Unix Year 2038 problem and the art of underestimating

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

DoctorOetker•about 12 hours ago

Why not calculate the number of bits necessary before Sol goes supernova? The clock will only be as useful as long as the local star lasts, and when different star systems get populated they or their planets will use local clocks as well.

In theory laws could be authored requiring entities to register pragmatic assumptions with foreseeable violation dates, so that they can be added to a sorted queue of assumption violations to be crossed.

apothegm•about 5 hours ago

Pretty sure a 64-bit integer gets us to the death of our sun with several powers of 10 left over.

Sol won’t ever go nova, though, so I’m not sure how one would calculate the number of seconds until that happens.

Y2038, meanwhile, is just an artifact of the limitations of older hardware.

YesJustWolf•about 12 hours ago

This one was pretty fun to discuss. Nobody is ever going to need more than 640k of RAM.

jammcq•about 13 hours ago

We talk about the Year 2038 problem, Y2K, DJ10K and many more bugs of this nature

rjsw•about 9 hours ago

This was fixed for all my UNIX systems in 2012.

Unix Year 2038 problem and the art of underestimating

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Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews