: The Epochalypse Project

#46

Post by dgfl »

Thorham wrote: post #36
fmbb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the year 287390 (285420.9 years after 1970) according to my calculations using DuckDuckGo’s calculator. If you ask ChatGPT it’s: = 285,616 years after 1970 = Year 285,616

That seems a bit small seeing how doubles can represent 53 bit integers accurately.

Well, 2^53 milliseconds is indeed 285 414 years.

Re: The Epochalypse Project

#48

Post by pixl97 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #27
jbeninger wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. My point is that the orgs paying for all these updates were mostly motivated by the vague claims of experts rather than concrete examples

That's nonsense. Orgs spent time and resources on it because they grabbed a test server and demonstrated it caused problems. It's not some weird ethereal untestable bug. They set the dev server to a minute before midnight and went "oh shit".

That and quite often the problems started showing up years before 2000 itself. "Hey, the scheduler is giving me a meeting 80 years ago" type weirdness when it crossed the boundry.

Re: The Epochalypse Project

#50

Post by rvba »

mkj wrote: post #42

Are they doing anything to fix it or just raising awareness? Here's an example of measuring packages that report warnings for software that has suspicious conversions. Compile with `-Wconversion` with both 32-bit and 64-bit time_t, and see what the difference is. https://github.com/mkj/yocto-y2038 That is using yocto, but you could probably do something similar with other less-embedded distros too, if you can rebuild…

It looks mostly like a project for self promotion of the two authors. Maybe they offer some consulting services.

Funniest is that one of them wrote that they have "learned about it after Y2K bug". I thought one learns about this overflow in a "introduction to programming" class...

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