The World will end on Tuesday, January 19th 2038...Apparently.

[me123]

Certainly more credible than a lot of the crap that gets printed in the newspapers, anyway.

 

[BJMorley]

Since everyone is jumping onto the end of the world bandwagon;
The world is going to end on the 17th of may in the year 2017, because a sufficient number of people across the world will all shut their wardrobe at the same time, the cumulative effect being a sound wave powerful enough to push Earth out of it's orbit, blow out the sun, and cause Neptune to spnotaneously combust for absolutely no reason whatsoever. The lack of light and the spontaneous combustion of Neptune shall then cause Earth to slowly fold in on itself until there is nothing left except a small pile of dust and the wheeltrim off a 1976 Austin Maxi.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

 

[Mojo]

I've always wondered what would happen if at the same time, everyone randomly decided to do exactly the same thing.

 

[90019]

I've always wondered what would happen if at the same time, everyone randomly decided to do exactly the same thing.

Neptune will spontaneously combust

 

[eezypeazy]

does anybody rememebr New Years Eve 1999, when everything stopped working, and all the planes crashed, and nuclear power plants went into meltdown, and we all died?

No, neither do I.

Nice idea, but I think we should be able to get around this one. Of course, by 2038, we wont have any computers anyway, as we'll all have gone back to the poverty and degradation of the dark ages thanks to the continuing credit crunch....

You are forgetting, of course, the huge army of IT "experts" who conned us and our governments into spending millions "solving" the "problem."

Presumably, these same "experts" will be about to retire in 2038, and will use "solving" this "time bomb" to top up their own personal pension funds, once again at our expense...

 

[Chilled Phill]

You are forgetting, of course, the huge army of IT "experts" who conned us and our governments into spending millions "solving" the "problem."

Presumably, these same "experts" will be about to retire in 2038, and will use "solving" this "time bomb" to top up their own personal pension funds, once again at our expense...

Indeed.

I wouldn't believe people would be so thick to have two numbers to represent a date rather than the proper 4 numbers. I mean, it's common sense... :roll:

 

[Broken Viking]

Apparently it's only 32-bit systems that are vulnerable to said error. 64-bits are fine for some reason...

Hmm...I've got a few older 286/386 boxes at home, and they all managed to handle Y2K without any problems. One system was reporting years as 1900CE after the change, but DOS didn't have any problem with it at all, and I'm quite certain that - If a file on my network bears a creation date in 1909CE - Then I'll have enough intelligence to add 100 years to get the correct date! :razz:

Personally, I think that any apocalyptic theory regarding computer date handling is completely invalid, and thus I don't worry too much about them. I may take a precautionary backup and set a few machine clocks back ten years beforehand, but I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep about computer systems across the world going boobs-up! 8)

Because I use dating systems that differ from the standard Gregorian one anyway, I'm used to working with odd-order years. As an example - And assuming that my brief Google search is accurate - The current Jewish year appears to be 5768HE...And I've yet to hear of any Jewish computer users complaining that their systems can't handle a year in the 5000's yet, have ye?

 

[Chris-P]

Apparently it's only 32-bit systems that are vulnerable to said error. 64-bits are fine for some reason...

This is because it's 32-bit Unix time, basically it counts the number of seconds before or after midnight (UTC) January 1 1970. 32-bit computers have a problem with this because 2^31 = 2 147 483 648, after that many seconds the time will "wrap around" and start at 0 again. 64 bit computers will survive until ±2^63 seconds after midnight Jan 1 1970, which is approximately 292 billion years, or, counting backwards, more than 20 times the age of the universe. The problem is already being worked on (representing the time as a 64-bit integer on a 32 bit computer is, after all, possible) and it doesn't affect windows, although it could affect certain software on windows.

Oh, and hi, it's my first post here *cheers*

 

[Chilled Phill]

This is because it's 32-bit Unix time, basically it counts the number of seconds before or after midnight (UTC) January 1 1970. 32-bit computers have a problem with this because 2^31 = 2 147 483 648, after that many seconds the time will "wrap around" and start at 0 again. 64 bit computers will survive until ±2^63 seconds after midnight Jan 1 1970, which is approximately 292 billion years, or, counting backwards, more than 20 times the age of the universe. The problem is already being worked on (representing the time as a 64-bit integer on a 32 bit computer is, after all, possible) and it doesn't affect windows, although it could affect certain software on windows.

Oh, and hi, it's my first post here *cheers*

Yeah, I read the Wikipedia article as well.

But thanks for helping clarify the theory in the first post.