![]() | |||||||||||||
Messages in this thread |
Dominik Kubla <dominik.kubla@uni-mainz.de> writes: > On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 05:13:00PM -0600, Bill Wendling wrote: > > > My main point was that 38 years is a LONG TIME in the computer industry. > > Are you still using Wordperfect 5.1 on a 386 DOS machine at 40 MHz? It > > requires much less energy than the Windows boxen running at 200+MHz and > > it has the added feature that secretaries really liked it and the Windows > > version of the same product sucked (from what I understand). That was 10 > > years ago... > > But your are completely missing the point! What chip is in your cell phone? > Most likely an ARM or Mips. 32bits. What chip is used in Fords electronic > motor control? PPC4xx. 32bits. What chip is used in the german d-box (DVB > settop box)? M68323 with the next generation going for PPC4xx. Still > 32bits. it matters not that the MIPS R3K is 32-bits or not. consider: 1) the lowly 8-bit motorola 6502 is capable of 64 bit math by chaining eight 8-bit operations. 2) even when CPUs are 64-bit, e.g., dec/compaq-alpha, time_t is still often 32-bits. people do and will continue to do stuff like time_t tx; ... time(&tx); write(tx,sizeof(time_t),fd); and this gets embedded into fileformats like tar and various databases making it very hard to change. just like y2k, it's not a question of cpu, but of data and file formats. since the binary time format is so pervasive, i predict it will be harder to fix than the y2k problem. in y2k it was mostly I/O format strings and BCD dates in COBOL datastructures. 2038 will be all of unix. -- J o h a n K u l l s t a m [kullstam@ne.mediaone.net] Don't Fear the Penguin! - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
| Last update: 2005-03-22 13:55 [from the cache] ©2003-2008 | |||||||||||||