this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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I'm pretty sure that it wasn't Windows that was the main offender, but instead legacy systems of all kinds made since 1970, where people were not expecting for their programs to run for more than 30 years.
Surprise! Businesses don't care whether the code is old, as long as it works - so that data type you store the year in only held two characters, and hard-coded the 19 onto it.
1999 would be written as 99. 19 + 99 = 1999 = computers were happy.
2000 would be written as 00. 19 + 00 = 1900 = computers went to shit
Yeah good explanation. I was too young to had any further knowledge about this issue way back and only saw it manifesting when I had to adjust my windows 95 clock :)
Next doom and gloom scenario is 2038, when poorly maintained *nix systems will think it's Jan 1st, 1970.
I'll be pushing 68. Hopefully retired or dead by then.
... I'll probably still be working, though...
Eh, it only being an issue for 32-bit systems will hopefully help. But of course somebody will still be running that in 15 years.
Lots of financial institutions are still using software programmed with Cobol. My father graduated with a software engineering degree for Cobol in the mid-1970s. My company provides external API for customers who still use green screen terminals. Of course there will be people running 32-bit systems. And I'm sure there will be well-paid jobs for fixing any date overflow on those systems.