End of Time (Unix) - Numberphile

Time will "end" for 32-bit computers on 19 January, 2038.
James Clewett explains.
More links & stuff in full description below ↓↓↓

NUMBERPHILE

Videos by Brady Haran

[matthewrease]

I like how, with 32 bits you have about 70 years. And then you double that, to 64 bits, and suddenly increase the time span past the estimated lifespan of the universe.
Numbers are great.

[aadityabrahmbhatt]

Cool This means when you were showing your screen counting the second in Unix manner of 1340197909...
It was Wed, 20 Jun 2012 13:11:49 GMT !!!!
BUT the video was published on "Jan 29, 2013"
& it worse thing that your awesome video was pushed in your Hard Disk for about 223 Days !!!
WHY????

But Publishing Date Jan 29, 2013 Is amazingly the exact 1 year before I am viewing the video on "Jan 29th, 2014" !!!!
HOW AMAZING :-)

This is real NumberPhile ;-)

[soundslave]

Another Y2K thing that'll be fixed before it actually becomes a problem.

[AsbjornGrandt]

32 bit computers themselves aren't really the problem, as long as the software counts the time in 64 bit.

I have a 4 bit computer, which handles 64 bit numbers just fine. (HP-48)

[doogleisfat]

More videos with James please Brady - this guy is great, his contribution to this channel has already been brilliant.

[charliefoxtrottherd]

The company I work for still, to this day, has this old green screen management system that runs on it's own special hardware platform that was obsolete in 1990, so we purchased all the spares we could get are hands on to keep this dinosaur running. It's called AS 400. It's a first generation IBM server. It works so well for our application and is so fast that I cannot get the old timers to upgrade to a new Oracle system or something like that. The green screen will burn holes into your eyeballs from staring at it for long periods. The actual machine is this big, clunky, noisy thing with fans blowing all around to keep it from igniting. Anyone else deal with a system like this?

[clickrick]

"Some of your viewers were too young for the millennium bug."
I was there, I was part of the crew that was desperately fixing those legacy systems.

Actually, I was using Unix in the 1970s and marvelling at this beautiful new operating system, and knew even then of the shortcomings of the epoch-based times, and knew in 1999 that the millennium bug was going to be nowhere as bad as when the Unix time hit the brick wall.

[hydroxenon]

They celebrated on September 9, 2001. Little did they know what would happen in 2 days

[jamesthurlow]

I saw that number and just thought, max cash stack on runescape

[ChaosTheSalamander]

um...DAD? I THINK THE COMPUTOR IS GONNA DIE!

[ClySuva]

I remember this 1 000 000 000 timestamp causing lots of issues as well. Many amateur PHP/MySQL systems actually sorted timestamps alphabetically. In this case the 1bil numbers came before anything else which began with 9.

I just recently saw some production system that sorted files by date by concatenating datestamp to string, alphabetically sorting them, and then removing the timestamp. :D

[DanOfAwsome]

Computer time: June 20th 2012
Upload date: January 29 2013
holy shit, you guys take for ever to upload. And I know it takes less then 7 months to edit an 8 minute video. but then again, you could be just running this channel part time. Either way, I should be thankful you're making this content in the first place.

[yessopie]

Everyone seems to be making the same mistake: it doesn't make a difference whether you have a "32-bit computer" or a "64-bit computer". A 32-bit computer can deal with 64-bit numbers perfectly easily, and a 64-bit computer can deal with 32-bit numbers perfectly easily. It's just slightly more efficient to use a matching length. The point: switching to a "64-bit computer" is neither necessary nor sufficient to solve the problem.

[ragamuffn]

Just wanted to make a small nitpick - Clewett states that an 8-bit unsigned integer can hold a range of values from 0 to 256, when in fact the maximum value is 255.

[RutiYT]

You recorded the video on June 20 2012 :) You however uploaded it on January 29 2013...

[bbbl]

Now, say what you will about the limits of 32-bit numbers, but one question is why did they use signed 32-bit numbers in a counter that only goes up? That immediately reduced the range of dates by 1 bit. If they used unsigned 32-bit numbers, then that would've put off the impending doom date by another 70 years, to 6:28:16 am EST Sunday, February 7, 2106!

[CoreFinder]

by 2038, I can't see why people would use 32bit..

[fmincer]

well, i realy like numberphile, but alot stuff said here is simply explained wrong. the problem is not in the hardware. the problem is that unix itself reads out the RTC (that runs with the 3V battery) and stores its information in a 32bit signed integer and uses this for all time/date informations. it has nothing todo with the hardware itself and changing to 64bit unix(most easy solution) is what makes the 64bit hardware nececary.

[SirJavaGaming]

The video has been recorded on 20.06.2012 1:12pm (UTC). Why was it uploaded half a year later? :)

[epicmarioplush]

so my 64-bit windows 7 computer will be fine?