[ale] Stupid people and DST

[Steve Litt]

Jim Kinney said on Thu, 17 Mar 2022 07:39:36 -0400

>There's a ton of embedded controllers in all sorts of industry
>processing that is 32 bit. 

Yeah, but do they use Linux? And to what extent will these devices
still be useful on January 19, 2038? On my 64 bit computer time_t seems
to be defined as 64 bit, so it seems the problem's already solved for
64 bit processors.

Even on a 32 bit computer, 64 bit time could be handled by two adjacent
long ints, plus a little bit of bit arithmetic, which processors are
*very* good at. I think 32 bit Linux might already use two longs
combined.

This is very different from the Y2K command, where most Cobol programs
defined the year as pic xx or pic 99, requiring an actual source code
modification to each file. This 2038 thing just requires a recompile of
the libraries.

I'm far more worried that mankind won't live to see 2038 than I am
about time going negative in 2038.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
March 2022 featured book: Making Mental Models: Advanced Edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mmm