#1 No 30 year loans, starting Saturday.
Posted: Tue Jan 15, 2008 6:35 pm
It's the Y2K38 bug, and unlike the other one, it's real.
Unix tracks time by counting the seconds since Jan 1 1970. It stores the integer in a 32-bit point of data. As of 03:14:07 UTC(Zulu to you military folks) Jan 19th, 2038, it will suffer a buffer overflow. This is an actual bug.
'Thirty years! No problem.' Except alot of loan software is built out of 32-bit C programming. Any 30 year loan trying to track a point in time after 3AM January the 19th 2038 will wrap around to 1901 and start over.
That'd be bad.
This one will take a while to work out; after all, you must upgrade that data point to a 64-bit one, which will require serious recoding. No doubt someone will come up with a workaround, but there you go.
Unix tracks time by counting the seconds since Jan 1 1970. It stores the integer in a 32-bit point of data. As of 03:14:07 UTC(Zulu to you military folks) Jan 19th, 2038, it will suffer a buffer overflow. This is an actual bug.
'Thirty years! No problem.' Except alot of loan software is built out of 32-bit C programming. Any 30 year loan trying to track a point in time after 3AM January the 19th 2038 will wrap around to 1901 and start over.
That'd be bad.
This one will take a while to work out; after all, you must upgrade that data point to a 64-bit one, which will require serious recoding. No doubt someone will come up with a workaround, but there you go.