The Y2k all over again

Just learned that Unix has its own version of the Y2k problem and it will happen on January 19th 2038. Not much fuss has been made about it in the press as far as I can tell. Probably too far out to extract dollars out of an article. And most people don’t even know what unix is probably. Which makes it difficult to get them all worked up about it. I read about it by accident and went to have a look on wikipedia to find out more. Seems that many systems are affected even though it is Unix and some databases and program languages like C rely on the same unix time. Unix is also used in so called embedded systems so it could affect your phone or car if it has systems in it that use time calculations based on the 32 bit unix time. Upgrading all these systems will not be possible and a few may still be around 18 years from now. The new versions of operating systems are obviously ‘upgraded’. I read that Mac OS X from version 10.6 doesn’t have the problem anymore. But some people hang on to their Macs for a very long time so if you are one of those maybe you should worry a bit. When inventing all this software technology people probably didn’t think that far ahead and never dreamt the technology would still be in use today. At least now, switching to 64 bit time we should be safe as this new system will run out of time 300000 years from now at the earliest. If there is still a computer counting time then I wonder if there will also still be humans around to notice the computer crashed.