The Year 2038 Problem

[Thomas G. Marshall]

In countries where little or no effort was put into preventing it, no
significant problems occurred either.

Like whom? It seems to me that every software installation of major
worth, regardless of the country, was checked and fixed and rechecked,
etc.

I still think that the y2k thing is real----I'm worried. Is it over
yet?

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

[Snipped most of the newsgroups, as this troll thread was ridiculously
crossposted.]

There was a Feb 29 bug in 2000 that wasn't hyped at all, and little
enough went wrong that day either.

This is rather impressively arrogant even for you, Gerry.

I personally saw numerous major projects that identified and corrected
Y2K bugs (including Feb 29 2000 bugs, and other variants) in in-use
production code that would have caused major difficulty and expense
for its users, and I wasn't even involved in Micro Focus' Y2K
remediation
business.

Do you have any evidence for either of the claims above?

Truth is the Millenium Bug Disaster was a '60s science fiction
scenario,

The truth is that you're making unsubstantiated claims about a subject
you've demonstrated no actual knowledge of.

based on the assumption that all the operations that keep the
industrial
world turning are done by technicians blindly obeying the orders on
punched cards that some big old computer spits out.

No, the actual assessment of the problem - not the myth reported by
an ignorant news industry - was based on actual examination of actual
running code.

The real world is
considerably more fault tolerant.

The real world runs a great deal of very fragile code. I've seen
quite a bit of it running at customer sites, and again that's just
incidental to my actual job. I rarely look at customer code, but
the bits I do see are not, in fact, particularly tolerant of faults.

A great deal of effort went into fixing real bugs in real code before
the rollover. It was a problem and it was handled. Those who claim
there was no problem are just as misinformed as those who hyped it
beforehand.

Michael, you're right.

As evidenced by /this/ ng in particular, It seems that some people are
prone to over simplified explanations, and are quick to point fingers at
past melodramas as if to say "I knew better." Furthermore some people
seem to only have hind-sight.

The truly interesting thing about y2k is that it wasn't the case that it
was a fear among the masses and that the engineers knew better. It was
the other way around: the masses had little clue UNTIL the hype and the
engineers knew all along.

It was truly amazing that as little failed as it did. You can test each
of the following, fix it for y2k, and verify it independently:

nuclear sub software
NYSE software
FAA control tower software
McDonald's french fry calibration software

....but you /can not/ have the entire world do a dry-run and test all of
those things at *once*.

So much software relies on other software working. We were /right/ to
worry about a cascade effect.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

corrected > Y2K bugs (including Feb 29 2000 bugs, and other
variants) in in-use > production code that would have caused major
difficulty and expense > for its users, and I wasn't even involved
in Micro Focus' Y2K remediation > business.

Might have been. But the way it was hyped, management in many cases
have gone out of their way to ensure that no Y2K problems did exist.
Even when the technically knowledgable said that there would be *no*
major problem. And printing 1-1-2000 as 1-1-100, 1-1-1900 or
1-1-19100,
is *not* a major problem. I know of people that had to ensure that
part of the software was Y2K immune, *even when the software did not
care about the date at all*. Like compilers. "Is gcc Y2K immune?"

The problem was almost never the date itself. It was the possibility
that a chain of causality would ensue, with each domino knocking over an
ever bigger one. Wow, was that a bad metaphor.

ALL software engineers know of the disasters that can infrequently occur
when seemingly innocuous parts of a system fail. In my years I've seen
all kinds of improbable interconnected hoo-haa.

And it was therefore CRITICAL that compilers, the /makers/ of the
software, be fixed.

I was not one of the Y2K hissy fitters----at the time I was one of those
saying "bah, nothing'll happen". But I said so foolishly.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

The entire planet's 3 thrillion barrels of oil is about 25% gone, and
at the current rate of 80 million/day, it will be completely gone
within the lifespans of some of the folks walking the earth today.

My solution is that I plan to be dead around 2040 or so.

When I was in middle school, mid to late 70's, they told us with
completely /authoritative tones/ that if the world were entirely hollow
and filled with oil that it would be used up before the year 2020.

eeeeeeeeee-Yuh.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

And where does the power to extract that hydrogen come from?

Nuclear power plants.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Hm I might not make that. Fun prospect!



The fun thing of course is that alcohols are about the simplest things
to make, and dead cheap too. The only thing that make them so darn
expensive is the various governements wanting a piece of the action,
in
the interest of letting people have less fun for their dollar.

Fact is, oil is not as cheap as it seems, as it has rather high
cleanup
costs associated with it. Same with nuclear fuels, but oil doesn't
have
quite such spectacular faillure modes. Altough I have to admit that
fuel/air bombs are kinda neat. And oily birds make for nice television
and cause traffic jams with people driving to a different, clean
beach.

Same with our silicon based computing stuffs. They and the facilities
needed to produce them are not very environment friendly, and the
pittance some of us now have to pay as advance clean-up costs will not
be enough to fix the problems the obsoleted debris will create later
on.

Anyway. Whatever we do, we'll pay for it sooner or later. If
sufficiently late we'll just be cursed by our ancestors. Which would
you prefer?

I'm thinking they're gonna hate us for one thing for another. If not
for environmental reasons then perhaps social. Heck, we might as well
give'm something to cry about. Let's go melt them polar caps good.
Er......wait a while....

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Given we want to represent times in the past as well as the future,
it would be reasonable to fix 'now' (give or take) as midpoint in the
range, so why not arbitrarily pick

00:00:00.000 on the morning of January First 0001 as
1-followed-by-255-zeroes (256-bit unsigned value).

Without doing the math....Does that leave it possible to have years
/before/ the begining of time?

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

I am not sure hyow hydrogen would be ditributed,
either to the resellers (filling stations)
or regionally (to terminals).
Gasoline is distributed to terminals via pipelines.
MTBE is also distributed via pipelines. But MTBE
pollutes ground water.
Ethanol is shipped via trucks, no pipelines.

Any thoughts on hydrogen distribution?

Once oil is refined into gasoline (aka petrol), it is shipped to filling
stations nearly exclusively via rail and truck tankers, at least in the US.
Hydrogen would be distributed the same way. Natural Gas is the only fuel
commonly transported via pipeline to consumers, and that makes it attractive
in the near term, but CNG and LNG aren't long-term solutions for clean
energy.

Transporting large masses of H2 isn't nearly as safe as petrol, for obvious
reasons, but this is mostly offset because hydrogen can be produced anywhere
electricity is available, removing the need to ship it long distances around
the world or even around a state/province. In theory, every filling station
could produce their own, removing transport from the picture entirely, but I
doubt that's cost-effective.

S

 

[CBFalconer]

Nuclear power plants.

Now you are really trying to pull my chain. Better known as a
silly way to boil water. If you could propose a way of nullifying
the waste products, that would be one thing. Hiding them under
the rug for future generations does not count. Take a look at the
chart of the nuclides, and the products of uranium fission,
sometime.

 

[Mabden]

Transporting large masses of H2 isn't nearly as safe as petrol, for obvious
reasons

I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?

 

[Mark McIntyre]

My favorite real world example is when the NASDAQ lost hundreds of thousands
of trades one day due to a fixed-length field in their protocol.

I have a similar example but with a less happy outcome. Turned out the
print format for the amounts was fixed-width, 8 spaces. No room for minus
signs on large trades.... oops.
On another instance, someone made a column too narrow on a spreadsheet, so
the first 2 digits got hidden. 255000000 looked like 5000000.... double
oops.

This is a large
part of why it still takes 7 to 14 days for a check to clear even if it's
from a bank across town -- they know better than to trust their programmers.

Nah, thats just so we can earn 7-14 days interest off you suckers.

(actually, its one of life's little mysteries. If we didn't trust our
programmers, would banks really transact trillions of dollars of FX, equity
and derivatives trades per day, many for same-day-settlement or at best
T+1? Believe me, there is no way banks can check off all those trades in
<24 hours...)

 

[q]

Once oil is refined into gasoline (aka petrol), it is shipped to filling
stations nearly exclusively via rail and truck tankers, at least in the US.

Gasoline, one of the main products refined from crude oil, accounts for
just about 16 percent of the energy consumed in the United States. The
primary use for gasoline is in automobiles and light trucks. Gasoline
also fuels boats, recreational vehicles, and various farm and other
equipment. While gasoline is produced year-round, extra volumes are made
in time for the summer driving season. Gasoline is delivered from oil
refineries mainly through pipelines to a massive distribution chain
serving 168,000 retail gasoline stations throughout the United States.1
There are three main grades of gasoline: regular, mid-grade, and
premium. Each grade has a different octane level. Price levels vary by
grade, but the price differential between grades is generally constant.

The cost to produce and deliver gasoline to consumers includes the cost
of crude oil to refiners, refinery processing costs, marketing and
distribution costs, and finally the retail station costs and taxes. The
prices paid by consumers at the pump reflect these costs, as well as the
profits (and sometimes losses) of refiners, marketers, distributors, and
retail station owners.

In 2002, the price of crude oil averaged $24.09 per barrel, and crude
oil accounted for about 43% of the cost of a gallon of regular grade
gasoline (Figure 1). In comparison, the average price for crude oil in
2001 was $22.95 per barrel, and it composed 38% of the cost of a gallon
of regular gasoline. The share of the retail price of regular grade
gasoline that crude oil costs represent varies somewhat over time and
among regions.

Federal, State, and local taxes are a large component of the retail
price of gasoline. Taxes (not including county and local taxes) account
for approximately 31 percent of the cost of a gallon of gasoline. Within
this national average, Federal excise taxes are 18.4 cents per gallon
and State excise taxes average about 20 cents per gallon.2Also, eleven
States levy additional State sales and other taxes, some of which are
applied to the Federal and State excise taxes. Additional local county
and city taxes can have a significant impact on the price of gasoline.

Refining costs and profits comprise about 13% of the retail price of
gasoline. This component varies from region to region due to the
different formulations required in different parts of the country.

Distribution, marketing and retail dealer costs and profits combined
make up 13% of the cost of a gallon of gasoline. From the refinery, most
gasoline is shipped first by pipeline to terminals near consuming areas,
then loaded into trucks for delivery to individual stations. Some retail
outlets are owned and operated by refiners, while others are independent
businesses that purchase gasoline for resale to the public. The price on
the pump reflects both the retailer's purchase cost for the product and
the other costs of operating the service station. It also reflects local
market conditions and factors, such as the desirability of the location
and the marketing strategy of the owner.

 

[Gerry Quinn]

Now you are really trying to pull my chain. Better known as a
silly way to boil water. If you could propose a way of nullifying
the waste products, that would be one thing. Hiding them under
the rug for future generations does not count. Take a look at the
chart of the nuclides, and the products of uranium fission,
sometime.

Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Gerry Quinn]

I'm thinking they're gonna hate us for one thing for another. If not
for environmental reasons then perhaps social. Heck, we might as well
give'm something to cry about. Let's go melt them polar caps good.

"Those bastards in the twenty-first century could have prevented the ice
age, but they insisted on reducing CO2 emissions..."

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Gerry Quinn]

[Snipped most of the newsgroups, as this troll thread was ridiculously
crossposted.]

There was a Feb 29 bug in 2000 that wasn't hyped at all, and little
enough went wrong that day either.

I personally saw numerous major projects that identified and corrected
Y2K bugs (including Feb 29 2000 bugs, and other variants) in in-use
production code that would have caused major difficulty and expense
for its users, and I wasn't even involved in Micro Focus' Y2K remediation
business.

Do you have any evidence for either of the claims above?

I remember it well. No hype. No disaster. A few incorrect bills, I
think.

The truth is that you're making unsubstantiated claims about a subject
you've demonstrated no actual knowledge of.


No, the actual assessment of the problem - not the myth reported by
an ignorant news industry - was based on actual examination of actual
running code.

Nobody's disputing that there were necessary millenium-related bug
fixes. What is clear is that it was ridiculously over-hyped (you admit
this yourself) and that much money was wasted (another poster gives
clear examples. [Of course some of the money spent was just an excuse
to re-advertise various products without the need to actually improve
them.]

The real world runs a great deal of very fragile code. I've seen
quite a bit of it running at customer sites, and again that's just
incidental to my actual job. I rarely look at customer code, but
the bits I do see are not, in fact, particularly tolerant of faults.

That's precisely why faulty software tends not to cause disasters.
People are aware that it is often faulty. If in fact a lot of computers
had gone down at once, I doubt that the inconvenience would have been
greatly multiplied compared to the random software collapses that occur
daily around the world.

A great deal of effort went into fixing real bugs in real code before
the rollover. It was a problem and it was handled. Those who claim
there was no problem are just as misinformed as those who hyped it
beforehand.

Perhaps I did over-egg the cake a little. But face it, the hype was
monstrous.

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Jens.Toerring]

Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.

Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?

Regards, Jens

 

[jpd]

I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?

Apart from the nasty tendency of those awfully small molecules to
slip through almost everything else (the main effort in creating
storage solutions for it is in storing it in a form where it's bound to
something else), it's mostly fear factor I guess.

It's a pity, really. It has such a simple cycle and in itself is about
as `clean' as you could wish for. It's just that handling it is hard.

 

[Gerry Quinn]

Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?

The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.

Note how frequently you see a casually implied estimate of the threat
from nuclear materials in terms of the mass of material multiplied by
the halflife.

And people complain about quite insignificant amounts of radionucleides
in seawater.

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Roger Willcocks]

Without doing the math....Does that leave it possible to have years
/before/ the begining of time?

I reckon so... 2^255 / (10^12 * 86400 * 365) = 1.8x10^57 years

or about 10^47 times the age of the universe.

To put it another way, the universe is apparently somewhere between 2^98 and
2^99 picoseconds old (10 - 20 thousand million years.)

 

[Baxter]

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Free software - Baxter Codeworks www.baxcode.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once oil is refined into gasoline (aka petrol), it is shipped to filling
stations nearly exclusively via rail and truck tankers, at least in the

US.

Nope. There's been more than one explosion of gasoline pipelines.
---------
RENTON, Wash. (AP) - The operator of a 400-mile fuel pipeline system that
was shut down after an explosion plans to complete necessary repairs and
restart the line late Tuesday.

The repair and restart plan has been approved by coordinators for both the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Ecology Department,
Olympic Pipe Line Co. spokesman Michael Abendhoff said Monday night.

The pipeline moves 12 million gallons of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel every
day. The explosion and subsequent fire disrupted fuel deliveries throughout
the system.
http://islandpacket.com/24hour/nation/story/1392234p-8654812c.html

Seattle - July 28, 1999 -The families of two 10-year-old boys killed in a
gasoline pipeline explosion last month filed suit Wednesday, seeking
punitive damages and to ban the pipeline operator from continuing to do
business in the State of Washington.
http://www.voiceoftheinjured.com/a-wd-pipe.html

Pipeline Accident Report: Rupture of Piney Point Oil Pipeline and Release
of Fuel Oil Near Chalk Point, Maryland

Pipeline Rupture and Release of Fuel Oil in the Reedy River at Fork Shoals,
South Carolina June 26, 1996

Williams Pipeline Company, Gasoline Explosion and Fire, Roseville,
Minnesota, April 16, 1981.
http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/P_Acc.htm