Y2K Problems - a Bit Late

[af024]

Well after such a damp squib around midnight on the turn of the year 2000, I seem to have a late comer.

As you can see, my rather aging Casio wrist watch is showing the 54th day of the third month! This has only happened today. Never had any other problems to date.

Do you have any possible 'late' candidates?

Regards,


Andy

[G8HQP Dave]

I'm still wondering at what point the press and politicians will notice the approaching 'January 2038' problem ('February 2176' for some systems). Wearing my previous hat as an IT consultant I did some Y2K work. I seem to recall I did find a few minor problems but nothing serious. It was always unlikely that aircraft would be dropping out of the sky, but some disruption was possible if no action had been taken. Industry having taken the necessary action, the press then afterwards wondered what all the fuss was about!

The craziest story I heard was that management in one establishment decided that all equipment should have a "Y2K compliant" sticker attached after testing. For complex equipment the testing went down to PCB level. One of my colleagues had great difficulty persuading a "sticker technician" that attaching a sticker (which were thin aluminium) to the copper side of a PDP-11 computer board might be counterproductive!

[Station X]

I can understand why 2048 might be a problem, but why 2038?

Lets see what happens tomorrow. This could be a long thread.

[julie_m]

Because all Unix-like operating systems (including Linux and Mac OS X) use a clock which counts seconds since midnight on 01 January 1970. 2147483647 seconds on from then -- the largest number that will fit in a 32-bit signed integer -- will be 03:14:07 on 19 January 2038.

At least we penguin-lovers have a chance of recompiling everything to use 64-bit signed integers for timestamps ..... and the Sun will burn out before 64-bit time runs out.

[threeseven]

A very old Sony digital watch that I still use ran out of years last year, it will now be perpetually 2009 ! Amazing it still works at all though, it was bought for me in 1980 !

[G8HQP Dave]

Just in case you are wondering, the Feb 2176 problem arise in those systems which use an unsigned 32-bit seconds count. Or is it Feb 2106? Maybe I remembered it wrong. Anyway, it won't affect me personally.

[Phil G4SPZ]

Originally Posted by threeseven

...Amazing it still works at all though, it was bought for me in 1980...

Thirty years and still working, eh? Not bad, considering there are no user-replaceable parts inside except the battery - surely that's not the original?

I wonder what's the oldest piece of electronic equipment still working without any attention? It's likely to be transistorised, of course, and for much transistor equipment there's no reason why it shouldn't soldier on almost indefinitely. But perhaps I should start another thread on this topic.

Phil

[neon indicator]

Older silicon gear yes... might work for a long time.

LCDs do decompose.

Modern VLSI suffers from voltage potential assisted migration of metal and doping, so it will fail with use.

[threeseven]

Originally Posted by Phil G4SPZ

Thirty years and still working, eh? Not bad, considering there are no user-replaceable parts inside except the battery - surely that's not the original?


Phil

I wish ! Batteries last about 2 years and there was a period of about 2 or 3 years when I didn't use it but the display is still crisp and clear, even the display illumination still works and it's pretty accurate !

I will move to your new thread with a few other mature itmes I have that still work perfectly !

[DAVEHALL]

Some of the older telecomms stuff I worked on had funny last year dated. My solution was to suggest that the year was ignored ,and a year in past corresponding to order of days in present year was chosen . e.g- today is Friday 27th August - so perhaps change year to one that aligned -say 2004 -same day etc, but get kit to miss out display of year .

[Station X]

2010 isn't a leap year, but 2004 was.

[Herald1360]

So it only works from March 1st. Not a problem now

It'll come unstuck at 29/2/2012 though.