if you're old enough you probably remember all the doomsdaying there was
around the y2k problem and if you aren't old enough well lots of people were
concerned in the late 1990s that once january 1st 2000 arrived computers would
think the year was 1900 instead of 2000
causing a huge number of unforeseen problems because computers are stupid
well the year 2000 got here and not much of anything happened i mean some taxi
meters glitched out but there weren't apocalyptic consequences but wait even
though 2000 was a nothing burger there have been other date-related shenanigans
that have happened since then and there might be more in the future so let's
start out by talking about a software bug that hit in 2010 which kept millions
of people from accessing their own hard-earned money
over in germany roughly 30 million bank cards simply stopped working in january
2010. some customers couldn't withdraw any yoy rose while others had their
cards simply eaten by atms the issue was
that the microchip inside the card simply couldn't comprehend that the year
was 2010. what
replacing the cards would have cost nearly a half billion dollars though
fortunately a software patch was issued instead now another issue with more
global consequences popped up in 2019 which affected the global positioning
system better known as gps you see gps
keeps track of which week it is using a counter that only goes up to 1023
this is because the counter only has 10 binary digits meaning weeks are marked
starting with 0 and ending with 1023
now 1023 weeks is a little under 20
years so each time the counter maxes out and resets to zero there's the potential
for anything that relies on gps time to experience issues that happened in 2019
flights were delayed or cancelled as a result and older cell phones and
consumer gps trackers also dealt with loss of location data fortunately this
is an issue that can typically be solved with software fixes but the problem is
going to rear its ugly head once again in 2038 and i'd be willing to bet
there's going to be some kind of issue because someone forgot to issue a patch
just patch it up it's easy i think it's hard and if 2038 sounds
familiar that's because you're probably thinking about the unix time problem
which works similarly to the gps bug originally systems based on the unix
kernel including macOS and anything that runs Linux used 32 bits to keep
track of how many seconds had passed since january 1st 1970. if you do the
math the counter maxes out in january of 2038 and unlike the gps problem we
mentioned it's not straightforward to fix it with a software update as
changing the way the counter works could break a large number of programs
although it seems like this could be catastrophic when you think of how many
servers and embedded devices use Linux the good news is that many systems based
on unix have since been updated to 64-bit including older Linux systems and
using a 64-bit time counter means it wouldn't roll over for another 292
billion years i'm hoping by then we'll have figured
out a way to write software smart enough to always know what time it is but
human beings you never know
finally let's end the video on a lighter note we've been used to using four digit
years since the battle of hastings in 1066 but what's going to happen once we
hit the year 10 000 a.d
we got used to the idea of computers needing to use four digits for the year
when the original y2k problem was first pondered but in about 8 000 years we
might run into the same issue again only this time we'll need five digits instead
of four although we have nearly eight millennia to figure it out why 10k is
already an issue for researchers as astronomical calculations often have to
be done on very long time scales so
here's hoping that y 10k doesn't cause us to miss an incoming meteor as bruce
willis probably won't be around to save us
but who knows what i do know is that this video is
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