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The so-called YAK problem is geek-speak for the year 10,000 problem, where Y stands for year, A(hex) = 10(dec) = 12(oct) = 1010(bin), and K stands for kilo, which is the metric prefix for thousand. Politicians are fond of warning us about the ramifications of our own actions on the lives of our children and grandchildren, but what about our great grandchildren, great² grandchildren and great³ grandchildren? Are these more distant descendants not worthy of our antecedent concern? Talk about "The Bottle Imp".
I think it is high time for America to lead the way for the rest of the complacent world. Let's not ignore our moral obligations to billions of our descendants who will otherwise be faced with colossal disruptions in their daily lives. And while we are at it, we might as well address the 128-bit Unix-time problem. It's later than you think.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:Having experienced the trauma of Y2K, which prompted me, and millions of other neurotics worldwide, to take doomsday precautions on New Year's Eve 1999 (don't ask), I feel it is not too early to ponder the looming "YAK problem", and beyond.
The year 2038 problem (also known as "Unix Millennium bug", "Y2K38," "Y2K+38," or "Y2.038K" by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038. The problem affects Unix-like operating systems, which represent system time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since January 1, 1970. This representation also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit integer. The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. Times beyond this moment will "wrap around" and be represented internally as a negative number, and cause programs to fail, since they will see these times not as being in 2038 but rather in 1901. Erroneous calculations and decisions may therefore result.
The so-called YAK problem is geek-speak for the year 10,000 problem, where Y stands for year, A(hex) = 10(dec) = 12(oct) = 1010(bin), and K stands for kilo, which is the metric prefix for thousand. Politicians are fond of warning us about the ramifications of our own actions on the lives of our children and grandchildren, but what about our great grandchildren, great² grandchildren and great³ grandchildren? Are these more distant descendants not worthy of our antecedent concern? Talk about "The Bottle Imp".
I think it is high time for America to lead the way for the rest of the complacent world. Let's not ignore our moral obligations to billions of our descendants who will otherwise be faced with colossal disruptions in their daily lives. And while we are at it, we might as well address the 128-bit Unix-time problem. It's later than you think.
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