Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Millennium Bug (20yrs on) - Computerphile" video.

  1. I remember in the mid-1990s, working on the first automation system for the NZ DNS registry, and learning Perl at the same time. The script we started with (from the Australian registry) was storing 2-digit year numbers. A (presumably more experienced) colleague immediately said not to worry about it, that there was no way our particular software would still be in use by the end of the century. I disagreed and insisted that years be stored as 4 digits. That was purely out of instinct, which turned out to be correct.
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  2.  @MatthewStinar  COBOL didn’t really have the concept of arithmetic in bits. It preferred to do it in decimal, with a precision of 18 decimal digits.
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  3.  @MattExzy  It did happen, albeit (mostly) not in a big way. There were instances of system failures from about early-to-mid 1999 onwards, certainly that I can remember. For example, a system for issuing cards with a 6-month expiry, which couldn’t handle expiry dates past 31st December 1999.
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  4. 0:07 You mean “off by 2” if you said “a year early” instead of “a year late”!
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  5.  @AndersJackson  ISO 8601 FTW! Also the national standard in Japan. For all their quirks, that’s one thing they did that makes sense.
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  6. Yes, it could very well happen again. People will get lazy again and forget what happened last time. Remember, it’s not a millennium bug, it’s a century bug.
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  7.  @stanrogers5613  I thought there was no Windows 9 because Germany said no.
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  8.  @MatthewStinar  COBOL was designed to be highly portable. Hence the specification in the standard that arithmetic always use 18 decimal digits, regardless of the platform. The vendors who were putting together the standard decided that 18 digits was equally inconvenient for all of them!
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  9.  @kerrynball2734  They didn’t invent GUIs.
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  10. No, the POSIX type is “time_t”.
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  11.  @mateuszsp8ebc691  No. In 64-bit Linux it is 64 bits. from <bits/timesize.h>: #if defined _x86_64_ && defined _ILP32_ /* For x32, time is 64-bit even though word size is 32-bit. */ # define __TIMESIZE 64 #else /* For others, time size is word size. */ # define __TIMESIZE __WORDSIZE #endif from <bits/types.h>: #if __TIMESIZE == 64 # define __time64_t __time_t #else __STD_TYPE __TIME64_T_TYPE __time64_t; /* Seconds since the Epoch. */ #endif
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  12.  @mikaelkjericsson  Glad to hear it!
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  13. Leap-seconds are a whole separate issue, necessitated by the slowing down of the Earth’s rotation. There is no predictable system to how they come in--it has to be determined by actual measurement. One thing we’re sure of, their frequency will inevitably increase over time. Some people are in favour of getting rid of them. But that leads to its own controversies ...
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  14.  @fryersoncaptain  Not a very Linux-compatible Unix, though.
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