Can anyone throw any light on this? Apparently all the world's computers will stop working on January 1st 2048.
I know that's a long way off, but it's kinda scary. Apparently they'll all just stop working unless some component is changed.
Well, considering that a computer is only good for about 5 or 6 years max, until you need to upgrade, I don't think there will be any problems. I mean they've got one of the best profit making gimmicks ever, changing the OS frequently. Then of course every so often creating a new OS that requires an entirely new computer. Apple and Microsoft are big market capitalism at its strongest. As a die hard capitalist, I salute them!
I started at my present company in June 1999 and they hadn't had inhouse IT support prior to that so, needless to say, I kicked off my career by checking our corporate systems for Millenium Bug issues. In the end, we found patches or workarounds for all of them and I spent New Year's Eve 1999 sipping wine at a friend's house.
As for any issues c. 2038, I should be retired by then so it'll be someone else's headache.
There is a techie discussion in Wikipedia if you look up "Year 2038 problem".
The problem, in general, centers on how times are encoded and used by various bits of software in various apps and file systems. Around January 16th, 2038, one fairly common way of representing times used in historical UNIX-like systems will roll over, and the numbers representing time will go negative, and then be interpreted as some date way off in the past. This is something like driving a vehicle so far that the odometer rolls over at 999999 to read zero clicks.
The effect of this could be anywhere from negligible (your car would not stop running, for example, if your odometer rolled over) to devastating depending on a lot of techie details, but probably this will only affect older stuff. Probably by then, you will have new stuff that uses a newer time-keeping format, and everything will be OK. Basically, it is a known problem, and people are already working on solutions.
It is a good idea to be aware that the problem will exist someday. Some things we have today that we want to keep beyond the critical date (like maybe old videos) will likely have to migrate somehow to a new environment that won't fail when the time rolls over.
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open one's mouth and remove all doubt" - Mark Twain (or Lincoln, or Confucius, or...)
the 2038 problem refers to a problem dealing with values larger than a certain amount in 32 bit signing. The solution: Switch to 64 bit signing. It's kind of like the IPV4 "problem" wherein we technically ran out of IP addresses, so we switch to a larger signing system of IPV6. It's completely different from Y2k, which dealt with what happened if the computers which were currently set to use a 2 year system would read the year as 00 could cause problem. Simple solutions to simple problems. In maybe 16-20 years we'll switch the integer signing system. Like we did in 1998 with signing years in four digits instead of two.
And I've only begun fucking with you people.
At the end of the day, it's all math.
