Y2K38: The Bug
Vishal Singh1, Prerna Chaudhary2
1Vishal Singh, B. Tech Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology, Meerut, India.
2Prerna Chaudhary, B. Tech Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology, Meerut, India.
Manuscript received on September 20, 2012. | Revised Manuscript received on October 15, 2012. | Manuscript published on October 30, 2012. | PP: 157-160 | Volume-2 Issue-1, October 2012. | Retrieval Number: A0756102112/2012©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: Digital world has been threatened by many bugs but only a few seemed to pose a great danger. The bug that got most famous was Y2K. Somehow, we got over it, then, there was Y2K10. It too was resolved and now we have Y2K38. The Y2K38 bug, if not resolved, will make sure that the predictions that were made for the Y2K bug come true this time. Y2K38 bug will affect all the systems, applications and most of the embedded systems which use signed 32 bit format for representing the internal time. As the epoch for most these systems is 1, January, 1970 and since then the number of seconds which can be represented using this signed 32 bit format is 2,147,483,647 which will be equal to the time 19, January, 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC(Coordinated Universal Time). After this moment the systems will stop working correctly. There have been some solutions for this problem but a universal solution is yet to be found. All the solutions tend to delay this problem so that we can have some more time to find a good and universal solution and so does our proposed solution.
Keywords: Signed 32 bit integer, time, Y2K, Y2K38.