written for youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k69kpu1oSHA
source: recent slashdot discussion about COBOL / chatGPT
this is a hoax. as the video mentions, at that time, there were 50 billion computers (of various scale) across the world. these were obviously not all fixed. i remember going into BIOS on my desktop comp in the 90s. instead of the time starting at 1900, it started at like 1956. so in 2056 the real chaos will begin.
though, i remember getting a new library card a few years ago. you could still only insert 2 digits for birthyear. i dont know how they solved that for people born in the 2000s.
and what the video didnt explain indepth, is why this would be a problem. its not just that the clock on the computer would show inaccurate time. every file ever created and in every database for every entry into it, the time is saved as year-month-day hours-minutes-seconds (on later systems milliseconds is included too, for software using atomic clocks it counts every 1/130.000th of a second).
so if a plan was to start at a time, it would show it incorrectly. if you had a debt of $100.000, it would get lots of interest on it the second the time changed.
financial systems, to this day, uses huge mainframe computers, operating systems (IBM z/OS), transaction servers (CICS), and a programming language (COBOL) originating in the 1950s. at that time, they actually used punchcards instead of digital memory. this has obviously been updated, but it handles decimals better than any binary systems (even 64-bit or 128-bit floating point is not good enough), so the problem persists. i dont know how they handled this.
Övriga genrer (Kåseri)
av Live2Dream
Publicerad 2024-08-21 20:30