Y2038
Tags: computers, doomed, time_t
Current Music: Front 242 -- Punish Your Machine Mix 12" ♬
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Previously
Need to have that available on a T-shirt (without the best buy logo). :-)
It's the Best Buy logo that makes it authentic!
That's true. I was focused on the possibility of being sued if an actual t-shirt was made.
:want:
It's not your computer that will have problems, but various random devices, no?
Click the first previously and tell me again how confident you are in that.
Welcome to the MariaDB monitor. Commands end with ; or g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 49666
Server version: 10.6.11-MariaDB-1 Debian n/a
Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.
Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the current input statement.
MariaDB [(none)]> SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2038-01-18 19:14:07");
+---------------------------------------+
| UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2038-01-18 19:14:07") |
+---------------------------------------+
| 2147454847 |
+---------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.003 sec)
MariaDB [(none)]> SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2038-01-18 19:14:08");
+---------------------------------------+
| UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2038-01-18 19:14:08") |
+---------------------------------------+
| 2147454848 |
+---------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.000 sec)
...is fixed between 10.4 and 10.6 (or built against a clib with 64-bit time_t), and yet I'm going to hold on to my pessimism because of https://m.xkcd.com/2347/
K3n.
Yes, I believe the average Internet user will be fine using their computer, especially compared to say any of their smart appliances. But we'll find out in a dozen-plus years.
Considering we now live in a world far less willing to actually do things to prepare for problems in the present, let alone the future, I wonder how this one will go compared to Y2K. I was quite young when the year 2000 rolled around; just a tad too young to remember details of what systems did and did not conk out. But I don't remember civilisation scrambling around for months in early 2000. Or maybe it did and I've forgotten.
I wonder how 2038 will go.
The late 90's were a different time. The Internet was still kind of new and Terminator 2 wasn't old enough to be forgotten, so people were able to be suitably panicked about the same thing, regardless of political affiliation. If anything I think humankind, as a whole, over-prepared. Some old lady in Baltimore got an electric bill dated January 1, 1900, and that was about it.
The reason Y2K wasn't a disaster is because people put in the fucking work, for many years. You're welcome!
Thank you for your service.
Like jwz says, one reason it was not a disaster was that people, including me, got paid to spend a lot of time making sure it wasn't.
The other reason is that there were a lot fewer systems (I was going to say 'exponentially fewer' and I have an ugly suspicion that the number might be exponential with time), which made the problem more tractable. And proportionally more of the systems that existed were sold by people who gave a shit rather than people who are just fine burning down the world if it makes them more money.
The only thing that makes 2038 less frightening is that by then climate change and general ecosystem collapse will be killing so many people it will seem like quite a small problem in comparison.
Honestly, I'm not too worried about Y2038, but it's not because of people spending money and testing and care on the problem per se. It's because over the next 15 years, most of those crap embedded systems will have had hardware failures and been replaced, and when that happens, whatever commodity garbage they are replaced with will likely be 64 bit and will (by necessity, not planning) contain a cut-and-paste copy of a contemporaneous Linux kernel that has fixed time_t.
So, planned obsolescence and shitty build quality might actually work out in our favour for a change?
I hate the term "planned obsolescence" in this context. That suggests there's some kind of well thought-out plan behind the short lifespans of IoT devices, when, in reality, they just can't be bothered designing them to last. It's not "planned obsolescence", it's "obsolescence through not-giving-a-shit-ness". For all we know, making these devices last may be impossible, I don't think anybody is trying!
I'm not as confident as you, I do think many of the embedded systems will be 64-bit ARM by then but I think an unfortunate number will be running an old 32-bit Linux distribution for various historical and/or "can't find the sourcecode" reasons.
In 1999 I wasn't too worried, for example, of my car not starting because I was pretty sure my cheap car had no concept of what year it was and due to various electrical problems it had it only knew it to within a few +/- months at best. Not true my current low-end car which is needlessly full of computers and does seem to know the year for some reason.
Doubtful. From this year on, all Arm cores will only support 64-bit mode. Unless people are using truly old devices in 2038, or an Arm licensee design their own 32-bit mode core, it will all be running in 64-bit mode... if not 128-bit or whatever they invent to replace Armv9 in 10 years time.
as far as I know they are dropping 32-bit support on their "large Cortex-A cores" which is mostly definitely not all ARM devices. It would destroy the company if they dropped 32-bit, as for a lot of embedded code it's just as easy to move to RISC-V as it would be to migrate to AARRCH-64. At least (if I recall) the Linux people forced the RISC-V 32-bit userspace to use 64-bit time so we have that going for us.
They dropped support on their large cores last year, this year they dropped 32-bit support in little cores as well (they announced it sometime last year). I don't know what's their plan for their microcontrollers, but I don't think Arm is getting anything out of that line.
Given past experience, though, the systems still running 32 bit OSes in 15 years will probably all be “touch it and it might explode” antiques in charge of absolutely vital infrastructure. So still a cause for concern and a problem in need of a government funded push to get them fixed. (Looks at government). That won’t happen. We will be fucked.
It's not going to be an issue. Servicing the moisture traps, burying the plague victims and shooting stray looters is where we're headed for 2038.
Y2K reloaded and retarded.
😀
The advice on that placard would come too late in my time zone, where 32-bit time_t will overflow the previous day.
I made a "Class of 0x80000000" shirt for my kid. I think precisely zero people have gotten it.
I'm seriously diggin' the retro stickers in the actual link.
In other news: I just fell down a rabbit hole for this blog (as one does) for the "retrocomputing" tag and came across your old write-up of this hilariousness:
Clearly, we're due for sequel.
Oh god. I just realized I started my career fixing Y2K bugs and I'm going to end it fixing Y2038 bugs.