The world ends on January 19, 2038: thanks Unix!

[greggh]

http://www.linuxlove.org/2008/02/12/jan ... ver-again/

The Year 2000 problem, also known as Y2K bug caused a word-wide spread concern that computers inside critical industries and The Government would cease to operate properly at the stroke between December 31, 1999 and January 1, 2000. This fear was fuelled by the attendant press coverage and other media speculation, as well as corporate and government reports.

While no significant computer failures occurred when the clocks rolled over into 2000, this might not be the case with the Y2K38 bug. Even if this problem only affects Unix-like operating systems, if true, will be enough to cause massive disruption to the computer world and real world alike, as we know them.

In a nutshell, the year 2038 problem basically consists of the fact that Unix-like operating systems represent time as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer. The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Times beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901. Just imagine if applications running the electricity, finance, nuclear and Internet industry will fail. Very bad things could happen.

Time to panic?

Not really. In fact, not at all. First of all, year 2038 will be in a long, long time and A LOT can happen until then. Secondly, keep in mind that only 32bit systems are affected and that 64bit systems are slowly making their way into our homes, work places and so on. Moreover, using a 64bit system provides a new wraparound date in about 290 billion years which should be just about enough for all of us

[Tsuroerusu]

Time to panic?

Not really. In fact, not at all. First of all, year 2038 will be in a long, long time and A LOT can happen until then. Secondly, keep in mind that only 32bit systems are affected and that 64bit systems are slowly making their way into our homes, work places and so on. Moreover, using a 64bit system provides a new wraparound date in about 290 billion years which should be just about enough for all of us

My next new primary desktop system, which I think I might get one of during the next two years to replace my aging AMD Athlon XP 3200+ based system, will be 64-bit for sure! So this will not be a problem for me. Also I think the only people who're gonna be effected by this are gonna be people running large UNIX mainframes or stuff that don't get changed very often. I could imagine the FBI or the NSA having problems, or like satellite control systems.

[Patrick]

I noticed that system76 now puts 64 bit installs of Ubuntu on their boxes by default. If you have the hardware you should run 64 bit. The arguments against running 64 bit are pretty minor. You can get flash working fairly easily and in a pinch you can always run 32 bit apps.

[Wally Balljacker]

I use 64-bit Gentoo and it's really no different than the x86 version. Flash works inside 64-bit Firefox, nVidia offers native drivers, Sun Java is available, 32-bit Skype works seamlessly using the 32-bit compatibility layer. I really can't think of any reason to stay with 32-bit distributions anymore.

[snarkout]

I'd bet money that this is pushed off so long that it becomes like y2k all over, regardless of any other variable.

[allix]

A less you a running a applications that uses more than 4GB of Ram there is not a "performance" benefit to running 64 bit. Having said that i use 64 bit all over.

[tarball]

64bit isn't just about a larger address space, it also means you can operate on data in 8-byte chunks rather than 4-byte chunks.