Comment on CFCs

• Ithi@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yeah I would imagine poor/lazy planning or they either thought their tools would be replaced by then and/or that computers were just a fad so there’s no way they’d be used in the year 2000.

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• withabeard@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Depends on the “they”…

  But generally, back in the day data storage, memory and processing power were expensive. Multiple factors more expensive than they are now. Storing a year with two digits instead of four was a saving worth making. Over time, some people just kept doing what they had been doing. Some people just learned from mentors to do it that way, and kept doing it.

  It was somewhat expected that systems would improve and over time that saving wouldn’t be needed. Which was true. By the year 2000 “modern” systems didn’t need to make that saving. But there was a lot of old code and systems that were still running just fine, that hadn’t been updated to modern code/hardware. it became a bit of a rush job at the end to make the same upgrade.

  There is a similar issue coming up in the year 2038. A lot of computing platforms store dates as the number of seconds since the beginning of 1970-01-01 UTC. As I type this comment there have been 1,710,757,161 seconds since that date. It’s a simple way to store time/date in a way that can be converted back to a human readable format quite easily. I’ve written a lot of code which does exactly this. I’ve also written lot of code and data storage systems that store this number as a 32bit integer. Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296. That means at 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, some of my old code will break, because it wont be able to properly store the dates.

  I no longer work for that employer, I no longer maintain that code. Back when I wrote that code, a 32bit integer made sense. If I wrote new code now, I would use a different data type that would last longer. If my old code is still in use then someone is going to have to update it. Because of the way business, software and humans work. I don’t expect anyone will patch that code until sometime around the year 2037.

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  • BorgDrone@lemmy.one ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296.

    A little nitpick: the count at that time will be 2,147,483,647. time_t is usually a signed integer.

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  • cqthca@reddthat.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I often wonder what happened to the code I wrote in 2010 and used for production coordination & was working fine when I retired (2018). I figured the minute I left the hotshot kids would want to upgrade to their own styles. Not everyone liked it bc it functional. I was busy learning design and assemble CNC routers; but it worked and I didn’t have time to make a selection of backgrounds & banners. It’s just Excel, AutoCAD, & Access using VBA, which everyone has says they are going to deprecate VBA but, alas, people still want it. I remember Autodesk announcing the deprecation of VBA c. 2012 and I just looked and I guess they changed their mind bc there are modules for VBA available

    14 years ago at stackoverflow. What is the future of VBA? stackoverflow.com/…/what-is-the-future-of-vba Download the Microsoft VBA Module for AutoCAD - Autodesk www.autodesk.com/…/3kxk0RyvfWTfSfAIrcmsLQ.html Links to download for VBA modules for their products Feb 7, 2024 To install the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Module (VBA) for Autocad, do the following: Select the appropriate download from the list below. Close all programs. In Windows Explorer, double-click the downloaded self-extracting EXE file.

    sometimes legacy methods last longer bc no one wants to be a hotshot.

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• problematicPanther@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  you think that’s bad, just wait til 2038 when the UNIX time rolls over.

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• SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The Mayans figured a calendar that only went to 2012 would be good enough. And they were right, their civilization didn’t exist anymore in 2012. Only relevance their calendar system had in 2012 was that some people felt like it was a prophecy about the end of the world. Nope, just was an arbitrary date the Mayans rightly assumed would be far enough away it wouldn’t matter.

  While I suppose you could make a date format that was infinitely expandable, it would take more processing power and is really unnecessary.

  Anyway got until 2038 until we’ll have to deal with a popular date format running out of bits. We’ll probably be in some kind of mad max post apocalyptic world before then so it won’t matter.

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  • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s a misconception. The Mayan long count for December 20, 2012 was 12.19.19.17.19. December 21, 2012 was 13.0.0.0.0. Today is 13.0.11.7.4. It continues the same way indefinitely, it’s just the number of days since some arbitrary date in base 20, with the second to last digit in base 18, probably so the third to last can stand in as a rough approximation of years.

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