Similar with Y2K — it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, “yeah lol it was a dud.”
The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
It’s already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you’re around then.
Finally it’d be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off
This is the funniest comment I have ever read here. Thank you.
2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet
That’s not true, lots of people are panicking about how fast they’re getting older
All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We’ve known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn’t been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They’re harmless
Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
You do realize that “counting from 1900” meant storing only the last two digits and just hardcoding the programs to print"19" in front of it in those days? At best, an overflow would lead to 19100, 1910 or 1900, depending on the print routines.
The issue wasn’t using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.
I’m going to assume you aren’t old enough to remember, but the “only two digits to represent the year” issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.
a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs.
You don’t spend much time around them, do you?
“Whatever happened with the ozone layer panic, if scientists are so smart?”
We listened to the scientists, and the problem went away.
It’s the same as people using the example of the Y2K bug being a non event. Yeah, because globally trillions of dollars were spent fixing it before it became an event.
Didn’t go away, just stopped getting worse at an alarming rate.
