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Thread: Year 2038 !!!

  1. #11
    Some Assembly Required ShagDevil's Avatar
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    2038? Common People, that's when the new M$ OS comes out.

    Introducing - 2038 Windows Anomaly:
    Come 2038, Microsoft will do what no other company has done, create the perfect OS. Known simply as "The Anomaly". No more BSOD's, patches, updates, or any other issues. This OS boasts complete perfection, so much in fact that engineers have included a new option in the Control Panel. This new option titled "System Crash" will imitate all previous MS operating systems. Just click on the icon and the screen will freeze, followed by 20+ cryptic error messages, a BSOD, and a final dialog box reading "critical system error, contact your system administrator".
    "Once the user hits the "OK" button, everything will be fine again, except the screen will be upside down" one MS engineer was quoted. "The user just has to flip his/her monitor and everything will be fine" he added.
    The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his - George Patton

  2. #12
    Priapistic Monk KorpDeath's Avatar
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    I've received spam from the future for quite some time, the significance of the date is probably only significant to the sender.

    maybe something of interest:
    http://aec.cadalyst.com/aec/article/....jsp?id=123100

    Also it a guess at the exact date of the 5 billionth article on wikipedia.org

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...e-million_pool

    and this goes on and on. ;P
    Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
    - Samuel Johnson

  3. #13
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    2038 is irrelevant

    we're all doomed 2036-04-13.37

    Apophis is projected to be within the orbits of most communication satellites ...and that's just a guess


    geeez...how old will Bruce Willis be by then...are we going to have to rely on Ben Affleck? ahhhh
    hhh
    hhhh
    I used to be With IT. But then they changed what IT was. Now what I'm with isn't IT, and what's IT seems scary and weird." - Abe Simpson

  4. #14
    Agony Aunty-Online Moira's Avatar
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    The reason (or one reason anyway) why spam arrives with a date way into the future is that if you have junk mail filters which delete mail automatically after so many days, these messages never get deleted, and I suppose the longer they're on your PC the more chance there is that you'll eventually read them.

    You often get messages arriving with a date of 1977 as well. This is apparently the date generated when spammers leave the date field empty - something which isn't possible using a mail client (apparently it can be done when sending mail through telnet, but I'm a bit hazy on the details here).
    77 111 105 114 97

    My PGP signature

  5. #15
    Senior Member frpeter's Avatar
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    Hello,

    The answer to this is quite simple, the 2038 date carries importance to all *nix systems, especially olders systems. Since the *nix machines count in seconds, there will be a rollover or overflow once the date reaches a certain count causing many large systems to break.

    This number is 2147483648. Here is the math:

    * There are 3600 seconds in one hour.

    2147483648 / 3600 = 596523.2500 hours
    596523.2500 / 24 = 24855.1348 days
    24855.1348 / 365.25 = 68.0497 years
    1970 + 68.0497 = 2038.0497 (the final second of any *nix)

    1 second over 2147483648 will cause a math error because the *nix system will see a time of -1 seconds.

    So 2038 in *nix term is the death date of all current *nix system.

  6. #16
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hah! *nix is doomed, and Billy Windoze will rule the Universe............

    Muhahahahahahahahaha..................

    Doctor, I think that I need another

    Please send your fee billings to Redmond, rather than the Southern Polar regions

    [Penguins live at the South Pole?]


  7. #17
    Senior Member frpeter's Avatar
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    Actually no. *nix is hardly doomed. One simple flip of a bit and we have an outrageously large number of seconds: 4,611,686,018,427,387,904 seconds.

    As to "Billy Windoze" ruling the universe, only in his delusions and wet dreams.

  8. #18
    Agony Aunty-Online Moira's Avatar
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    So we're headed for another year 2000 in the world of linux?
    77 111 105 114 97

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  9. #19
    Senior Member frpeter's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Moira
    So we're headed for another year 2000 in the world of linux?
    Yes (this should probably be a maybe) for the older UNIX systems, no for the modern UNIX/*nix systems.

    Time is *nix is store as a singed long (4 bytes) currently. In 2038 or before (most likely before), time will move to an unsinged long.

    There are 31,557,600 seconds in a standard year. In the *nix world, the Epoch is 1970, so the (supposed) "death date" is 1970 plus the number of years computed from the seconds.

    Here is a table that sums this up (32 bit):

    Signed long............... 2,147,483,647 seconds (4 bytes), 68.0497 years, 2038.0497 A.D.
    Unsigned long........... 4,294,967,295 seconds (4 bytes), 136.0993 years, 2106.0994 A.D.
    Signed long long....... 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 seconds (8 bytes), (take 1970 off), 292,271,030,272.0000 A.D.
    Unsigned long long... 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 seconds (8 bytes), (take 1970 off), 584,542,060,544.0000 A.D.

    *nix is gonna be here for a LONG LONG (signed or unsigned) time.

  10. #20
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Well, as frpeter has more or less implied, it is a well understood issue that will be addressed way before the deadline. Hey, how many people will be using 32 bit OSes in 2038 anyway

    It is not the same as Year 2000 as that was partly a physical issue in that the CMOS RTCs in some computers only held the date as two characters. And developers had become used to using two character dates.

    I was given an HP Vectra VS12 (286) in late 1999. I put a new battery in it and it passed the tests with flying colours, even the rollover! mind you it must have cost £3,000 when it was new so I suppose it ought to have the more expensive 4 digit clock

    I actually never came across a machine that couldn't be fixed.................mostly they just couldn't handle the rollover, so you had to manually reset them.

    Incidentally, Lotus 1-2-3 will die in 2899. It has a three character date that starts in 1900

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