this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Similar with Y2K


it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, "yeah lol it was a dud."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (3 children)

All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We've known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn't been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They're harmless

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but not all people live on American soil...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

It's the American tradition to ignore that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened! Complete duds these things really

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

WTF?

Unless that was sarcasm that I missed... 100's of weapons have been tested on US soil..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

At the rate of one year per year, even.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For each second that passes we're one second closer to 2038

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Except for leap seconds. Time is the worst to work with :(

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

It's already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you're around then.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Finally it'd be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Obviously new systems are unaffected, the question is how many industrial controllers checking oil pipeline flow levels or whatever were installed before the fix and never updated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Being somewhat adjacent to that with my work, there is a good chance anything in a critical area (hopefully fields like utilities, petroleum, areas with enough energy to cause harm) have decently hardened or updated equipment where it either isn't an issue, will stop reporting tread data correctly, or roll over to date "0" which depending on the platform with industrial equipment tends to be 1970 in my personal experience. That said, there is always the case that it will not be handled correctly and either run away or stop entirely.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Look some info on BCD or EBCDIC.