Tuesday, January 07, 2020
Y2K + 20 = Y2K20
Via New Superstitionist, the Y2K bug is popping up again this month due to Github thinking by some of the fixers.
Coders chose 1920 to 2020 as the standard window because of the significance of the midpoint, 1970. “Many programming languages and systems handle dates and times as seconds from 1970/01/01, also called Unix time,” says Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, an engineer at cloud platform provider Fastly. The theory was that these windowed systems would be outmoded by the time 2020 arrived, but many are still hanging on and in some cases the issue had been forgotten. Those systems that used the quick fix have now reached the end of that window, and have rolled back to 1920. Utility company bills have reportedly been produced with the erroneous date 1920, while tens of thousands of parking meters in New York City have declined credit card transactions because of the date glitch.Programmers with Github brains couldn't imagine that the "hopelessly obsolete" code would still be around 20 years later. Everything must be updated every femtosecond! In real life it's generally SAFER, not just easier, to keep old systems running. New operating systems spend 99% of their time updating and 1% of their time running. The total focus on updating means that nothing is ever stable or reliable. THIS IS THE TOTAL PURPOSE.
Labels: defensible times
¶ 11:26 PM
