On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, Mike Miller wrote: > Thanks to both Florin and Elvedin for looking this up. Very interesting. > I had no idea that this was how we would be dealing with the 2038 problem > on some of these machines - by replacing them with 64-bit machines. It is > really a software problem, but I guess it's much more easily resolved in a > 64-bit architecture so programmers are crossing their fingers and hoping > all the 32-bit machines will be gone before 2038 gets here! I won't be > surprised if air traffic controllers are using in 2038 machines that they > bought in 1997. In my opinion, we should have switched to 64-bit circa 1997. If you can't mmap your whole hard disk, you don't have enough bits of adress space, and you immediately start running into problems (for example, lseek breaking on large files). The server chips had all switched by that point. But the computer industry, like governments, does the rational thing only after all other possible alternatives are exhausted. Brian