At 12:21 AM 1/6/99 -0800, you wrote:
> Itīs quite likely that a whole rash of accounting failures will
>crop up on April Foolīs Day, because a lot of companies will start fiscal
>year 2000 then. And interesting things may happen on August 21-22nd when
>the GPS system has itīs week-rollover (BTW, the GPS satellites broadcast
>time, which is used instead of the WWV signal some places where HF
>reception is poor).
What's the GPS week-rollover? I've heard of some of the other dates, but
this is the first I've heard of a GPS issue.
> I think 2038 is the UNIX date rollover.
Yep; Its a software issue brought on by the hardware. The problem here
is that the standard Unix time libraries store date and time as the number of
seconds since the epoch (sp?) I believe that is January 1, 1970, GMT. At any
rate, as the dates get further from 1/1/70, this number gets bigger and
bigger.
With the current 32 bit machines, the largest integer they can store is
2,147,483,647. (That's January 19, 2038 (at about 3:15am) GMT. If you try
to add
one to that number, it will probably will roll over to 0, butI believe its
pretty
much undefined.) Some unix systems use a bigger data type (long instead
of int)
for this variable, so they're immune. At any rate, as long as we aren't
using 32
bit systems in 2038, we'll be OK. Systems like the DEC Alpha don't have to
worry
about this particular problem for a very long time. :-) (Because their
integers
are 64 bits instead of 32, so (if my calcs are right) they won't experience
this
problem until the year 292057780204). I wonder if my Dak will still be around
then? :-)
-Jon-
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