Shoutbox

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Originally posted by andrewdodd13
In all honesty, who would really be expecting to use a 32-bit PC in 2038?

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64-bit will be old by then.

The problem is overflow of 32-bit integers.  If any systems using 32-bit timestamp are in service at that time, they won't necessarily crash.   The date will simply roll back to January 1, 1970. 

For software that depends on date calculations, that could be a problem resulting in a crash.   However, lots of systems would remain functional, with only minor annoyances, like wrong date stamps in logs, wrong date displayed or printed.  A traffic light controller that uses different timings for weekdays and weekends may get confused about what day it is, but I don't see any obvius reason why it should stop working completely.

By the way, all of the above also applied to the Y2K issue, except that was overflow of two digit decimal numbers.  My Y2K non-compliant microwave didn't stop reheating my food, it just failed to automatically update the clock to daylight savings time four months later.

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Originally posted by andrewdodd13
In all honesty, who would really be expecting to use a 32-bit PC in 2038?

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It has nothing to do with how many bits your architecture is; it has to do with the size of the integer used to hold the timestamp.  A 32-bit CPU is perfectly capable of working with a 64-bit integer, except that on the machine code level single instruction operations become a few instructions (operating on 32-bit halves one at a time).

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Originally posted by L. Coyote
64-bit will be old by then.

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64 Bit is old now, it's only recently been adopted into teh consumer market that's all

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Originally posted by Adeptus
My Y2K non-compliant microwave didn't stop reheating my food, it just failed to automatically update the clock to daylight savings time four months later.

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no, but did the non Y2K-compliant plane that fell out of the sky when the world was ending cause any damage when it landed on your microwave?

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Originally posted by aNILEator

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Originally posted by L. Coyote
64-bit will be old by then.

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64 Bit is old now, it's only recently been adopted into teh consumer market that's all

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But do we really need any more than 128bit?  I mean, with 128 bit, we can have more RAM than there are visual objects in the Universe.

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Originally posted by Svip

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Originally posted by aNILEator

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Originally posted by L. Coyote
64-bit will be old by then.

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64 Bit is old now, it's only recently been adopted into teh consumer market that's all

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But do we really need any more than 128bit?  I mean, with 128 bit, we can have more RAM than there are visual objects in the Universe.

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I don't think so. In all honesty, this UNIX time-stamp problem only occurs in implementations which use signed integers rather than unsigned.

For those who don't get it: UNIX time is basically just the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 01-Jan-1970 UTC. So on whatever the date is they're going on about, 2^31 seconds will have elapsed since that date (2^32 for implementations using unsigned integers).

If we migrated to a 64-bit signed integer, there would be a hell of a lot more time available [292,279,025,208 years (that's what, 20 times the age of the universe?), by my calculations], the only problem being, as someone mentioned, that 32-bit processors don't do 64-bit integer operations as quickly as 32-bit ones.

They will have easily found a solution and the world will have moved on by then easily

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Originally posted by Eddie
They will have easily found a solution and the world will have moved on by then easily

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that'll be cool.

i doubt anything would crash just clock over back to the start, like it does when my space pinball score =>999999

think about it, using your current PC in 2038, would be like stilling using a commodore 64 right now, its not going to happen, i'd say anoter 10 years and 32 bit pc will be on there way out, 20 and they'll be ancent, and then when 30 years come, anybody still using a 32 bit PC will be laughed at

probualy the only 32 bit systems will be vintage ones, and i at that point you don't real care if the date resets, its kinda like having an old NES system, you don't care that its old, its just a classic