Originally posted by Agent WhiteYeah, I thought I was talking about something completely different. But do we still use the same mainframe system from the 70's or the 80's?
The difference that you speak of is between personal computers and mainframe computers/embedded systems. Personal computers are the ones replaced every few years, but mainframes and large computer systems are not.
Originally posted by Slay
But wasn't Y2K exactly the same thing, only with dates? I can't really remember all of it, so I might be wrong, but I thought that it was.
Y2K wasn't a counting problem, it was a representation problem. There it was because computers stored dates in memory as two digits per day, month, and year (e.g. today would be 12-13-08, or 13-12-08, depending on whether day or month come first). When the year 2000 came, what would happen is that the day would stop being displayed as 12-31-99 (December 31, 1999) and become 01-01-00 (January 1, 2000). However, some systems were expected to interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000, causing problems. Of course, the fix to this was to stop storing dates as 01-01-00 and change them to 01-01-2000, fixing the problem.
Originally posted by Ax3l
Interesting. Well, here's to hoping they figure out a fix for it, eh?
We can only hope that by 2038 they'll figure out what to do. As long as major systems (e.g. nuclear power plant control) can be fixed and stay intact, we can deal with the loss of some personal computers.
Originally posted by Agent WhiteWell, they've got 30 years. Anything can happen in 30 years. The robots could rise up by then.
We can only hope that by 2038 they'll figure out what to do. As long as major systems (e.g. nuclear power plant control) can be fixed and stay intact, we can deal with the loss of some personal computers.
Originally posted by Agent White
Y2K wasn't a counting problem, it was a representation problem. There it was because computers stored dates in memory as two digits per day, month, and year (e.g. today would be 12-13-08, or 13-12-08, depending on whether day or month come first). When the year 2000 came, what would happen is that the day would stop being displayed as 12-31-99 (December 31, 1999) and become 01-01-00 (January 1, 2000). However, some systems were expected to interpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000, causing problems. Of course, the fix to this was to stop storing dates as 01-01-00 and change them to 01-01-2000, fixing the problem.