Could Lazy Y2K Fixes Still Haunt Us?

[anorlunda]

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...-the-y2k-bug-as-lazy-fix-takes-down-software/
Y2020 arose from a lazy fix to the Y2K (or millennium) bug. This was the concern that computer systems that saved years as two digits – 99, say, instead of 1999 – would treat 00 as 1900 rather than 2000. Thanks to mass patching in 1999, this didn’t happen. Yet it turns out that an estimated 80 per cent of computers solved this using a cheap and quick method known as “windowing”, in which all dates from 00 to 20 would be treated as the 2000s rather than the 1900s. When January 2020 rolled around, those systems reached the end of that window and reset to 1920.

The issue now seems to be under control, but 19 January 2038 was set to be the next troublesome date for Linux computers, which count the date in seconds from 1 January 1970. The date is stored as a 32-bit integer, and its storage capacity would be exceeded at this point.

GEMPAK is used to generate files used for weather forecasting.

twitter.com pmarshwx/status/1345178416765677569
GEMPAK has a Y2K21 bug that we have been working on all day. This mesoanalysis radar issue is one if the problems that has not been resolved. The mosaic-ing code is producing files with years 1921 and are unusable. ETA for fix remains unknown.

From the social welfare system in Norway:

twitter.com skogesT/status/1344579147495075840 [translated]
An app that turns 101-year-olds into one-year-olds?

Taken to be 100 years younger https://dagbladet.no/nyheter/tatt-for-a-vaere-100-ar-yngre/72135315

101-year-old Giovanni Palmiero has lived in London since 1966. When he applied to stay in the UK, now that Brexit has been introduced, a technical error occurred…

There is certainly a corresponding Y2K / 2020/2021 bug in Infotrygd (the case processing system NAV uses for, among other things, child benefit).

 

[jedishrfu]

Here's a table of time breakdown for different languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_time

Unix systems start at Jan 1 1970 but DOS based systems start at Jan 1 1980 so there may be a few more gifts on the way.

Oh what a tangled web we weave once we seek a time reprieve.

All I want for New Years is a brand new clock, a brand new clock...

 

[anorlunda]

The SI system gives us the second as a unit of time, but that has little relevance to the human uses of hour/day/month/year/leap year.

Switching to/from daylight time, causes problems. We also have leap seconds. Often those cause software failures.

I just read that we may have our first negative leap second because the Earth has been spinning faster. That gives opportunity for entirely new kinds of software failures. Maybe even the UTC time servers could crash.

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-earth-faster.html

Some smug people think that because we have UTC, there are no more problems with measuring time or expressing time. That's very far from the truth.

 

[glappkaeft]

It is practical programming in a nutcase, time is relatively (read: not at all) easy, since it has standards. Now consider names...

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/