🚀 go-pugleaf

J.R.Suckling wrote:
> 
> In article <casper.889020671@uk-usenet.uk.sun.com>,
> Casper H.S. Dik - Network Security Engineer <Casper.Dik@Holland.Sun.Com> wrote:
> >Wayne Schlitt <wayne@midwestcs.com> writes:
> >>Trying to fix the problems with switching from signed to unsigned
> >>time_t isn't worth it.  Just switch to a 64-bit time_t instead.
> >
> >Which might be a bit hard for on-disk formats and such.
> 
> Good point, but after the y2k thing is over you will still
> have more then 30 years to switch to a new file system.
> You will need new hardware in 30 years -- switch then.
> 
> We will need the new 64bit version of tar should read
> the old 32bit tar files and set the old dates correctly.
> same goes for cpio and what ever else you use.
> Still, we have a bit of time to think about that.

What really bothers me about the present y2k problem is that the engineers
_had_ plenty of time to "think about that". I often wonder if the whole Y2K
problem isn't emblematic of a very jaundiced world-view: the engineers
literally didn't think (on a subconscious level maybe?) that there was any
possibility that we'd even make it to the Year 2000 - and thus didn't
anticipate ever having to deal with a century nor a millenium rollover. It's
as if people didn't try to forestall a technical doomsday because they didn't
anticipate anyone having the technology nor perhaps even the lives to run
software after the year 2000.

I can't even with tongue-in-cheek start to elaborate upon just how many "after
the bomb" science-fiction stories have been shot down in flames by the Y2K
problem. You know, ( (c) copr 1998 TJH Internet SP) first gasp of a renascent
civilization discovers an archival artificial intelligence which mysteriously
blinks to life after a ten-century hiatus despite no I/O or powersupply... and
suddenly it hits the simple fact that it's reading a date some 50 years before
it was programmed, decides it's traveled back in time (quite an imaginative AI
there) and promptly goes mad trying to analyze the impacts its actions in what
it thinks is the now will have on its own development. Okay, so I could do a
precis. But I can't elaborate on it because it's all too silly and beside
probably Silverberg has done it before. 

I guess that if there's one thing learned from this whole mess it's this: if
your business is programming you're dealing a lot with sequence and branching.
Well, how could anyone in good conscience not plan for something like a mere
turn-of-century? It's just extended sequence. I can understand it in terms of
saving memory back when computers had a whole 14K of magnetic core, but
anytime after maybe 1992 it simply doesn't make sense and I cannot believe
that nobody saw this coming.

So if anyone is going to start writing for the future I guess I hope they'll
be writing for, as someone else put it, "cosmological timescale" and we SF
writers who dabble in computing can go back to writing stories about undying
artificial intelligences that can lie buried beneath the wreckage of
civilization to fortuitously aid in the rennaisance of civilization millenia
hence etc yadda yadda - without causing anyone knowledgable to fall down
laughing "but what about Y2K?"

Sorry for the rant.


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