8 ms·

Having worked in embedded, I'm perfectly comfortable with horrible kludges that nonetheless solve the problem: In 2036, factory reset to wipe all state, and ke

Having worked in embedded, I'm perfectly comfortable with horrible kludges that nonetheless solve the problem: In 2036, factory reset to wipe all state, and keep using the same ancient kernel with a tiny hotpatch to assume 1/1/2035 as time base. If your kitchen appliance is still around by the time that is a problem, you'll get an award ;) But don't tell anybody, I plan to hawk my consulting skills from 2030-2038 to pad my retirement income. Just like the good old Y2K days & COBOL.

LeonM 8y ago
Sssssh, you just told the world my retirement plan!
mulmen 8y ago
How does the hot patch solve the logistical challenge of installing firmware updates on thousands of devices that generally receive no updates at all? Am I supposed to pull my microwave out of the wall and ship it back to GE? Does it have a USB port for installing this hot patch? How does GE tell me about it?
- anyfoo 8y ago
  Do you care about your microwave showing the correct date? Does your microwave even keep track of the date? Devices like your microwave won't magically stop working in 2038. For most non-networked and, in 2038, ancient appliances, there shouldn't be that much of a problem.
  - klodolph 8y ago
    Shouldn’t, but I have to deal with things that “shouldn’t“ happen all the time. Remember, the Zune wouldn’t boot in 2009 because 2008 was a leap year, and that wasn’t tested.
    - anyfoo 8y ago
      Yeah, but I specifically said non-networked appliances. Most microwaves I know don't even let you input the date. For those that do, and that you still want to keep in 2038, you can just enter a fake, old date. I understand that there might be some smart microwaves with Wifi and whatever (setting all sentiments about that aside), but those are not what are meant.
      - c22 8y ago
        I can set the date on my microwave. I just set it to 2040 and it seems to be working fine, so I guess if anyone's really worried about this buy a Kenmore Elite while you still can.
        deytempo 8y ago
        Trying to imagine why you would want the date to be on a microwave
        opan 8y ago
        First thing that comes to mind is maybe more complicated than anything you can do, but something like running at a certain time 5 days a week to heat up a meal for your kids to eat after school while you're at work. You'd prep said meal and let it sit in there, heated right before it would've been eaten. Although there are a couple issues I can already think of. The microwave is not a fridge. This limits food that could sit there all day. Also, the kids could hit 'start' when they get in the door, so main appeal would be something cooking plus cooling enough to eat by the time they get home, or something with a long cooktime, which would maybe be mashed potatoes or something, and we're still just talking around 5 minutes most likely.
        dTal 8y ago
        Maybe so it can display the correct time when daylight savings rolls around? (I'm just trying to guess. Personally I think it's an absurd feature, and on the rare occasion I've had a microwave that even displayed the time, it was always wrong anyway)
      - 8y ago
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      Zune wouldn't boot because the real time clock keeps time in MM:DD:YY HH:MM:SS which is utterly wrong.
      - exmadscientist 8y ago
        And yet, they're all that way! Hardware RTCs are horrible. (Well, almost all of them are that way. There are a few, precious few, sane parts that are just a 32-bit counter counting up at one second per second. These, of course, are rare, obscenely expensive, large, and missing useful features like trimming. Sigh.)
        Gibbon1 8y ago
        The NXP Kinetis micro-controllers have a sane RTC that counts seconds as a 32 bit number and fractional 32khz ticks. Bonus survives a hardware reset. STMicro's RTC's are the usual POS everyone loathes. All the RTC IC's are also just like that.
  - mulmen 8y ago
    I’m willing to accept “the device will function without update” and “the device will be outside its useful life in 2038” as reasons to not be concerned. I am not willing to accept “install a hot patch” as a solution unless it comes with an explanation of how the hot patch will be distributed.
  - deelowe 8y ago
    I think most people replying haven't shopped for appliances in the past 5 years. For example, you have to choose the most basic HVAC system these days to avoid communicating systems with built in smart controls. A fair number of fridges now come with integrated screens. A lot of new homes come with ring door bells and smart security systems. Even washing machines and driers now have built in systems for notifying you when your clothes are done and other such things. Pedantics would say "well just don't buy this IOT crap," but the problem is that only the bottom line devices come this way in a lot of cases.
    - stedaniels 8y ago
      This is a very upper class problem. You are vastly over estimating the ratio of smart to dumb devices.
      - opan 8y ago
        I believe it. We've seen it happen with TVs for sure.
      - dmitriid 8y ago
        I think we're all both underestimating and overestimating the problem :) There are way more "smart" devices (devices with some kind of embedded software and clocks) than we assume, and there are way less of these devices than we fear. It's still gonna be a problem though.
      - alxlaz 8y ago
        What's more, most smart devices will not last until 2038. Planned obsolescence is a standard feature of smart devices product development plans today, especially since fewer and fewer of them are doing anything without cloud integration. If this trend continues, I would bet a kidney that no smart product launched in 2025, regardless of target audience, will still be operating (and be incapable of receiving updates automatically) in 2035.
        mulmen 8y ago
- ianai 8y ago
  Lets get real. Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then. Modern engineering ensures a death date agreeable with the financial department.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    "Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then." That's what they always say but when the time comes the old stuff is still around. Happened with Y2K stuff, happened with old Cobol code.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    I'm still using a microwave I bought in the late 1980s.
  - u801e 8y ago
    We have an old VHS camcorder my father bought in the mid '80s. It still works, but the timestamp overlay can't be set to display a year beyond 1999.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      Most embedded RTCs are still limited to storing two digit years. There will be a minor Y2.1K issue because of this.
  - IvyMike 8y ago
    > Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then. I'm looking back at the things that I own today that I owned in 2000. (Or, if you're young, consider the things your parents own that they owned in 2000). It's not a ton, but it's not zero either. And we're equidistant to 2038 and to 2000.
    - close04 8y ago
      I think you (and most of the other replies below) miss the point. The newer the device, the shorter the lifespan. You year 2000 device was built to last much longer than the average equivalent device built today. Planned obsolescence is a staple of consumer society, you have to have a guaranteed reason to replace the item. Breaking down will do that better than anything else. 20 or 40 years ago most people expected their devices to last a lot longer than today. Now if you TV breaks down after 5 years most never bother fixing it and just think "I was due for a new one anyway".
- ams6110 8y ago
  Does your microwave actually know what the date is? All that I've seen just show the time.
- mysterydip 8y ago
  Why not ship devices with a patch now, that activates any (every?) time the system clock reaches 2036?
emmelaich 8y ago
Yes, what most programs are interested in is duration from boot time or process start time. Not some human level duration from some arbitrary point in the past. Programs should just use time since boot. And only bother to convert when offered for human or external consumption.
- cmrx64 8y ago
  You might enjoy this, which I wrote a few years ago. The project is dead now. https://robigalia.org/blog_drafts/2016/12/23/what-time-is-it.html https://robigalia.org/blog_drafts/2016/12/23/what-time-is-it...
- hermitdev 8y ago
  I dont think is even remotely true; certainly is patently fall for anything involving a financial time. Your claim might be true for logs, but even then, its far more relatable to the person looking at the logs if it is wall clock time. I dont want to have translate every log statement I'm looking at from when the system or process started. Personally, I deal with trading systems in the US; we record all timestamps in EPT down to microsecond resolution. Currently only deal with US equities, so dont need to worry about DST. I would prefer timestamps were in UTC, but well, legacy systems...
  - emmelaich 8y ago
    I cover all that in my mention of human consumption. The point is that there is no necessary _strong_ _low-level_ connection between 'how long ago something happened on this computer' and how many years since the birth of JC.
    - hermitdev 8y ago
      There's still the problem if what if you're looking at a log after a system restarted/crashed. Do you have the previous start time logged somewhere? Personally, while I appreciate your arguments, I'm not sold on them.
Quequau 8y ago
I gotta say that my middle sister made a nice living polishing COBOL turds for something like a decade. We all thought it would be a sorta of last hurrah but it turned out to be lesson in not underestimating how much folks want to do things in the most painful way possible. Anyway, I'm sorta skeptical that a whole lot of things that have been running deeply embedded code for a while now will still be running in 2038. Tech changes faster now, hardware isn't designed to last many decades much any more (at least it's the exception rather than the rule), and there's so much of industry that is going to have to change to overcome future challenges that I expect a great many things to taken out of service before then.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Thanks, but I'm not looking forward to the increased mental health bill that this will bring (COBOL polishing I mean)
DougN7 8y ago
Kitchen appliances are the easy and almost ignorable bit. What about: * controls for railroad track switching * hardware in air traffic control radars * hardware that controls elevators * firmware for traffic lights * guidance systems in old oil tankers * pipeline control systems * oil refinery systems * industrial food refridgeration systems Embedded systems are everywhere, and they’re not all trivially dismissed.

LeonM 8y ago

Sssssh, you just told the world my retirement plan!

mulmen 8y ago

How does the hot patch solve the logistical challenge of installing firmware updates on thousands of devices that generally receive no updates at all? Am I supposed to pull my microwave out of the wall and ship it back to GE? Does it have a USB port for installing this hot patch? How does GE tell me about it?

anyfoo 8y ago
Do you care about your microwave showing the correct date? Does your microwave even keep track of the date? Devices like your microwave won't magically stop working in 2038. For most non-networked and, in 2038, ancient appliances, there shouldn't be that much of a problem.
- klodolph 8y ago
  Shouldn’t, but I have to deal with things that “shouldn’t“ happen all the time. Remember, the Zune wouldn’t boot in 2009 because 2008 was a leap year, and that wasn’t tested.
  - anyfoo 8y ago
    Yeah, but I specifically said non-networked appliances. Most microwaves I know don't even let you input the date. For those that do, and that you still want to keep in 2038, you can just enter a fake, old date. I understand that there might be some smart microwaves with Wifi and whatever (setting all sentiments about that aside), but those are not what are meant.
    - c22 8y ago
      I can set the date on my microwave. I just set it to 2040 and it seems to be working fine, so I guess if anyone's really worried about this buy a Kenmore Elite while you still can.
      - deytempo 8y ago
        Trying to imagine why you would want the date to be on a microwave
        opan 8y ago
        First thing that comes to mind is maybe more complicated than anything you can do, but something like running at a certain time 5 days a week to heat up a meal for your kids to eat after school while you're at work. You'd prep said meal and let it sit in there, heated right before it would've been eaten. Although there are a couple issues I can already think of. The microwave is not a fridge. This limits food that could sit there all day. Also, the kids could hit 'start' when they get in the door, so main appeal would be something cooking plus cooling enough to eat by the time they get home, or something with a long cooktime, which would maybe be mashed potatoes or something, and we're still just talking around 5 minutes most likely.
        dTal 8y ago
        Maybe so it can display the correct time when daylight savings rolls around? (I'm just trying to guess. Personally I think it's an absurd feature, and on the rare occasion I've had a microwave that even displayed the time, it was always wrong anyway)
    - 8y ago
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    Zune wouldn't boot because the real time clock keeps time in MM:DD:YY HH:MM:SS which is utterly wrong.
    - exmadscientist 8y ago
      And yet, they're all that way! Hardware RTCs are horrible. (Well, almost all of them are that way. There are a few, precious few, sane parts that are just a 32-bit counter counting up at one second per second. These, of course, are rare, obscenely expensive, large, and missing useful features like trimming. Sigh.)
      - Gibbon1 8y ago
        The NXP Kinetis micro-controllers have a sane RTC that counts seconds as a 32 bit number and fractional 32khz ticks. Bonus survives a hardware reset. STMicro's RTC's are the usual POS everyone loathes. All the RTC IC's are also just like that.
- mulmen 8y ago
  I’m willing to accept “the device will function without update” and “the device will be outside its useful life in 2038” as reasons to not be concerned. I am not willing to accept “install a hot patch” as a solution unless it comes with an explanation of how the hot patch will be distributed.
- deelowe 8y ago
  I think most people replying haven't shopped for appliances in the past 5 years. For example, you have to choose the most basic HVAC system these days to avoid communicating systems with built in smart controls. A fair number of fridges now come with integrated screens. A lot of new homes come with ring door bells and smart security systems. Even washing machines and driers now have built in systems for notifying you when your clothes are done and other such things. Pedantics would say "well just don't buy this IOT crap," but the problem is that only the bottom line devices come this way in a lot of cases.
  - stedaniels 8y ago
    This is a very upper class problem. You are vastly over estimating the ratio of smart to dumb devices.
    - opan 8y ago
      I believe it. We've seen it happen with TVs for sure.
    - dmitriid 8y ago
      I think we're all both underestimating and overestimating the problem :) There are way more "smart" devices (devices with some kind of embedded software and clocks) than we assume, and there are way less of these devices than we fear. It's still gonna be a problem though.
    - alxlaz 8y ago
      What's more, most smart devices will not last until 2038. Planned obsolescence is a standard feature of smart devices product development plans today, especially since fewer and fewer of them are doing anything without cloud integration. If this trend continues, I would bet a kidney that no smart product launched in 2025, regardless of target audience, will still be operating (and be incapable of receiving updates automatically) in 2035.
      - mulmen 8y ago
ianai 8y ago
Lets get real. Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then. Modern engineering ensures a death date agreeable with the financial department.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then." That's what they always say but when the time comes the old stuff is still around. Happened with Y2K stuff, happened with old Cobol code.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I'm still using a microwave I bought in the late 1980s.
- u801e 8y ago
  We have an old VHS camcorder my father bought in the mid '80s. It still works, but the timestamp overlay can't be set to display a year beyond 1999.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    Most embedded RTCs are still limited to storing two digit years. There will be a minor Y2.1K issue because of this.
- IvyMike 8y ago
  > Most of such if not all things will fail and have to be replaced before then. I'm looking back at the things that I own today that I owned in 2000. (Or, if you're young, consider the things your parents own that they owned in 2000). It's not a ton, but it's not zero either. And we're equidistant to 2038 and to 2000.
  - close04 8y ago
    I think you (and most of the other replies below) miss the point. The newer the device, the shorter the lifespan. You year 2000 device was built to last much longer than the average equivalent device built today. Planned obsolescence is a staple of consumer society, you have to have a guaranteed reason to replace the item. Breaking down will do that better than anything else. 20 or 40 years ago most people expected their devices to last a lot longer than today. Now if you TV breaks down after 5 years most never bother fixing it and just think "I was due for a new one anyway".
ams6110 8y ago
Does your microwave actually know what the date is? All that I've seen just show the time.
mysterydip 8y ago
Why not ship devices with a patch now, that activates any (every?) time the system clock reaches 2036?

emmelaich 8y ago

Yes, what most programs are interested in is duration from boot time or process start time. Not some human level duration from some arbitrary point in the past. Programs should just use time since boot. And only bother to convert when offered for human or external consumption.

cmrx64 8y ago
You might enjoy this, which I wrote a few years ago. The project is dead now. https://robigalia.org/blog_drafts/2016/12/23/what-time-is-it.html https://robigalia.org/blog_drafts/2016/12/23/what-time-is-it...
hermitdev 8y ago
I dont think is even remotely true; certainly is patently fall for anything involving a financial time. Your claim might be true for logs, but even then, its far more relatable to the person looking at the logs if it is wall clock time. I dont want to have translate every log statement I'm looking at from when the system or process started. Personally, I deal with trading systems in the US; we record all timestamps in EPT down to microsecond resolution. Currently only deal with US equities, so dont need to worry about DST. I would prefer timestamps were in UTC, but well, legacy systems...
- emmelaich 8y ago
  I cover all that in my mention of human consumption. The point is that there is no necessary _strong_ _low-level_ connection between 'how long ago something happened on this computer' and how many years since the birth of JC.
  - hermitdev 8y ago
    There's still the problem if what if you're looking at a log after a system restarted/crashed. Do you have the previous start time logged somewhere? Personally, while I appreciate your arguments, I'm not sold on them.

Quequau 8y ago

I gotta say that my middle sister made a nice living polishing COBOL turds for something like a decade. We all thought it would be a sorta of last hurrah but it turned out to be lesson in not underestimating how much folks want to do things in the most painful way possible. Anyway, I'm sorta skeptical that a whole lot of things that have been running deeply embedded code for a while now will still be running in 2038. Tech changes faster now, hardware isn't designed to last many decades much any more (at least it's the exception rather than the rule), and there's so much of industry that is going to have to change to overcome future challenges that I expect a great many things to taken out of service before then.

raverbashing 8y ago
Thanks, but I'm not looking forward to the increased mental health bill that this will bring (COBOL polishing I mean)

DougN7 8y ago

Kitchen appliances are the easy and almost ignorable bit. What about: * controls for railroad track switching * hardware in air traffic control radars * hardware that controls elevators * firmware for traffic lights * guidance systems in old oil tankers * pipeline control systems * oil refinery systems * industrial food refridgeration systems Embedded systems are everywhere, and they’re not all trivially dismissed.