1. Re: questions from a newbie (Y2.036K bug =)

>   One last note is that some of the timing routines in
>   Windows are rumored to start over around the year 2037.
>   Instead of returning the number of seconds since a given
>   year in the past it will start returning the number of
>   seconds since 2037.  This is because of the max integer count
>   capability using 4 bytes.
>
>

so far, this bug only faces C and C++ programmers.  It stems from the
common definition of the time_t as an integer containing the number of
seconds since midnight, January 1, 1970.  Most C/C++ runtime libs define
time_t as a long int.  On most systems, long int is 32 bits, which means
there's a range of 2^31-1 (2,147,483,647) seconds - until sometime on
January 18, 2038.  Since the number is signed, when the clock rolls over
the time will be a very large negative number, giving us a time warp of
a little over 136 years, which means it's back to late December, 1901.
Anything that uses time_t is affected, including the MFC CTime class.

So, if your C program deals with dates after 1/18/2038, you're in
trouble.  If not, there's nothing to worry about =)

Greg


--
Greg Phillips
i.shoot at rednecks.com
http://euphoria.server101.com
--

Useless fact of the day:

The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter
is uncopyrightable

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