Other bugs:
August 22, 1999 - GPS Rollover
GPS (Global Positioning System) software rolls over its week counter for the first time. GPS satellites in geosynchronous orbit measure time in weeks;
every 1,024 weeks (about 19 years, eight months), this value changes from 1,023 to 0. With the system dating from January 5, 1980, the rollover has
never been tested live before. Bugs in international-funds transfer programs that use GPS dates could cause 20-year errors in calculating interest rates.
September 9 , 1999 - End-of-file Bug (Part 1)
Programs that use "9999" as an end-of-file marker may mistake the date 9/9/99 as an end of file, or vice versa. But by this time, Y2K-type failures will
already be frequent news, occuring whenever business contracts, drug prescriptions, travel arrangements, and other critical transactions involving future
dates venture into the no-man's-land of 00.
January 1, 2000 - The Big One
Even if 85 percent of all Y2K-prone applications are fixed, about 1.7 million will still fail next New Year's Day. Jason Matusow, strategy manager for
Microsoft's Y2K effort, has deployed hundreds of "the people closest to the code" to test and debug the company's wares and minimize the impact. But
most institutions won't have this luxury: The programmers who wrote their code have long since moved on to other projects.
September 8 , 2001 - End-of-file Bug (Part 2)
One last wave of circa-2000 problems comes when some Unix programs using "999,999,999" as an end-of-file marker confuse the data with the date -
999,999,999 seconds since January 1, 1970, as Unix timekeeping goes.
2000-2025 - Phone Number Fallout
The explosion in devices requiring new phone connections - cellular and other wireless telephones, pagers, and fax machines - is eating up the supply of
available numbers in North America's 10-digit scheme. Instituting a new system - such as four digit area codes - will break databases and other software
based on the 10-digit scheme and make millions of cell phones and PDAs with fixed formats obsolete.
January 19, 2038 - Unix End of Time
Nearly 40 years from now, Unix systems hit their own date overflow bug when the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, exceeds a 32-bit storage
value. "Keep some perspective," advises Unix and C architect Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. "It's 40 years from now. Forty years ago there were no
commercial computers at all."
Circa 2050 - Social Insecurity
A billion Social Security numbers seems adequate for a nation the size of the United States (population 270 million). But think of the ubiquity of Social
Security numbers as identifiers. Unless the numbers are recycled - an option under consideration - the addition of digits or other changes in the system
will need to be reflected not only in software, but in databases stretching back to the dawn of computing.
January 1, 10,000 - Y10K
In 10,000, software with four digit year fields will think the year is AD 0000. Seem unlikely? Remember that that most Y2K issues were known to developers
even as they wrote their own flawed code. Bright spot: Given the stiff consulting rates charged in the 1990's by masters of obsolete programming
languages, college kids in 9998 will find an easy way to hustle up tuition - by learning the 8,000-year-old secrets of Cobol. |
