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Emperor's 2019 exit will be first era change of information age, and switchover could be as big as Y2K say industry figures
[...] On 30 April 2019, Emperor Akihito of Japan is expected to abdicate the chrysanthemum throne. The decision was announced in December 2017 so as to ensure an orderly transition to Akihito's son, Naruhito, but the coronation could cause concerns in an unlikely place: the technology sector.
The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito's coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shōwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito's coronation will itself mark another new era.
But that brings problems. For one, Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age, meaning that many systems have never had to deal with a switchover in era. For another, the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced, causing concern for diary publishers, calendar printers and international standards bodies.
It's why some are calling it "Japan's Y2K problem".
"The magnitude of this event on computing systems using the Japanese Calendar may be similar to the Y2K event with the Gregorian Calendar," said Microsoft's Shawn Steele. "For the Y2K event, there was world-wide recognition of the upcoming change, resulting in governments and software vendors beginning to work on solutions for that problem several years before 1 Jan 2000. Even with that preparation many organisations encountered problems due to the millennial transition.
[...] A much harder problem faces Unicode, the international standards organisation which most famously controls the introduction of new emojis to the world. Since Japanese computers use one character to represent the entire era name (compressing Heisei into ㍻ rather than 平成, for instance), Unicode needs to set the standard for that new character. But it can't do that until it knows what it's called, and it won't know that until late February at best. Unfortunately, version 12 of Unicode is due to come out in early March, which means it needs to be finished before then, and can't be delayed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)
Lots of embedded systems might still be in the 1900s as far as they know.
Plenty of such systems don't need to know the current 4 digit year correctly.
It's just like those old VCRs or microwave ovens with the wrong time settings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01 2018, @03:08AM
Quite right... I have a lot of stuff that has embedded microprocessors, and they are not going to die just because time_t overflows. I don't believe a one of them even knows what time_t even is. An integral part of my design involves timestamping events. Overflowing time_t does not crash anything.... but makes the time and date display as a little over 136 years ago.
Maybe I abandon POSIX for a 64_bit time word. Considering how insignificant using eight bytes to store a timestamp, I am sorely considering recoding it. I'm open for suggestions, before I coin yet another incompatible "standard".