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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

How does the hot patch solve the logistical challenge of installing firmware updates on thousands of devices that generally receive no updates at all?

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?

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Do you care about your microwave showing the correct date? Does your microwave even keep track of the date?

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.

I think most people replying haven't shopped for appliances in the past 5 years. For example, you have to choose the most basic HVAC system these days to avoid communicating systems with built in smart controls. A fair number of fridges now come with integrated screens. A lot of new homes come with ring door bells and smart security systems. Even washing machines and driers now have built in systems for notifying you when your clothes are done and other such things.

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.

This is a very upper class problem. You are vastly over estimating the ratio of smart to dumb devices.

What's more, most smart devices will not last until 2038. Planned obsolescence is a standard feature of smart devices product development plans today, especially since fewer and fewer of them are doing anything without cloud integration. If this trend continues, I would bet a kidney that no smart product launched in 2025, regardless of target audience, will still be operating (and be incapable of receiving updates automatically) in 2035.

Protocols would change way before then. 2038 is 19 years in the future. What devices from 2000 are still running, that wasn't running long before 2000?

Dibs on your kidney.

We've bought one of the cheapest dishwashers we could find, and it came with a feature to connect it to an app using NFC. Granted, the whole EU is "very upper class" compared to most of the world, but it's still quite a huge number of machines.

I believe it. We've seen it happen with TVs for sure.

I think we're all both underestimating and overestimating the problem :)

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.

Shouldn’t, but I have to deal with things that “shouldn’t“ happen all the time.

Remember, the Zune wouldn’t boot in 2009 because 2008 was a leap year, and that wasn’t tested.

Yeah, but I specifically said non-networked appliances. Most microwaves I know don't even let you input the date. For those that do, and that you still want to keep in 2038, you can just enter a fake, old date.

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 can set the date on my microwave. I just set it to 2040 and it seems to be working fine, so I guess if anyone's really worried about this buy a Kenmore Elite while you still can.

Trying to imagine why you would want the date to be on a microwave

Maybe so it can display the correct time when daylight savings rolls around?

(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)

First thing that comes to mind is maybe more complicated than anything you can do, but something like running at a certain time 5 days a week to heat up a meal for your kids to eat after school while you're at work. You'd prep said meal and let it sit in there, heated right before it would've been eaten. Although there are a couple issues I can already think of. The microwave is not a fridge. This limits food that could sit there all day. Also, the kids could hit 'start' when they get in the door, so main appeal would be something cooking plus cooling enough to eat by the time they get home, or something with a long cooktime, which would maybe be mashed potatoes or something, and we're still just talking around 5 minutes most likely.

I don't think the Zune was really a networked device. It just literally wouldn't turn on for a day.

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.

> updating the clock for daylight savings time

That feature is unlikely to work well, tzdata is updated multiple times a year.

How expensive would putting a WWV shortwave receiver into a device? [1]

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWV_(radio_station)

"the station's future is in doubt, because it, along with WWVB and WWVH, has been recommended for defunding and elimination in the NIST's Fiscal Year 2019 budget request."

Zune wouldn't boot because the real time clock keeps time in MM:DD:YY HH:MM:SS which is utterly wrong.

And yet, they're all that way! Hardware RTCs are horrible.

(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.)

The NXP Kinetis micro-controllers have a sane RTC that counts seconds as a 32 bit number and fractional 32khz ticks. Bonus survives a hardware reset.

STMicro's RTC's are the usual POS everyone loathes. All the RTC IC's are also just like that.

I’m willing to accept “the device will function without update” and “the device will be outside its useful life in 2038” as reasons to not be concerned. I am not willing to accept “install a hot patch” as a solution unless it comes with an explanation of how the hot patch will be distributed.

Lets get real. Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then. Modern engineering ensures a death date agreeable with the financial department.

> Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then.

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.

I think you (and most of the other replies below) miss the point. The newer the device, the shorter the lifespan. You year 2000 device was built to last much longer than the average equivalent device built today. Planned obsolescence is a staple of consumer society, you have to have a guaranteed reason to replace the item. Breaking down will do that better than anything else.

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".

Exactly. My 2013(?) microwave started failing in 2018 - I keep it’s power strip off when it’s not in use and frequently have to cycle it. It replaced a microwave from possibly the mid 90s around 2013. Reliability engineering seems to have matured for planned life cycles.

"Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then."

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.

We have an old VHS camcorder my father bought in the mid '80s. It still works, but the timestamp overlay can't be set to display a year beyond 1999.

Most embedded RTCs are still limited to storing two digit years. There will be a minor Y2.1K issue because of this.

I'm still using a microwave I bought in the late 1980s.

Last time I read a blog post on 2038 one of the main concerns were cars.

I’d argue that for environmental reasons such cars should be taken off the roads much sooner - through governmental Buy backs, inclusive.

Does your microwave actually know what the date is? All that I've seen just show the time.

Why not ship devices with a patch now, that activates any (every?) time the system clock reaches 2036?

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