Year 2038 Bug

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skip0110

skip0110

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skip0110
No joke. This site explains it pretty well:
The year-2038 bug is similar to the Y2K bug in that it involves a time wrap not coped for by programmers. In the case of Y2K, many older machines did not store the century digits of the date year, hence the year 2000 and the year 1900 would appear the same.

Of course we now know that the prevalence of computers that would fail because of this error was greatly exaggerated by the media. Computer scientists were generally aware that most machines would continue operating as usual through the century turnover, with the worst result being an incorrect date. This prediction withstood through to the new millennium.

There are however several other problems with date handling on machines in the world today. Some are less prevalent than others, but it is true that almost all computers suffer from one critical limitation. Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970. A recent milestone was Sep 9 2001, where this value wrapped from 999'999'999 seconds to 1'000'000'000 seconds. Very few programs anywhere store time as a 9 digit number, and therefore this was not a problem.

Modern computers use a standard 4 byte integer for this second count. This is 31 bits, storing a value of 231. The remaining bit is the sign. This means that when the second count reaches 2147483647, it will wrap to -2147483648.

The precise date of this occurrence is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038. At this time, a machine prone to this bug will show the time Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901, hence it is possible that the media will call this The Friday 13th Bug.
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Programs really do use UTC very often, but is this going to be the "real" Y2K bug, or just another doomsday prediction?
 
It might happen for those particular machines, but 33 years from now, I'd say just about any computer that will be affected by this will have been replaced several dozen times.
 
Jordan
It might happen for those particular machines, but 33 years from now, I'd say just about any computer that will be affected by this will have been replaced several dozen times.
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My thoughts exactly.
 
Agreed has well. Most computers we have right now are most likely going to eb replaced by extremely more high-tech machines that will able to handle it.
 
I stopped reading after the first line. :indiff:

Remember the Y2K bug? Remember all the hoo-ha over that? How it would shut down businesses, etc, etc?

And what happened? Nothing.
 
I stopped reading after the first line.

Remember the Y2K bug? Remember all the hoo-ha over that? How it would shut down businesses, etc, etc?

And what happened? Nothing.
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Many companies spent lots of money on programmers so that the doomsday prediction would not come about.
 
Stinky Chicken
I stopped reading after the first line. :indiff:

Remember the Y2K bug? Remember all the hoo-ha over that? How it would shut down businesses, etc, etc?

And what happened? Nothing.
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This is correct. It won't really matter. By the time this rolls around there might be some megacomputer that is the size of a fingernail. I know that the PC I am using now will be long gone, as we usually get new PC's every 2 to 3 years.
 
claf-43
remind when closer to the date :)
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We won't need to remind you when it gets closer to the date. By the time this rolls around computer manufacturers would have fixed the problem, like the Y2K bug. Everything will continue the same as usual, just like after the new millenium.
 
cardude2004
We won't need to remind you when it gets closer to the date. By the time this rolls around computer manufacturers would have fixed the problem, like the Y2K bug. Everything will continue the same as usual, just like after the new millenium.
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I don't know, aprt of the reason Y2K appeared to be no big deal is because it got so much press--everyone was prepared. One of my machines needed a BIOS patch to hold the date correctly after Y2K, and my dad said that about 1/5 of the PC at his office needed similar work. Thats a significant percentage.
 
skip0110
I don't know, aprt of the reason Y2K appeared to be no big deal is because it got so much press--everyone was prepared. One of my machines needed a BIOS patch to hold the date correctly after Y2K, and my dad said that about 1/5 of the PC at his office needed similar work. Thats a significant percentage.
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How old is your PC. Our PC's here at home, and the ones that my parents use for work transfered to the new millenium without any changes. We didn't have to update the BIOS or anything.
 
^Oh, our PC's at the time were like a year old, maybe even younger than that. At the time, the oldest PC we had in the house was an 8 year old PC, it trasfered to the year 2000 just fine, without an update.
 
skip0110
Its my really old one...it was top of the line when I got it and it's not even a Pentium II.
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Heh mine also. We have a 1999 Dell XPS T600. Paid 2300 for it. Back then it was all nice and all now its still kinda nice. I really am not a gamer except the GT series and thats about it. :D BTW mine is a P3 :P
 
pimp racer
Heh mine also. We have a 1999 Dell XPS T600. Paid 2300 for it. Back then it was all nice and all now its still kinda nice. I really am not a gamer except the GT series and thats about it. :D BTW mine is a P3 :P
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Yeah, well thats my crappy desktop, my good one is a 1.5 Ghz P4 circa 2001 ;)
 
If anyone actually still uses a computer from today 33 years from now, man .. I don't even know what I would say. By the time the bug would actually be a problem the systems affected would be so antiquated they would practically be worthless.

Honestly now, does anyone here still use a computer from the early 90s or better yet, does anyone use one of those old punchcard mainframes on a daily basis? I think not.

This bug may be a little bit of a big deal now, as software developers will be looking at new ways to avert this so called disaster. But 33 years from now they will look back at this bug and laugh at the coverage it recieved.
 
VTGT07
If anyone actually still uses a computer from today 33 years from now, man .. I don't even know what I would say. By the time the bug would actually be a problem the systems affected would be so antiquated they would practically be worthless.

Honestly now, does anyone here still use a computer from the early 90s or better yet, does anyone use one of those old punchcard mainframes on a daily basis? I think not.

This bug may be a little bit of a big deal now, as software developers will be looking at new ways to avert this so called disaster. But 33 years from now they will look back at this bug and laugh at the coverage it recieved.
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We still have a computer in our home from the early 90's, but we rarely use it. Most of the time we just watch TV on it because it, like our other PC's has a TV tuner card.
 
What's the point in this, when it is "predicted" that the world will end in 2010??? I reckon it's all butt juice.
 
Pretty much a non-issue for passenger aircraft that are not bush planes or other really small aircraft. Most jet and larger turboprop aircraft have been using combined INS-GPS systems for the last 20 years. GPS is only used to correct for any minor deviation in the INS system, at least in the aircraft I work on (Embraer ERJ-145's). GPS could completely fail and the aircraft can still navigate with minimal effort. I imagine most all modern systems also act the same way in other commercial aircraft.

Really, only in general aviation you have navigation systems that only rely on GPS, but even still, pilots are trained to fly with maps anyway, so a competent pilot should not get lost. Granted, not all GA aircraft even have GPS systems lol...
 
Venom800tt
Pretty much a non-issue for passenger aircraft that are not bush planes or other really small aircraft. Most jet and larger turboprop aircraft have been using combined INS-GPS systems for the last 20 years. GPS is only used to correct for any minor deviation in the INS system, at least in the aircraft I work on (Embraer ERJ-145's). GPS could completely fail and the aircraft can still navigate with minimal effort. I imagine most all modern systems also act the same way in other commercial aircraft.

Really, only in general aviation you have navigation systems that only rely on GPS, but even still, pilots are trained to fly with maps anyway, so a competent pilot should not get lost. Granted, not all GA aircraft even have GPS systems lol...
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It's not the GPS signal that's at issue, it's the receiver code. So it's specific to the particular GPS device, and my guess is that since this is known, and has been known for many years, that it's not something that would be allowed in a major aircraft with that kind of flaw. Also there's this from the article:

article
So that this doesn't happen again any time soon, GPS devices made in the past decade use 13 bits for the week counter, yielding a total of 8,192 weeks or 157 years. Those devices will not have to restart time until 2137, by which time our descendants will have created a whole new set of technological problems.
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I'd imagine GPS receivers in aircraft would have had their software updated anyway. But then a lot of that info is a bit harder to find, at least for the particular aircraft I work on (not an avionics tech).
 
Venom800tt
I'd imagine GPS receivers in aircraft would have had their software updated anyway. But then a lot of that info is a bit harder to find, at least for the particular aircraft I work on (not an avionics tech).
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Indeed, and an aircraft doesn't need GPS anyway, any modern passenger jet's flight computer can cope with zero GPS signal. Planes are voice-routed out of and into controlled airspace and, in between, can easily navigate the airways with or without GPS - it's just another backup. Given that Boeing built the majority (possibly all) of the GPS satellites it strikes me as unlikely that they're not on top of this problem both at the transmission end and in terms of providing industry-standard update information to aircraft manufacturers and operators.

It's far more likely that the taxi ride to the airport would be affected by this bug.
 
Considering the fact that the week rollover has been widely known for more than twenty years I trust that all manufacturers of GPS receivers have solved the issue long time ago already.

I’d be concerned if I had a Stone Age GPS receiver, but if it survived the last week rollover it will probably be fine again.
 
Jordan
It might happen for those particular machines, but 33 years from now, I'd say just about any computer that will be affected by this will have been replaced several dozen times.
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Tell that to my in laws :lol:

Jerome
 
Jump_Ace
Tell that to my in laws :lol:

Jerome
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Or the government... we have a few really old systems still in our legacy environment that are running programs coded in COBOL that have been going since like 98. Atm it's too expensive to replace. They probably won't be replaced in fact until they fully break. Then it will be a scramble to get a new system created, cause, that's how governments work.
 

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