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Comment by tinus_hn | Hacker News Reader

Just wait about 15 years and we’ll see how ‘preposterous’ it can get when the 32-bit Unix timestamp rolls over. It’s going to be Y2K all over again.

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Some OSs like OpenBSD have already implemented a 64-bit timestamp to account for this [0].

I am not sure about Linux.

I would think that this is a problem that would greatly affect older systems (like all the banks' mainframes... yikes!)

[0] https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20130813072244

I think Linux has adopted 64-bit timestamps on 32-bit systems as well by now.

Mainframes don't run Unix in the way we think of it, and the applications they run store timestamps in a different format (hence the panic about Y2K back in the day). I'm by no means an expert, but I think these people don't need to worry about Y2K38.

Yeah, I am versed in the COBOL world as much as the next guy (so not much at all), but I would sleep better knowing that the financial systems are safe from yet one more end-of-the-world crisis.

I heard some banks "fixed" the Y2K problem by shifting the offset, i.e. defining that year numbers from "00" to, say, "15" were interpreted as "2000" to "2015", giving them some time to fix the problem without the stress... ... and then doing nothing for a decade or so.

The financial world has not collapsed so far, so they must have found some way to deal with that. But I'm not sure I really want to know what "solution" they went for.

I was under the impression Linux is proofed against that already by now. Is 15 years time to prepare the rest not enough?

You think management now is going to worry about a problem 15 years down the track when they will no doubt be at a different company?

Just like with Y2K a lot of things are proofed already. But to avoid things falling over, everything has to be proofed. Not just the kernel, also file formats, file system formats, programming languages and libraries and applications.

That’s a big project with a lot of players and we won’t know if they all did their job right until the clock rolls over.

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