Been catching up on bestofyoutube.com and came across this gem
It attempts to explain why money is not the only thing that motivates professionals and how linux, apache have come to the dominate or excel in each of their areas despite being products made available for free created by and maintained entirely by volunteers.
On one of my many trips around wikipedia I stumbled across a date that has been called the real millennium bug.
Contrary to belief, the computers which run the most important systems including most webservers and database systems run on a variant of Unix/Linux or Unix-like aka *Nix.
All these operating systems operate a time keeping mechanism that starts from 1st January 1970
The measure of this time keeping is that it counts in seconds from this.
Most versions installed are 32bit Operating Systems which means that the largest number in seconds that can be represented would occur at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038
This is the Year 2038 problem (or Y2K38 bug) and the result is that all these computers unless upgraded to a 64bit OS (or other patches applied) will have their calendar reset to 1st January 00:00 at 03:14:08 on 19th Jan 2038. 64 bit OS’s will last well into the future – 290 billion years. A less radical solution of assigning the size of the time character to unsigned 32 bits would extend the problem till the year 2106 but could cause other problems. Other suggestions are to reset the date that is counted from from 1970 to 2000 which would extend the problem by 30 years.
I’m sure a solution will be found, but given that these operating systems are not found as often in home computers (with the exception of linux and Mac OSX operating systems) it has not become as well known but am sure that it will hit the press at some point in the future.