Thursday, June 14, 2007
OMG, 2038's Y2K: Y2K38. WTF POSIX?
One of the mentions in the last post I made had to do with a 30 year cookie that Google was putting out. Turns out that they settled on that timeframe because there's another issue coming up in a few decades that will glitch out the computer world again: the 2038 Problem.
(They've got 30 years to come up with something snappier, like 38Fate or Dirty Hate Thirty-Eight, which will inevitably truncated to DHTE and pronounced "date," conceivably and absurdly reducing it to something appropriate yet meaningless, earning it "high comedy" status in Wired magazine which will posit that you are a loser because you didn't know what it meant six months ago. No, not six months from when it debuts in Wired; six months ago from now, when I just made it up. But I digress.)
Basically, the 32-bit integer storing the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 (in the POSIX time representation) reaches its limit at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Duct tape and water bottles!
Actually, it's just silly. Everyone knows the world's going to end in 2012 anyway. Sheesh.
(They've got 30 years to come up with something snappier, like 38Fate or Dirty Hate Thirty-Eight, which will inevitably truncated to DHTE and pronounced "date," conceivably and absurdly reducing it to something appropriate yet meaningless, earning it "high comedy" status in Wired magazine which will posit that you are a loser because you didn't know what it meant six months ago. No, not six months from when it debuts in Wired; six months ago from now, when I just made it up. But I digress.)
Basically, the 32-bit integer storing the number of seconds since January 1, 1970 (in the POSIX time representation) reaches its limit at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Duct tape and water bottles!
Actually, it's just silly. Everyone knows the world's going to end in 2012 anyway. Sheesh.
Labels: computer doomsday n, software
posted by Symetri at 6/14/2007 09:27:00 AM 
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