In 2036, factory reset to wipe all state, and keep using the same ancient kernel with a tiny hotpatch to assume 1/1/2035 as time base. If your kitchen appliance is still around by the time that is a problem, you'll get an award ;)
But don't tell anybody, I plan to hawk my consulting skills from 2030-2038 to pad my retirement income. Just like the good old Y2K days & COBOL.
Am I supposed to pull my microwave out of the wall and ship it back to GE? Does it have a USB port for installing this hot patch? How does GE tell me about it?
Devices like your microwave won't magically stop working in 2038. For most non-networked and, in 2038, ancient appliances, there shouldn't be that much of a problem.
Pedantics would say "well just don't buy this IOT crap," but the problem is that only the bottom line devices come this way in a lot of cases.
There are way more "smart" devices (devices with some kind of embedded software and clocks) than we assume, and there are way less of these devices than we fear.
It's still gonna be a problem though.
Remember, the Zune wouldn’t boot in 2009 because 2008 was a leap year, and that wasn’t tested.
I understand that there might be some smart microwaves with Wifi and whatever (setting all sentiments about that aside), but those are not what are meant.
(I'm just trying to guess. Personally I think it's an absurd feature, and on the rare occasion I've had a microwave that even displayed the time, it was always wrong anyway)
Having a date on your microwave could be useful for things like updating the clock for daylight savings time. Or it may be that the clock overflow causes the entire firmware to crash in 2038, bricking an otherwise still functioning device.
That feature is unlikely to work well, tzdata is updated multiple times a year.
(Well, almost all of them are that way. There are a few, precious few, sane parts that are just a 32-bit counter counting up at one second per second. These, of course, are rare, obscenely expensive, large, and missing useful features like trimming. Sigh.)
STMicro's RTC's are the usual POS everyone loathes. All the RTC IC's are also just like that.
I'm looking back at the things that I own today that I owned in 2000. (Or, if you're young, consider the things your parents own that they owned in 2000). It's not a ton, but it's not zero either. And we're equidistant to 2038 and to 2000.
20 or 40 years ago most people expected their devices to last a lot longer than today. Now if you TV breaks down after 5 years most never bother fixing it and just think "I was due for a new one anyway".
That's what they always say but when the time comes the old stuff is still around. Happened with Y2K stuff, happened with old Cobol code.
Anyway, I'm sorta skeptical that a whole lot of things that have been running deeply embedded code for a while now will still be running in 2038. Tech changes faster now, hardware isn't designed to last many decades much any more (at least it's the exception rather than the rule), and there's so much of industry that is going to have to change to overcome future challenges that I expect a great many things to taken out of service before then.
Embedded systems are everywhere, and they’re not all trivially dismissed.
Programs should just use time since boot. And only bother to convert when offered for human or external consumption.
Personally, I deal with trading systems in the US; we record all timestamps in EPT down to microsecond resolution. Currently only deal with US equities, so dont need to worry about DST. I would prefer timestamps were in UTC, but well, legacy systems...
The point is that there is no necessary _strong_ _low-level_ connection between 'how long ago something happened on this computer' and how many years since the birth of JC.
Personally, while I appreciate your arguments, I'm not sold on them.