Non Political Things That Make You Go Hmmm.. *reborn* (Part 7)

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There’s a great Ken Burns documentary about the road trip. It’s quite dramatic, with a couple of car companies of the day trying to beat him to become the first to drive cross country. I love Ken Burns documentaries.

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Now that is f—-ing FUNNY !

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But it’s a hands free device officer!

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how is that worse than EVERY computer, all of them that are not linux, not being able to tell what century we were in? sure most servers are linux, but most computers are windows. this only affects the linux ones.

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The Linux boxes are servers and are what nearly all other computers are dependent upon. Any call made to any server will utilize Unix based date and time, even Windows servers.

The good news is, workarounds are being implemented and what will actually be affected on 19 January 2038 will be legacy systems nobody bothered fixing.

The entire issue goes back to the fact that date and time storage was based upon a 32 bit scheme for the Unix epoch in seconds with a start date of 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 and an end of the Unix epoch of 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. The fix is upgrading it on everything to a 64 bit scheme which will give a date and time epoch of roughly 292 billion years, or roughly 21 times the age of the universe.

The Y2k issue was far simpler as it was based upon a data storage scheme that relied upon 2 digits for the year rather than 4.

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again with the “far simpler”. upgrading linux machines to 64 bit in the next 14 years is not the same thing as rewriting every program that uses a date. hell, i’d bet most of them are already 64 bit and the rest will reach end of life and be replaced by then. but this is akin to arguing over which natural disaster is worse. i had a friend who was working on the y2k thing and he told me about the 2038 bug in 1999. that is almost twice as long as they had to fix y2k. they’ll all be fine, again, and it will all be written off as hype, again. same shit, different day/millennium. i do recall going to bed at about 10.30 on new year’s eve in '99.

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Again, you miss the issue entirely. The Y2K38 issue is much more complex than Y2K ever was and has its roots in kernel implementation and kernel calls. It is not as simple as upgrading machines to 64 bits. Every piece of software that makes a call to the kernel for time will have to be updated. It’s not a simple fix. I have personally worked on both. The only thing about Y2K38 is, as you say, the amount of time to fix.

And yes, both were/will be over-hyped. Only idiots who failed to update will be affected

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if they are using the same software in 14 years it’s a problem. no way anything is usable for that long without getting an update. like you say, only those who refuse to upgrade/update are in a position to be in any sort of trouble. mainly some one-off machines in industry that are still running dos computers or something. i’m not arguing that it isn’t a severe issue that needs dealt with, just that there is not really any hurry to do anything except figure out how much embedded software needs to be replaced. and with the time we have most will already be end of life way before it is an issue. maybe it does need to by hyped a little more so folks will get off their collective arses and do something.

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Dude, some of the Windows base operating system is still running some of the same base code as DOS 1.0. We are talking about code that is more than 4 decades old running on nearly every home computer. Nobody throws away old code if it still works.

Same issue applies to Linux, though the code base is much younger. A lot of it still goes back to base code for GNU based software from the 80’s, though.

And yes, just like with Y2K, the only systems that will be affected will be idiots who fail to update. And you know what? There will be idiots that fail to update. I can say from experience too many companies run legacy systems that should have been scrapped for better alternatives two decades ago. Too much of the IRS is still running on systems that cost more to upkeep than a complete overhaul of the infrastructure would cost to implement.

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and the programmers at m$ have 14 years to get that time call function replaced. i could do it in a month using stack exchange (on one system, not all of them) and these guys get paid to write code all day and there are most likely more than a dozen of them, hundreds maybe. usually when they write the new function once it can be copied with minimal adjustment and then they have 13.9 years to find any bugs that crop up. and face it, it’s m$, we expect some of it to be wonky. anyone who fails to update gets no sympathy from me, since it is mainly (not the govt) due to not wanting to lose any of those precious profits they have to squeeze out of their customer base. the smaller orgs have been way more open to updating/upgrading in my experience and it was the big dogs that had huge budgets that drug their feet.

as for the rest, if the new stuff is written with the fix, then in 14 years it will all be fixed incrementally. this conversation is suffering from a different perspective, that’s all. it’s just not that big a deal. and i do recall that some were working on the y2k thing in the early '90s and probably a bit before that. sure, if it all goes to shit it may cause some serious issues, but realistically we have way more important things to worry about. we need to work on this and fix it, but not let it bother us. i’d be way more concerned about some social issues. have a great day.

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I cannot deny any of this. The problem is, the suits in corporations ignore needed upgrades. In lean times they cannot upgrade because money. In times of plenty, well we have other concerns to spend that money on. Meanwhile, their IT is using duct tape and bubblegum keeping a mission critical legacy system from 20 years ago running.

And when the crap hits the fan, and we both know it will eventually regardless of whether it is Y2K38 or a piece of ancient hardware dying with no replacement to be found, some lowly IT worker gets the blame and the C level suite of suits will get bonuses.

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Dam my brain cell hurts now

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Yes, this is true in my house…except the dog hairs on leather sofa, my dogs are not allowed in my living room.

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Did you know Virology isn’t observed Science?
…well, time to sign out for the evening. :upside_down_face:

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