back to article It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Today is February 29, an unusual day in that it is added to the common 28 in years that are multiples of four to keep the calendar in sync with the astronomical year. This kludge prevents our seasons from drifting out of whack, but it presents a problem for computers and software, which have to be programmed to account for the …

  1. John H Woods

    Don't people test edge cases any more?

    Text required so might as well be this pedantic note

    - it's not "divisible by 4" as there are 365.2425 days in a year, not 365.25. So it's divisible by 4 unless divisible by 100 unless divisible by 400.

    1. b0llchit Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

      As implemented by numerous good libraries that handle time.

      The real problem is that people assume they understand time and date. It is THE most difficult subject. Let alone time zones and leap seconds. A limited compiled list of falsehoods is just the beginning. Or take a look at days that were removed.

      Do you think year 0 (zero) exists?

      1. Joe W Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        Came to say exactly that about the libraries.

        Let's face it, people quite intelligent and capable have thought about that problem, solved it, tested it, refined the edge cases. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, it will come out triangular.

        1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
          Meh

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

          Okay, so we won't re-invent the wheel (badly). The next problem is: how do we know which time libraries are "correct"? Popular acclaim has no relevance to accuracy.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

            It generally does, in that if you use a library that has existed and worked correctly in many countries for a lot of years, they probably considered time zones and leap days. It's usually not too hard to find something to help with time. Most programming language standard libraries and operating systems have that handled. Unless you have something they can't handle, the chances are that you will not benefit by either writing your own or trying to find someone else's library for the task.

            If you're going to do so, perform the following basic tests:

            1. Look through their documentation. If they mention oddities of time zones that they handle, they probably work. If they sound like students putting out something on GitHub, maybe not.

            2. Check leap year information. Run this code or language equivalent foreach (int i in [2000, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2400]) print(is_leap_year(i))

            If you get true, false, false, false, true, good sign. If you don't, don't use it.

            3. Check what they did the last time some country decided to mess with daylight saving time for no reason. For example, you could see whether and how quickly they updated the time rules that Greenland changed in 2023. If they're using the typical sources of information, this could be automatic.

            1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
              Coat

              Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

              Don't forget the edge case for Sweden in February 1712

              1. tatatata
                Coat

                Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

                I'd think the Brits would remember 1752 better,

                1. Toni the terrible

                  Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

                  Why?

                  1. jacampbell

                    Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

                    There was no January or February 1752 in England or Wales; nor most of March. There was in Scotland.

                    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750 has most of the gory details.

          2. TheBruce

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

            GNU emacs and g m n t

          3. yoganmahew

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Time Libraries: The Next Problem]

            I agree with you. A case I hit this year (not in my code) was using a library to do 5 digit date validation. The library allowed for 29FEB, but only if a year was included. As the year had not been determined at that point (it could be future, today, or past), validation failed.

            Ostensibly the code was 29FEB safe and the library validated it, it still failed.

      2. munnoch Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        I was asked to check if we could handle this a couple of weeks ago.

        Our system has been in production since 2006 so I'm pretty sure we've been through this before but someone in the upper strata obviously had a bit of a panic over their morning coffee when he realised that four years ago 29/2 fell on the weekend so its been *8* years since we did this!

        We store dates as Julian numbers, so really, there is absolutely no possibility of our core functions not working. They quite literally DO NOT KNOW what date it is, in the anthropomorphic sense. Anyone who encodes dates any other way is an idiot. YYYYMMDD is a display format (one of a great many), its NOT a suitable internal representation. Sadly few developers understand the difference between these concepts.

        The input validation functions do care, but I already fixed those to recognise 29/2 several years ago (along with the correct leap year function, the one that's good for 2100...). We inherited the date class from another team, they were superstars...

        1. gnasher729 Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          The company I worked at at the time had a Feb 2nd, 2000 problem. The root cause was utter stupidity but everything was fine up to that day. That wasn’t an edge case. I bet the problem was “todays+/-1 year is a valid date”.

        2. mbc
          Thumb Up

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          I had never heard of the Julian date concept before. Thanks for introducing me to the concept. I've got a programming project in mind that'll be able to make good use of this, I think. Don't worry, I'm not a professional programmer who's about to display his ignorance about time. I'm doing that here!

          1. munnoch Silver badge

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

            If your application mostly deals with date arithmetic then any representation that is an offset from a known epoch is what you want. Just so long as the range of the offset covers the needs of your problem domain. Julian numbers probably overkill for most commercial applications but a little inadequate if you are simulating the formation of the solar system (I'm guessing you would use different units for that one though).

            Stuff like number of days between two date points becomes trivially easy. But converting to an input or output representation that a human can understand is more expensive. Debugging can be a nuisance too. Some domains have complex rules for day counting e.g. number of business days between two points, we do that with a list of non-business days.

            Martin Fowler's Analysis Patterns is a very good read on this and other subjects.

            1. veti Silver badge

              Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

              And define your requirements. Do you really need to be able to display any date? - because that's a lot of complexity that you probably don't really care about. You can save, probably, some months of work just by setting a starting date and specifying a single calendar.

          2. This post has been deleted by its author

        3. A.P. Veening Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          We store dates as Julian numbers, so really, there is absolutely no possibility of our core functions not working. They quite literally DO NOT KNOW what date it is, in the anthropomorphic sense. Anyone who encodes dates any other way is an idiot.

          Julian numbers are fine, but make sure your programs can handle day 366 in a leap year. That was the one that tripped up the Norwegian railways in (yup, here it comes) the year 2000, a leap year, on the last day of that year.

        4. martinusher Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          >Sadly few developers understand the difference between these concepts.

          Its part of the library/framework. I just forklift the code (or the AI does it for me).

      3. ldo Silver badge

        Re: Do you think year 0 (zero) exists?

        Astronomers certainly think so.

        1. ravenviz Silver badge
          Headmaster

          Re: Do you think year 0 (zero) exists?

          Re: Astronomers

          You might be thinking of cosmologists.

      4. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        THAT...would be an ecumenical question.

        :-)

        1. sabroni Silver badge
          Headmaster

          Re: THAT...would be an ecumenical question.

          So close, but I think you mean an ecumenical matter.....

      5. find users who cut cat tail

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        Most are pretty obviously false, but could someone enlighten me on ‘The day before Saturday is always Friday.’? Are there any exceptions to this aside from when entire blocks of days were skipped to sync with the stars?

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          Well, the WWW can enlighten you on that one. From the first result from my search: "In 2011, Samoa switched time zones, skipping directly from Thursday to Friday."

      6. Toni the terrible

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        Time however is eminently predictable, as are most dates. Not to include such things and check them is very basic.

        1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Predictability]

          It's not that time and date calculations are inherently complex or difficult; they're not. What's complex and difficult is accounting the arbitrarary changes introduced by powerful people and organizations, in the envronment of human politics.

          1. find users who cut cat tail

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more? [Predictability]

            Time calculations are inherently complex and difficult.

            Every object in the universe has its own proper time. If you do any kind of measurement based on physics (i.e. any measurement whatsoever) you must use proper time. It's the correct time for description of how physical processes go for the specific observer.

            Different observers can disagree on which of two events occured first (if they are space-like).

            The idea that there is some single time barely works at the scale of counties with our current time meaurement precision.

            The mess created by humans is just a big and ugly database of weird rules. But it is not fundamentally mind boggling – unlike anything coming from relativity.

    2. TeeCee Gold badge

      Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

      But "divisible by 4" is entirely adequate for use. Even worked for 2000[1], when quite a lot of things didn't without change, courtesy of the "unless" qualifier.

      As I have observed before, if anything I've written is still in use for something important come 2100, I would be flattered and very surprised, if only I were not dead.

      [1] Rather amusingly, the one bit of leap year logic that had to be changed as part of the Y2K project was where some eejit had tried to be clever, but had been ignorant of the 400 year exception. KISS engineering wins every time.

      1. C R Mudgeon

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        "But "divisible by 4" is entirely adequate for use ... if anything I've written is still in use for something important come 2100, I would be ... very surprised"

        Which is exactly the sort of cavalier attitude that caused the Y2K situation in the first place. (Different technical problem of course, but the same short-term thinking.)

        1. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          "Just get it done A.S.A.P.! Don't worry, you won't have to support it." -- A former manager of mine.

          1. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

            Fast, Cheap, Good.

            Pick one of three.

            1. James Wilson

              Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

              Ouch. It used to be two, but I guess that's shrinkflation for you.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          "divisible by 4" that sounds complicated. I'm good with =~ 20[0-9][0-9]

        3. ChrisC Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          "Which is exactly the sort of cavalier attitude"

          Yes and no. Like the previous commenter I've also adopted the principle that the Y2100 problem simply isn't something I need to concern myself with in the code I write, because I'd be willing to bet my life on none of my code (at least none that I've ever written so far or am currently in the process of writing) still running without modification by then.

          I mean, I'm most assuredly already going to be dead by then anyway, given that I've just entered my 5th decade on this planet, but the principle remains - I KNOW none of my code will still be used as-is by then, because all of the date-handling code I've written so far has been for embedded systems which, no matter how much longevity the customers might try to eke out of them, will themselves no longer still be operating by then.

          And should any of my code still find itself being used by other engineers by then, and should it then cause them to run into Y2100 issues, more fool them for not paying attention to the clear comments in said code explaining the short-cuts/limitations/optimisations/etc taken...

          So under certain circumstances (and embedded coding is an area where certain circumstances occur rather frequently, given the limitations of the hardware on which our code operates) it's really not cavalier to take such an attitude, it may well be an entirely pragmatic and reasonable approach to developing code that does what it needs to do without incurring unnecessary overheads which may impact on other aspects of the system.

          1. coconuthead

            Re: none of your code still running in 2100

            Depending on what kind of embedded systems you’re building, that may not be true. Stuff like railways comes to mind. 75 years is old, but not out of the question. I believe parts of the NY subway signalling go back to the 1930s.

            "And should any of my code still find itself being used by other engineers by then, and should it then cause them to run into Y2100 issues, more fool them for not paying attention to the clear comments in said code explaining the short-cuts/limitations/optimisations/etc taken..."

            I worked on railway software that was still in production 30 years later. By then, they had lost the source code. Undeterred, they built a PDP-11 emulator for it (not that the non-standard pre-ANSI C would have compiled as was). It was finally retired when enough new railway stations had been built that a statically allocated array was now too small and it couldn’t load its data at startup! And yes, that array bound would have been #defined, but without the source code...

            Someone trying to restore a car or electronic toy in 2124 also won’t have the source code.

          2. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
            Coat

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

            "... has been for embedded systems which, no matter how much longevity the customers might try to eke out of them, will themselves no longer still be operating by then."

            Older hardware systems can live nearly-forever in compatibility modes and emulation. I choked on my own spit when I started reading the instruction set of the then-new PowerPC CPU and saw something from the IBM System/360 series: "Branch and Link Register?!!"

            (Mine's the one with an RPi box in the pocket running an emulator of [Dead or Alive on Windows CE on a Hitachi SH-4 CPU].)

          3. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

            You can't assume that dates like 2100 will only be of concern to programs that deal with "now", though. Anyone born today has an excellent chance of still being alive in 2100, so any programs that are expected to deal with life assurance or pensions for them may well have to handle dates up to 2120 and beyond. You don't want pension forecast reports to fail just because someone didn't care whether 2100 was a leap year or not.

          4. claimed Silver badge

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

            Your comments won’t survive the LLM regurgitation process, your bugs might ;)

        4. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

          Re: Which is exactly the sort of cavalier attitude that caused the Y2K situation in the first place

          A previous employer of mine had massive budgets for software, but not hardware (software being the "in" thing). So we had to be really careful with hardware resources (memory, disk space, CPU performance). In the real-time* situation we were coding, performng one IF THEN test rather than two or more allowed critical time dependent operations to be performed within strict time constraints. I suggested collapsing two tests down into one by using a 'magic number' of 31/12/1999 to compare against, on the understanding that the hardware would be upgraded prior to the millennium. This was accepted by management and was well documented (backside covered? Check).

          Another problem with many applications is that they use different concepts of time. We used 2-second time. This was to fit into whatever data-width we were lumbered with at the time. I forget where the baseline was set, but we regularly converted to/from 2-second time into normal time to interface with reality. So we had to concoct our own library to do these things.

          *These being typical applications that could have caused big Y2K problems.

        5. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          "You're over-engineering this." -- A favorite saying of another, non-technical, former manager of mine.

    3. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

      I came here to say exactly that, and also to add that we were coding for this in shonky 8086-assembler-written personnel systems in 1985, so there's no real excuse.

      GJC

    4. RobThBay

      Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

      Not quite.

      It's a leap year when the year is divisible by 4, unless the year is divisible by 100 and not divisible by 1000. I think I said that properly.

      2024 is a leap year.

      2000 was a leap year.

      1900 was not a leap year.

      Plus, years that are divisible by 25000 are not leap years.

      1. PRR Silver badge
        Angel

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        > years that are divisible by 25000 are not leap years

        I'll keep that in mind. When the time comes.

      2. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        I'm not sure where you got this, but it is not correct. For example, the year 2400 is a leap year according to the Gregorian calendar, but using your calculations, it would not be one. Your rules also result in a different number of days per solar year of 365.24096. The Gregorian calendar's cycle is 400 years in length and repeats after that. There is no rule based on 1000 or 25000 years.

        1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

          Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

          They had a double negative: "unless ... unless". The second unless applies to 2400.

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

            There is only one unless in their rule:

            "It's a leap year when the year is divisible by 4, unless the year is divisible by 100 and not divisible by 1000."

            2400 is divisible by 4, divisible by 100, not divisible by 1000. As I structure their statement, that does not allow 2400 to be a leap year. I don't see how you find a second unless, nor how you can make 2400 a leap year and 2300 not one using divisors of 4, 100, 1000, and 25000 singly. It's also just incorrect based on Gregorian rules. There is no rule for divisors of 1000 or 25000 and there is one for 400.

            1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

              Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

              My mistake. I thought you were replying to John H Woods at the top, but you were replying to RobThBay further down. I agree with you that RobThBay got it wrong.

          2. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge

            Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

            Only 1 in every 4th year mightbe a leap year, but of those, only 97 in 100 are.

            Not hard to understand. Having understood, not hard to code. But realising that that's what you actually need to understand... Hard. General ignorance strikes again.

            1. veti Silver badge

              Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

              So we should generate a random number to decide?

              Great idea. Everything is better with dice.

      3. gnasher729 Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        Your downvotes come from the fact that years divisible by 400 (not 1000) are leap years. And getting it right is important because if I see code that fails on this trivial problem, how can I trust the developer to get anything at all right?

      4. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        Plus, years that are divisible by 25000 are not leap years.

        Note that in 24999 years, the solar and astronomical calendar will have diverged by half a day, and the extra leap adjustment will suddenly make it wrong by half a day in the other direction. That won't help people. We mostly care about the cumulative effect, so after multiple 25000 year periods, and we don't even see any benefit at all until another 12500 years after the adjustment.

        They've already effectively decided to stop using leap seconds, partly because of the predicted problems caused by skipping seconds. No reason to expect anyone to want to shift everything by one exceptional day in 25000 years, even if we are still using the same calendar.

    5. TooOldForThisSh*t

      Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

      Had a problem just this morning at the BP station. System refused my BP Visa card but no problems with my ELAN Visa card. Had me worried for a minute as we've had repeated problems over the years with credit card fraud and I never find out about it until card is refused. Never gave it a thought that it might be "leap day".

      1. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        Not a leap year issue, but I had a classic y2k one only the other day. A spreadsheet at work required me to enter a future date for something. Being lazy, I entered "1/1/30" and it parsed it to 1st January 1930. A bit of experimentation revealed some logic in there that was something like "if YY<34 then year =19YY else year = 20YY".

        Partly my fault for entering a 2 digit year, but I do think the interface should have returned "use a 4 digit year, you plonker!"

    6. uncredited

      Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

      The number of times I've been told to remove tests that deal with edge cases "because that will never happen" is horrifying - and I've worked in a few financial systems...

      1. munnoch Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        Err, edge points are the *only* places you need to test. Just before the boundary, just on the boundary and just after the boundary. If you know the direction of the equality then you can drop one of those three.

        In between the boundaries you follow the same code paths so testing random samples does nothing to improve code coverage.

        The key of course is knowing where the boundaries lie. If you wrote it then you should know the answer to that. If not then a combination of white and black box testing may be what you want.

    7. Evil Auditor Silver badge

      Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

      Apparently, no, they don't. As I had to learn when recently auditing interest calculations. And it wasn't even such an edge case as all - just the totally unexpected fact that February doesn't have 30 days.

      1. gnasher729 Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        I bet the problem was that the same day in the previous or next year doesn’t exist.

      2. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: Don't people test edge cases any more?

        As I had to learn when recently auditing interest calculations.

        But February does have 30 days!

        That's the 30 day interest calculation method. Annual interest is divided by 12 to get monthly interest, monthly interest is divided by 30 to get daily interest, March 31 gets no interest, March 1 gets 2 or 3 days interest. Still sometimes used for contracts (typically with annual compounding, fixed amounts, and daily interest required for point-im-time valuation).

        If you are doing (another example) minimum-monthly-balance, monthly compounding, it doesn't matter how many days are in the month, and the 30-day month assumption just gives you value for the days in the first fractional month of a contract.

        That interest method (and others like it) were designed for people doing calculation by hand, but still exist today because they are in standard contracts.

        Sometimes markets switch to a new standard contract, but often there is no real reason to do so, and it takes a very long time.

        This is why you use a date library for financial calculations.

  2. alain williams Silver badge

    Oh, come on - this is elementary

    Dealing with February in leap years is an exercise in basic programming. If programmers cannot cope, or do not think, about this then they should not be in the job.

    Having said that: there are many out there who are not competent :-(

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

      Look on it as a regular test to find out which of those who entered the job market in the last four years should never have been sat in front of a keyboard, at leas, not one connected to anything. Wasn't it 1988 when a lot of Sun systems crashed? And before it even got to February I think. And my then manager's multi-page "Is it Friday yet" function couldn't tell when it was Friday.

      1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

        Is it Friday yet

        If you have an internet connection, it's easy. Just count the beer icons on El Reg comments.

        1. Dagg Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: Is it Friday yet

          WRONG! Typical brit or septic, you need to consider time zones. NZ is 12 hours ahead of the UK and around 19 hours ahead of the US so you poor buggers can be a day behind. <G>

    2. cookieMonster Silver badge
      Flame

      Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

      My thoughts exactly. I learned how to deal with this nearly 40 years ago. HOW is this still a problem in 2024, FFS!!

      1. Denarius Silver badge

        Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

        how old is Zellers Conguence ? 19th century. FFS

      2. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

        This is how we get things like Horizon. Littered with flaws that have been basic fundamentals of primary-school level computation for centuries.

    3. nematoad Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

      "Just one of those things" if the software isn't calibrated for the event, which to us is highly suggestive of human error.

      Wonderful.

      The Antikythera Mechanism, had, as far as we can tell, built in features to deal with the variability of the temporal cycle. It's all way above my head but scholars have shown that the variability of the Moon's phases, intercalary adjustments and so on have been factored into the design of the mechanism and was, at our best guess, designed circa 200 BCE. See here

      That's 2200 years ago so why hasn't the world learned to take things like leap years into account yet?

      1. Someone Else Silver badge

        Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

        That's 2200 years ago so why hasn't the world learned to take things like leap years into account yet?

        Well, we can thank in part the Millennial mindset that anything that happened before they were born is not important. Factor in the corollary that they can do anything better than the previous version (even if they don't have the slightest idea how to do it).

        You know, something from 200 BCE just isn't shiny enough.

        1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

          Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

          Well, possibly not. But Clickspring's reconstruction of it, now *that's* shiny enough :)

        2. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

          Yes, millennials can be blamed for that, as long as you're* willing to take the blame for everything that breaks in 2038. I'm willing to bet that that will be more things.

          * I'm guessing that, because you said this, you're not a millennial and probably of the appropriate age to have been around when someone made the 32-bit signed time solution. You probably weren't the one to do it, but we're blaming generations for the actions for a member, so it's your fault.

          1. Someone Else Silver badge

            Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

            Actually I was the one who filed a bug report to Micros~1 when the released that abomination laughingly referred to as "Quick C" complaining about how they buggered up the time_t and related structures. One of the problems was signed values; another was keying the beginning of the epoch at 1Jan1900 (which, because of yet another bug, was really 31Dec1899). To the best of my reading, nothing in the C standard (up through C99) requires the epoch to start at 1Jan1970, nor requires signed (or unsigned) time_t values of any magnitude. A time_t could be a 64-bit unsigned integer, and be standards compliant (unless, of course, C-standards beyond C99 changed, that...but I doubt they would).

            1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
              Devil

              Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

              So you are likely the one responsible for the accountExpires attribute in Active Directory represents the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601 (UTC)?

      2. ldo Silver badge

        Re: Antikythera Mechanism

        Bloody brilliant thing. For the Moon position, it had two gears beside each other, one at an angle with a slot, driven by a pin on the other gear. This way it would speed up and slow down as it went around, just like the Moon does as it seems to go round the Earth.

        1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

          Re: Antikythera Mechanism

          I think you'll find the Moon really does go around the Earth (or, pedantically, around a point about 1/81th offset from the centre of the Earth).

    4. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

      An exercise in basic programming and an exercise in BASIC programming.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

      I just keep a table with dates in so I don't have to think.

    6. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

      Indeed. None of my code had any problem with 2024-03-00.

  3. may_i Silver badge

    Add the Swedish ICA supermarket chain to that list

    They run thousands of supermarkets and pharmacies in Sweden and were unable to process credit card payments until about three this afternoon.

    D'oh!

    1. MiguelC Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Add Euronext stock exchange to the lot.

      This morning they warned their clients they're unable to process orders with validity for today.

    2. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Add the Swedish ICA supermarket chain to that list

      And Paris street lighting, some French papers are reporting that it all went out at midnight on the 28th, and had to be switched on again manually.

  4. Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

    After 2038, assuming the human race is still around, we'll need to cope with the fact 2100 ISN'T a leap year...

    1. Arthur the cat Silver badge
      Joke

      After 2038, assuming the human race is still around, we'll need to cope with the fact 2100 ISN'T a leap year...

      I would hope by then we have the technology to ensure that it will be. What else is the International Earth Rotation Service for? (Get pedalling!)

      1. ldo Silver badge

        Re: International Earth Rotation Service

        Such a brilliant name.

        Sadly, I don’t think they use it any more ...

        1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
          Thumb Up

          Re: International Earth Rotation Service

          According to Wikipedia, their new name is:

          International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service

          Now, I know who to write to when I have a complaint.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: International Earth Rotation Service

            But remember that they still use the old initials.

            Saves money on stationary and business cards.

    2. John Riddoch

      And yet 2000 was a leap year, which meant that anyone who only partially understood the rules would get caught out. If you only knew the "every 4 years" part, you'd be fine. If you remembered the "except every 100 years" and forgot the "unless it's the 400 year mark", you'd get it wrong. One of those occasions where being mostly wrong was better than being mostly right...

      As for 2100 - there's still a push from some to get rid of leap years/days, so we may not be working with the current calendar by then anyway. Which means we'll likely have other software bugs in date functions to deal with. The three certainties in computing: BGP errors, DNS failures and incorrect time/date functions.

      1. Cloudy Data

        The three certainties in computing: BGP errors, DNS failures, incorrect time/date functions, and off-by-one errors.

        1. Joe W Silver badge
          Pint

          I.... hate you

          (brilliant comment, I mean)

        2. Ken Shabby Bronze badge
          Alert

          And not being able cater character encodings that are not ASCII

          1. Ken Shabby Bronze badge
            Mushroom

            And to think you can compare floats for equality

      2. DJO Silver badge

        Unless we alter the Earths orbit we are stuck with having to make periodic adjustments to keep the year aligned. No amount of changes to the calendar or the measurement of time will change that.

        I suppose we could alter the rotation rate and make the days a bit longer and chop 1.25 of them off the year. Technically doable but it would mean bleeding off a lot of angular momentum.

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          And screwing up every human's sleep cycle. We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle. Bad things happen when that changes too much. There are some people who have a circadian rhythm that's not aligned with that, but most of them are caused by total blindness where the light triggers used to form normal rhythms are unavailable. From online descriptions, the experience seems very unpleasant.

          1. ldo Silver badge

            Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

            I’m not so sure. I recall some experiments, from the 1970s or earlier, when people were put in windowless (but otherwise comfortable, livable) environments for several weeks on end, with no cues as to when was night or day. Their natural body clocks seem to lengthen to a period of more like 26-27 hours.

            1. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

              I have not read the study, but I do wonder a few things about it. Specifically, how long they kept that up, because anyone who has stayed awake all night to do something knows that you can do something like that occasionally and be generally okay, but doing it too often has some really negative results. Also, the schedule is probably different depending on how much exertion or stress a person goes through, so people living in an experimental environment probably aren't doing the same amount of stuff as a typical person at a job, a student, or a parent.

              1. Graham Cobb

                Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

                The experiments were quite well known, and have been repeated several times IIRC. I am sure they are easy to look up.

                1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

                  Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

                  I did it when I was a student (apart from the hiding from daylight part) and both my sons did it extensively during the Covid lockdowns.

                  We may not count as fully human but none of us had (or have) any trouble at all in adopting diurnal cycle well over 24 hours.

                  1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

                    Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

                    Also happens to me every Christmas/New Year (in the northern hemisphere) as it is mostly dark - so no proper daylight reset trigger, and no going-to-work cycle - so no social reset trigger.

            2. Alan Hope

              Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

              Circadian rhythms are, at least partly, driven by meal-times.

            3. Bebu
              Windows

              Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

              《Their natural body clocks seem to lengthen to a period of more like 26-27 hours.》

              One such experiment was deep underground - with no natural day night forcing.

              Nuclear powered submarine would be another good environment in which to test this but in practice a normal 24 hour day would be maintained I imagine.

              1. david 12 Silver badge

                Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

                Nuclear powered submarine would be another good environment in which to test this

                You do not get a normal sleep cycle in a Nuclear powered submarine. You get shifts, and people get chronic sleep disruption.

        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          "Unless we alter the Earths orbit we are stuck with having to make periodic adjustments to keep the year aligned."

          That's only because some of us care about it, usually for historical reasons Other calendar systems don't worry so much about when the "new year" starts in relation to the Earths position around the sun and a weird fixation on specific religious things happening on certain dates in relation to the seasons.. After all, Easter is pretty variable in when it happens already :-)

          There's no real reason why we should not just decide that a "year" is 365 days and allow the calendar to slowly change such that "new year" moves in terms of our orbital position. Does it matter if December is in Winter or Summer[1]?

          [1] No matter which hemisphere you are in :-)

          1. doublelayer Silver badge

            "Does it matter if December is in Winter or Summer[1]?"

            It does to me. If, for example, we're tracking climate changes, we can ask a question like "how has the rainfall in December varied over the past hundred years" and get an answer. If December keeps moving between seasons, it's no longer going to work as accurately. In order to calculate it, you'd have to phrase the question like "how has the rainfall during the period from twenty days before the solstice to eleven days after the solstice" and do all the calculations. This isn't just relevant for months; we get the same effect if we calculate the rainfall between November 17th and January 3rd, assuming there's a reason to do it, because that or any other set of dates consistently refers to almost the same time in the solar year.

            1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

              It's not accounting for things like that that gets senseless headlines like "coldest Easter in decades!" when Easter falls on, eg, 22nd March and comparing it with Easter being on 20th April.

          2. ldo Silver badge

            Re: Earths position around the sun

            Not the position in its orbit, but the orientation of the Earth’s axis, since that is the primary determinant of the seasons.

        3. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

          Coming soon to a legislature near you

          "No amount of changes to the calendar or the measurement of time will change that."

          You mean, no amount short of abolishing calendars, or deprecating the measurement of time.

      3. Someone Else Silver badge

        As for 2100 - there's still a push from some to get rid of leap years/days, [...]

        Are these the same nimrods who want to get rid of Daylight Saving Time/Summer Time, and want to make pi equal to 3 (because either of these are soooo inconvenient...)?

        1. doublelayer Silver badge

          I admit to being one of those who doesn't understand why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time and thinking that we could manage equally well without doing it. Many countries have managed that. But I know why there are leap years and we cannot get rid of them. Most societies two millennia ago understood that and had figured out some method of handling it, so it should be pretty obvious how necessary it is.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            "But I know why there are leap years and we cannot get rid of them. Most societies two millennia ago understood that and had figured out some method of handling it, so it should be pretty obvious how necessary it is."

            Not really. In a strictly agricultural society without an easily accessible technology telling you what time of year to plant, some form of regular calendar that didn't slowly get out of synch with the seasons across the generations was vital, likewise where certain organised religions needed to exert control, but today, not so much. Without leap years, it would take ~700 years for the June/December seasons to entirely switch. Most people would barely notice the difference across their natural lifespan :-)

            1. doublelayer Silver badge

              It would take significantly less time for December to become October, which would be relatively inconvenient even if it wasn't a complete reversal. However, even if you don't care about that, we get into philosophical areas about why we even have a calendar. If we don't care about the consistency between our date counting and seasons, why have months? In fact, why track years? Just count everything in days so you can give an age when necessary, and ignore everything else. I think we still find that having a way to describe, consistently, times in relation to solar movement, to be something we want to continue doing. Doing that inaccurately is not any better than not doing it at all.

              1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

                Perspective

                "Doing that inaccurately is not any better than not doing it at all."

                People need to be wrong at least sometimes, otherwise there wouldn't be any reason to yell at them. Although I suppose you could yell at them for doing nothing.

            2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

              "some form of regular calendar that didn't slowly get out of synch with the seasons across the generations was vital"

              You say that, but Nature always grants you the option of dying. You're just prejudiced because you are descended from a long line of nerds who didn't fancy dying.

              1. jake Silver badge

                The planting calendar is one of the most important tools hung on the wall of the seed barn.

                I have a stack of them going back to the late 1800s. When combined with the farm journals, I have a pretty good idea of what I need to plant, when, this Spring (which looks to be wetter than normal, but not outside historical data).

          2. ldo Silver badge

            Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

            If you are far enough from the equator, the benefit is in getting up earlier because sunrise is earlier, so you get more daylight hours before you go to bed in relation to sunset.

            Some misguided folk suggest going onto permanent daylight saving all year round. The downside to that is waking up earlier in winter when it’s still dark. Not so much fun then.

            1. munnoch Silver badge

              Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

              Presumably the down-vote is someone in the Sarf-East.

              Where I live its not fully daylight until after 9am in late Dec. Without DST adjustment that would be 10am. So some justification to the travel safety argument.

              1. DJO Silver badge

                Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

                The rationalisation was to allow school kids to have daylight when going to school in the mornings.

              2. doublelayer Silver badge

                Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

                "Where I live its not fully daylight until after 9am in late Dec. Without DST adjustment that would be 10am. So some justification to the travel safety argument."

                I think you have that backward. In winter, the clocks are still on standard time, so there is no adjustment and 9:00 is 9:00. I'm assuming winter from the late sunrise. Thus, without DST, it would be exactly the same. The difference comes in the summer only. Of course, you could institute winter time where the clocks go extra forward, making that 9:00 into 8:00, but only if you're willing to have a rather early sunset.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

              "you get more daylight hours before you go to bed"

              Shifting the day doesn't make it longer: You lose on one end what you have gained on the other, so what's the point? You get to wake up one hour earlier, in total darkness, just to get some more daylight in the evening, when you're sitting in front of your TV? Not convincing.

              1. ldo Silver badge

                Re: You lose on one end what you have gained on the other

                That is the point. Typical city dwellers do not get up much before sunrise, but they do stay up long after sunset. Daylight saving simply caters to this characteristic to maximize our use of available daylight hours — hence the “saving” bit.

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: You lose on one end what you have gained on the other

                  "Typical city dwellers do not get up much before sunrise, but they do stay up long after sunset."

                  Have you seen a city dweller lately? I mean, since electricity was invented? They all live indoors, all lights on, and who cares if there is still some amount of daylight outside. After all, there is no day or night in a city, it's just the sky illumination which turns off part of the day.

                  The argument of people staying up late and thus needing additional daylight was valid in the 19th and early 20th century, nowadays people live totally disconnected from the sun cycle.

                  1. ldo Silver badge

                    Re: Have you seen a city dweller lately?

                    Yes. I am one, and I frequently deal with others in person.

            3. doublelayer Silver badge

              Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

              In my mind, this is no problem, just get up earlier. This is especially true for farmers who can start their day as early as they want to because their fields don't register for appointments on their calendar. The clock doesn't need to be changed for that to happen when they could just set their alarm back an hour some time in the spring when they decide the sunrise justifies it, or even better, by ten minutes six times throughout a month so there's less of a jolt to the schedule. I don't need you to get up earlier in order for me to do so.

              1. jake Silver badge

                Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

                Alarm? The cows queuing up outside the milking parlor let us know the day is starting. (Some people swear by roosters, personally I swear at them ... so there are none on the Ranch.)

                The clock has no bearing on day-to-day life around here. It's all tied to the sun and weather. No amount of the Government dicking around with what the clock says will ever change that. Even the Vet, Farrier and various delivery folks use time no more precise than morning, noonish, afternoon or evening.

                1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

                  Re: why we benefit from changing the clocks for summer time

                  The "solution" I keep banging on about is to do a one-off move of the clocks by half an hour in spring or autumn, then leave them forever like that. Will work for anywhere there is Daylight Saving. One reason why it might not be liked as a solution is that GMT will then only exist as a virtual reference point for those of us in Blighty. Another tradition consigned to history.

                  Ok there will be a big upheaval initially, but in the long run... Perhaps the apocalypse is so near that it is not worth the effort.

                2. ldo Silver badge

                  Re: The clock has no bearing on day-to-day life around here

                  And yet I’m sure that all your computers are firmly locked to accurate time, to within fractions of a second, via NTP. And that you would be very annoyed if there were any disruption to that.

        2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          who want to get rid of Daylight Saving Time/Summer Time

          [Waves hand}

          They had a clear purpose at one point in time but, for a lot of the world, that purpose has long since ceased to be as agrarian requirements get less in the northern and southern parts of the world..

          1. Ken Shabby Bronze badge

            Former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen argued daylight saving faded curtains and confused milking cows.

            1. jake Silver badge

              The cows don't get confused very easily ... but it would seem that Queensland politicians do.

              1. Bebu
                Windows

                The cows don't get confused very easily ... but it would seem that Queensland politicians do.

                Joh Bjelke-Petersen more than most with gems like:

                You can’t sit on a fence, a barbed wire fence at that, and have one ear to the ground.

                The Canadian environmentalist, David Suzuki, named him the greatest deadhead in the universe at one stage. :)

                Australian politicians generally aren't greatly endowed gray matter department, Queensland ones don't even seem to have been waiting in the queue.

                For the record Queensland doesn't have daylight saving but the other three eastern states (NSW,VIC,TAS) in the same timezone (UTC+10) do which can be a PITA.

                When it mattered to me I just set the watch to UTC and add 12 sub 1 in Sydney and add 12 sub 2 in Brisbane. (remember its modulo 12 :)

                A consequence of buggering a couple of watches changing the time backwards and forward.

            2. ldo Silver badge

              Re: Joh Bjelke-Petersen

              Ah ... Dannevirke’s most famous export ...

          2. jake Silver badge

            It never had any purpose at all for agrarian activities.

        3. Bebu
          Windows

          make pi equal to 3

          《make pi equal to 3》

          I suspect it would be half way down a decent black hole.

          Where such enlighted legislators should be reaccommodated.

      4. gnasher729 Silver badge

        That was interesting. Stupid worked. Clever worked. The halfwits in between failed. In 2100 the halfwits will be fine, only stupid will fail.

        And my prediction is we will get rid of utc. Only solar time to keep things working, and atomic time with 37 seconds offset for precision. Posix time will be solar time.

      5. C R Mudgeon

        "As for 2100 - there's still a push from some to get rid of leap years/days ... Which [if that happens] means we'll likely have other software bugs in date functions to deal with."

        Not least of which will be the massive installed base of software that *does* understand leap years.

      6. ldo Silver badge

        Re: 2000 was a leap year

        It still is, as far as I know.

        1. Bebu
          Big Brother

          Re: 2000 was a leap year

          《It still is, as far as I know.》

          A block time/eternalist and not a fan of presentism? :)

          Arguing the continuing existence of the past is as fraught as arguing the same for the future. ;)

          Philosophers of time appear to have particularly scots calvanist bent. :)

      7. Mister Dubious

        One of the classics

        One of the best descriptions of the "unless 400" rule was found in a VAX/VMS Software Problem Report (SPR). I can no longer find the original, but a transcription is still available from Hewlett-Packard at [http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/openvms/products/year-2000/leap.html]. Highly recommended reading!

      8. Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

        That year we were more concerned about the Y2K Bug™

  5. smudge
    Facepalm

    My leap year tale

    Exactly 40 years ago, I was working for an IT company which supplied software for pathology labs in hospitals - basically databases of results of blood tests, urine tests, and other unmentionable things.

    Quality wasn't very good, but, having been there for only a year, I was trying to improve it.

    Feb 29 rolled around, so I sat back and waited for the phone to ring. Nothing. No complaints. Had we got through it? No. The next day, March 1st, the complaints came in.

    At some time in the previous four years, before I joined, someone had added a "delta check" facility to the software. This checked a patient's latest results against their previous results, and raised an alarm if they were changing too quickly.

    Whoever programmed the delta check had forgotten about February having 29 days every four years. So when it compared new results against older ones, it calculated the time difference to be 24 hours less than it really was... and all hell broke loose as a large number of patients were flagged as needing attention.

    Only good thing about it was that eight years later, New Scientist magazine published an article which I had written about it. I had realised that in 1992 they would have an issue actually dated 29th February, so I submitted an article recounting the above leap year woes, and then looking forward to 01 January 2000 - one of the early mentions of what became known as the Millennium Bug.

    The next week they published a letter by one Arthur C Clarke, saying "interesting article, but I described this problem, and a solution, in my book......". I later saw several very similar letters from him, on other topics, so he must have had a standard template that he just added the appropriate details to before firing it off to the magazine.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: My leap year tale

      Unisys 2200 systems log files use a double word integer (72 bit) to store the time. The starting date is December 31st 1899.

      While in development the starting date was January 1st 1900. Luckily during development, a large customer wrote their own date conversion routine. They discovered the OS team didn't know 1900 wasn't a leap year.

      Things were far enough along that the OS team didn't want to fix it "correctly" so they just changed the documented starting date.

  6. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge
    Trollface

    First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

    People are already campaigning to abolish leap seconds. How long before they are clamouring to abolish leap days?

    1. JulieM Silver badge

      Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

      Leap days are not going anywhere.

      Almost nothing anyone says or does will change the fact that the number of days in a year is not an integer; that is to say, the Earth does not rotate around its own axis a whole number of times in the time it takes to complete a full turn around the Sun.

      1. ldo Silver badge

        Re: the number of days in a year is not an integer

        Fixing that, I suppose, would mark our progression from a Kardashev Type I civilization to being on our way to Type II.

        1. C R Mudgeon
          Unhappy

          Re: the number of days in a year is not an integer

          We've already become a Kardashian civilization. Fortunate there are pockets of resistance, including (I like to think) the El Reg community.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: the number of days in a year is not an integer

            Oh, c'mon. That's hardly "civilization", now is it?

      2. the spectacularly refined chap Silver badge

        Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

        Almost nothing anyone says or does will change the fact that the number of days in a year is not an integer; that is to say, the Earth does not rotate around its own axis a whole number of times in the time it takes to complete a full turn around the Sun.

        No, that's one of the other myths about timekeeping. A day is the (average) period from one noon until the next. For the Sun to return to its highest point the Earth has to rotate slightly more than once, since it has moved around its orbit in the interim. A sidereal day (a single rotation) is about 4 minutes shorter.

        1. davefb

          Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

          Thanks for that clear explanation, I don't think I've ever understood what the difference is! I've read 'sidereal day' and just shrugged and wondered, but its obvious to me now!

      3. David Hicklin Silver badge

        Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

        > Earth does not rotate around its own axis a whole number of times in the time it takes to complete a full turn around the Sun.

        So we either need to push the earth closer or further away to shorten (fixed 365) and lengthen (366) the number of days it takes to get around the sun

        As the planet is getting warmer I suggest we push it out.

        And there is another variable - the moon is gradually slowing the spin of the earth down just for good measure

      4. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

        You caught me on the isostatic rebound

        It was tongue-in-cheek (notice the original icon).

        But if you're happy to have sunrise at midday, and sunset at midnight, because it makes computing easier - why not have spring in July because it makes computing simpler?

        We know, from countless ERM fiascos, that you fit your processes to the computers - not the other way around. Man's time keeping will have to match what the computers can manage. (Still, slightly, tongue-in-cheek)

        1. JulieM Silver badge

          Re: You caught me on the isostatic rebound

          This is not altogether unbelievable. Certain genes have actually had to be renamed; fittingly enough, because Microsoft Excel was incorrectly interpreting their names in cells of type "auto" as dates and storing them internally as such, which led to them being mis-displayed on systems configured for other localities.

        2. Dagg Silver badge

          Re: You caught me on the isostatic rebound

          why not have spring in July

          This type of dating actually depends on governments. Here is Australia the government defines that the season start at the being of a month regardless of nature. Other places define the start of a season as starting on the equinox or solstice. To me nature defines when they start,

    2. gnasher729 Silver badge

      Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

      Removing leap seconds is actually reasonable.

      There are two reasonable time systems: Solar time where the sun is at its highest above Greenwich exactly at noon every single day. Which can be measured within 25 microseconds. And atomic time, where each second lasts exactly one SI second, within a few nanoseconds every year. Currently 37 seconds ahead of solar time.

      UTC is a perversion that tries to match up atomic time and solar time. Every time atomic time goes too far ahead of solar time they insert a leap seconds. So you get a mix of solar time before the decimal point and atomic time to the right of the decimal point. With solar time you get the time within 25 microseconds without problems. Atomic time gives you the time within nanoseconds. With UTC getting the time within a second is hard.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

        "There are two reasonable time systems"

        There is a difference between "time", the dimension, and "what time is it?", clock/calendar time.

        I run on three major clocks, and one minor one.

        The first is TheWife's monthly cycle. If you are married to a woman, you'll grok.

        The second is the seasonal clock handily provided by the Solar Year & the Earth's axial tilt with respect to its orbit. It is totally out of my control, but I plant my fields & breed my critters by it, as humans have since time immemorial. Trying to change this is a fool's errand.

        The third is the clock provided by the Master clock on my network, which syncs up to an atomic clock once per day (ntp.org works for most purposes ... I use something else), which all of my machines adhere to. This is for computer record keeping more than anything else.

        Context is key. There is no "SingleTimeStandard[tm]", and never will be. With the exception of The Wife's, of course.

        The minor fourth clock is my dive watch. I wear it when appropriate. It's kinda important ... but it could be completely out of sync with the three major clocks in my life and it wouldn't matter at all.

        As a side-note, I don't wear a wristwatch day-to-day ... and haven't in nearly half a century (since my HP-01, back in 1977). In my mind, they are completely pointless. Everywhere you look these days you can see something giving you a pretty good approximation of "local time". Humans living life to the second or minute (or even ten minutes!) is counter productive. Even when baking bread ten minutes either way won't kill you, or the loaf ... Relax, be patient, learn to make cheese, cure meat and brew beer.

        1. JulieM Silver badge
          Boffin

          Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

          The first is TheWife's monthly cycle. If you are married to a woman, you'll grok.
          I'm genuinely curious here: Do you not have your own monthly cycle?

          Oestrogen affects the growth of facial and body hair. If you shave with a blade, you can actually feel the resistance offered by the hairs changing from one day to the next, coming down the handle; and it's easy enough to demonstrate experimentally that this is not just your razor blade getting blunt.

          It's my personal contention that this phenomenon is where lycanthropy legends originated; since it's no great leap to imagine a man preferring to believe he is turning into a wolf during a certain phase of the moon (which, conveniently, tends to line up fairly well with the oestrogen cycle; there may well be an evolutionary explanation, as an external clue to your own fertility sounds like the sort of survival advantage that could be significant over thousands of generations, and the period of the cycle sounds like the sort of thing that would be hereditary), rather than accept his body undergoes the same cyclic changes as a woman's body.

          Oh, and if the quartz clock in my kitchen is in anything like sync with local solar time, you may infer from that fact that the battery has recently been changed. It's used strictly for measuring time differences (especially since the timer on my microwave broke; so as long as there is any life left in the magnetron, it's wedged on full power and controlled with the switch on the wall socket), and whatever it may lose or gain over the duration of cooking a meal is unlikely to be significant. Even although it drifts a lot over the life of a battery, which may well include daylight saving changes. It's not really worth getting the clock down from the wall to adjust the hours and minutes hands, if I'm only paying mind to the seconds hand!

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

            I'm genuinely curious here: Do you not have your own monthly cycle?

            Simple answer No, complex answer if I did it would be linked to SWMBO cycle as per what happens with groups of females...

      2. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

        Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

        "Solar time where the sun is at its highest above Greenwich exactly at noon every single day."

        But, due to the earth's orbit not being circular, the interval between this can vary by +/-O(15 mins). That's why we had to invent a mean day and mean time for practical day-to-day applications. There are just four days in the year when local apparent solar time and mean time are about aligned at Greenwich - as governed by the "equation of time". (Which, I guess, is an example of regularising our time keeping to make computing easier.)

        "Every time atomic time goes too far ahead of solar time they insert a leap seconds. So you get a mix of solar time before the decimal point and atomic time to the right of the decimal point."

        Yes, UTC is kept within 1 second of UT1. But UT1 is not a measure of solar time: it's a measure of the angle of the earth (the position of the equinox) remembering it takes about 4mins less than 24 hours for the earth to rotate through 360°. Let me quote the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac:

        Although it would be possible to define a system of time measurement in terms of the hour angle of the sun, such a system could never be precisely related to sidereal time and could not, therefore, be determined by star transits.

        I'm suspecting your 25μs is, anyway, the error in difference between UTC and UT1 (IERS Bulletin B, 12th Feb, gives the mean formal error UT1-UTC as 0.0253ms)

        A consequence of this is the mean sun used in GMT isn't even the real mean sun - it's a fictitious one. (Hence the "about aligned" in my opening para.)

        I also think it means your assertion that "you get a mix of solar time before the decimal point and atomic time to the right of the decimal point." is incorrect. I get what you're saying; it's not a bad mental model. But UTC is an approximate measure of what you call "solar time" (i.e. the earth's rotation) that is advancing in SI seconds as measured on the "surface" of the earth.

        And the point is, as humans, we like that angle. IIRC, the historical record shows 1hr/1000 years is plausible. If the poles disappear quickly, it could get even worse. Nobody is going to accept to sunrise at midday. (Pre-millennial projections over estimate the number of leap seconds we would have. So maybe it will sign flip and go negative; I'm sure negative leap seconds will really piss everybody off even more.) But,drop leap seconds, and we'll either introduce leap hours or time zones shifts, and end up with timezones that are 18hrs off "atomic time". So we'll be saving ourselves some some work in the short term but creating a lot of pain further down the line.

        1. gnasher729 Silver badge

          Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

          The 25 microseconds is the precision with which we can determine “highest position of sun above Greenwich”. In that time the Earth at Greenwich moves about 1cm below the sun. What actually is measured is the position of some quasars in the middle of the night.

          Earth rotation speed is off by 0 to 4 or do milliseconds every day; that determines how the difference between UTC and UT1 changes. That can be 100 times more in a day. Plus the 25 microseconds are not cumulative. They don’t add up. Every day we get the exact UT1 date with an error of +/- 25 microseconds.

          So if you really want Earth rotation as the basis, ut1 gives you that within 25 microseconds, UTC is off up to 0.9 seconds.

  7. AndrueC Silver badge
    WTF?

    Why is this a problem? I spent 35 years as a computer programmer and never once encountered a problem with February the 29th. One of the Amstrad CPC mags back in the 1980s published a BASIC function that could tell you the day of the week for any date going back hundreds of years. It could even be modified to handle the various leap days when the Gregorian calendar was adapted around the world (eg;in protestant countries 11 days were removed from September in 1752).

    If anyone's code is confused then whoever wrote it made a right bog of it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Back in those day though we had Analysts, Programmers, DBA and other specialists,

      Now half of development is by lowest cost script kiddies.

      I've just been part of setting up a new office in India, interviewing supposedly senior developers. Watching their eyes flicking around when I asked questions, resulted in the same two responses from me:

      "Are you reading from Post-It-Notes all over your wall?"

      "Are you looking this up on the Internet?"

      I even told one guy that ChatGPT gave a better summary than he did trying to read from Wikipedia!

      My senior people in the new India office are of equivalent standard of my first year summer holiday interns when they go back to Uni to learn more.

      The bean counters just see wage costs, not the amount of teaching time we have to put into these people, fixing their bugs, etc. until they leave as soon as they think they have learned enough to get the next job.

      For a cheaper site, I prefer Romania.

      They speak better English

      They are closed to Central European Time

      They are loyal to the company

      But again the bean counters kyboshed that idea.

      1. Paul Herber Silver badge

        Get cheaper bean counters.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Yeah, it's funny how the bean counting department never gets outsourced!

          1. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
            Devil

            Oh, I don't know...

            BOFH seems to "outsource" the bean counters occasionally...from the 3rd floor window.

            (probably not the best "real life" solution to the problem, though)

          2. the spectacularly refined chap Silver badge

            Yeah, it's funny how the bean counting department never gets outsourced!

            I take it you've never read of any of the scandals that regularly affect E&Y, KPMG, PwC etc. Nor indeed the effective corporate death penalty that was applied to Arthur Andersen in the wake of Enron?

    2. Old Used Programmer

      If only it was that simple...

      The English-speaking world changed in 1752. Catholic countries changed in 1582. In places where Orthodox Christian churches dominate, civil calendars changed at various other years. Greece, for instance, didn't switch until 1923. At least some Orthodox (e.g. Russian Orthodox) churches still use the Julian calendar as their liturgical calendar.

      All of this has led to one of my favorite questions... If it is claimed that someone was born on 29 February 1900, can that be true? Lots of people have such a poor grasp of the Gregorian calendar that they don't see why there is a problem. Those that do understand the calendar ask, "Where were they born?"

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > If anyone's code is confused then whoever wrote it made a right bog of it.

      Haven't you seen the sort of code produced these days?!

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Modifications

      "It could even be modified to handle ..." That's marketing-speak for, "Some unspecified other person(s) will potentially-handle the truly-hard parts."

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Meh

        Re: Modifications

        Um..no. It was published in a magazine aimed at the young computer enthusiast. The Amstrad CPC was an 8-bit Z80 based Microcomputer sold in the early 80s.

        As published the function worked according to the protestant version of the Gregorian calendar (it was a UK magazine after all) but the line of code that handled that calculation was followed by several similar lines commented out with information as to which sky fairy sect they related to.

        1. James Wilson

          Re: Modifications

          Ah, the CPC 464. I have fond memories of that. Probably more playing "Harrier Attack" than of writing some incredibly elementary BASIC to make a little character man run across the screen.

          I have less fond memories of waiting 17 minutes for a game to load from tape, from (very hazy) memory it was called "Sultan's Maze", only for it to be, well, crap.

    5. gnasher729 Silver badge

      Simple question: Does my lease expire within the next year? Solution: Take today’s date. Add one year. Compare with expiry date. If the expiry date is before (today plus one year) then it will expire in less than a year.

      Except on Feb 29th 2024 “calculate one year from now” fails.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Happy

        Lol. Reminds me of a licensing system I was involved in a couple of decades ago. They'd made the mistake of having the license expire at midnight CST, Not a good decision for a product sold internationally.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If they only they had some prior warning this extra day that happens every four years was going to happen. The concept of leap year has only been around since the 3rd century B.C. and introduced into the Gregorian calendar in 1582 so it's understandable they haven't got the hang of it yet. I wish them luck in 4 years time when it unexpectedly happens again for the 112th time.

    1. Old Used Programmer

      Say, what? The leap-day-every-four-years is part of the *Julian* calendar, and that dates back to Julius Caesar. The correction that makes on century years leap years if they are evenly divisible by 400 is the correction that was introduced with the Gregorian calendar.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        You are correct however before that the Egyptians were also aware of leap years apparently. They kind of had to be considering everything is based on seasons. Can't be building pyramids in winter.

        1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          Can't be building pyramids in winter

          Or, more accurately, can't be building pyramids during the Nile flood and the month or so afterwards..

          (That was when the farmers planted their crops in the nice rich mud that the floods had left. There isn't a huge amount of seasonal variation in the weather there!)

      2. gnasher729 Silver badge

        Because in 1582 the leap years that had been removed had shifted the seasons by 11 days.

  9. Aladdin Sane
    Trollface

    My automatic watch says it's 29th, what's the problem?

    1. HereIAmJH Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Here I was thinking "I haven't worried about date problems since the 90s" And then it was only because we were prefixing ticket numbers with 2 digit years and going from 991234 to 001234 blew up our sorts on reporting. Lesson learned.

      Then you made me look at my watch, out of curiosity. It's says it's Thursday 3/1. I guess it's going to be 2/28 again today, and maybe tomorrow it will be back to normal.

      1. yetanotheraoc Silver badge

        wrong for a day

        My digital watch also says "TH 3/01". I'm waiting until it says "FR 3/02" before I fix it.

        Getting leap days wrong is not a new thing. I remember on 2004-02-29 when many at work were complaining their cellphones said 03-01. I fixed my Nokia something-or-other by removing the battery, after putting it back and restarting it picked up the correct date from the network. Worked for my boss as well, different cellphone manufacturer.

      2. AndrueC Silver badge
        Boffin

        My Casio G-shock went 28, 29 and is now showing 1st. I remember that the manual for my first Casio digital watch bought in the early 80s said it knew about leap years and would be good until something like 2100. At the time knowing what I did I couldn't see why it would have a problem beyond the year 2100 but I suppose Casio's marketing department felt that 'it'll calculate the date correctly forever' to be too broad a claim.

        So..yeah. I don't understand why this year has suddenly sprung a problem on the IT world and if I think about it I become increasingly alarmed. I only retired in August so surely things can't have gone to shit that quickly?

    2. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      You just have to remember to click it 2 days forward before Friday...

  10. Howard Sway Silver badge

    Owners of Fastrack FS1 smartwatches have reported the clocks being stuck

    OK, I can just about accept that a few things like petrol pumps might go wrong, due to some amateurs somewhere not thinking too carefully when hacking out code. But come on, a watch, which has the one main function of working with date and time............. smart that most definitely is not.

    1. oldandgrey

      Re: Owners of Fastrack FS1 smartwatches have reported the clocks being stuck

      Well, my 1989-vintage Casio F-91W digital watch isn't aware of leap years. At midnight it jumped to the 1st of March. I had to put it back to 29th of February. Now let's see if it's smart enough to know what to do when the 29th ends.

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

        Re: Owners of Fastrack FS1 smartwatches have reported the clocks being stuck

        None of my watches have sufficient complications to have more than a date ring with the numbers 1-31 marked on it. So they're all quite happily showing the 29th. Of course, tomorrow is the 30th.

      2. Spoobistle
        Facepalm

        Re: F-91W

        Just for reassurance, my 2024-vintage F-91W is no more clued up!

        1. Medieval Research Council

          Re: F-91W

          My 2013 Casio AW-90H is currently showing Fri 2nd March, "3 2FR" on display.

        2. jake Silver badge

          Re: F-91W

          "my 2024-vintage F-91W is no more clued up!"

          To be fair, that watch doesn't track the year.

    2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Owners of Fastrack FS1 smartwatches have reported the clocks being stuck

      "a watch, which has the one main function..."

      Ah. You probably think a phone has one main function, too. Welcome to the modern world. You may take some time to adjust.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Owners of Fastrack FS1 smartwatches have reported the clocks being stuck

        Both the modern watch, and most modern telephones have precisely one function ... they are a bit of haberdashery designed to make the wearer/user feel important.

  11. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Time to go

    > February 29

    Also, it's the day many people don't get paid for working.

    If you are paid weekly, then the extra day just forms part of the normal working week and employers pay their staff for the leap-day.

    But if you are paid monthly, then you get the same amount fof February 2024 as you got for February 2023 (assuming no intervening pay rise - an increasingly common complaint). Even though you work an extra day in 2024.

    1. munnoch Silver badge

      Re: Time to go

      Well, yes, but every other February you get paid the same as the other months for doing 2 or 3 days less work.

    2. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: Time to go

      Where I work, we are paid a (mostly) fixed monthly amount that is calculated upon a specific yearly number of hours worked (1,607 I think; it's the number of non-holiday days multiplied by seven hours) divided by 12 (months).

      As we clock in and clock out, the time worked is subtracted from that big scary number. The aim is to be +/- 14 hours by the end of the "year" (April 1st to March 31st).

      So we don't get paid extra for the 29th, but we do get seven hours deducted so we're not losing.

      1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Time to go

        I just get paid every two weeks.

    3. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Time to go

      If you're payed the same amount for every month, then you're getting more per hour or day in February, whether it has 28 or 29 days, because it doesn't have 30 or 31 days and every other month does. If it's something based on the number of days and they treat it as 28, then maybe you have a point, but I'd need to see that algorithm to understand if it applies or not.

    4. Falmari Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Time to go

      @Pete 2 "But if you are paid monthly, then you get the same amount fof February 2024 as you got for February 2023 (assuming no intervening pay rise - an increasingly common complaint). Even though you work an extra day in 2024."

      It's not the frequency you get paid, it's what you are being paid, salary (normally per annum) or wage (normally per hour). Waged you are paid for the actual hours worked, Salaried is a fixed amount for a year paid incrementally at regular intervals.

      Waged does not have to be paid weekly in past I had hourly paid jobs that have been paid monthly and even fortnightly. Salaried is normally in my experience paid monthly but not always, one of my past employers paid 4 weekly so 13 pay packets a year.

      BTW the number of working days in a year can vary by 2 if your working week is Monday to Friday, 2024 has 2 more working days than 2023.

      1. STOP_FORTH Silver badge

        It's more complicated than that

        At least two countries (South Korea is one, can't recall the other) have some companies that pay monthly paid employees 1/13 of their annual salary for January to November. You then get 2/13 of your salary to help out with end of year expenditure.

    5. Cliffwilliams44 Silver badge

      Re: Time to go

      If you pay salary employees people biweekly normally there are 26 pay periods in a year.

      Every 4 or so leap years you end up with 27. Of the 23 years I've worked for my employer this has never been a problem until one bean counter realized that we would be paying salary people 1 extra pay period. They devised a plan to reduce every pay amount so that the annual amount would match the salary. The backlash was deafening!

      The simple answer is to pay people semi-monthly but our payroll software can't do that! It can only pay people hourly in periods divisible by 1 week. (i.e. weekly or biweekly). We are using one of the largest financial programs in the world.

      1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        Re: Time to go

        I remember a few years ago the UK Benefits Agency had kittens when they hadn't accounted for there being two Easters in their accounting year, April the somethingth 20xx and March the somethingth 20xx+1.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Just one of those thing /s

    "just one of those things that caused payment software to have a glitch."

    Just who the f~1 are they getting to write their software?

    Unix Time starts counting from Jan 01 1970

    Windows File Time starts counting from Jan 01 1601

    ----------------

    Python Script to test if leap year is handled correctly ..

    ----------------

    from datetime import datetime, timedelta

    # Create a datetime object for February 28th, 2020 (leap year)

    date = datetime(2020, 2, 28)

    # Add one day to the date

    next_day = date + timedelta(days=1)

    # Print the result

    print(next_day)

    1. ldo Silver badge

      Re: Python Script to test if leap year is handled correctly

      calendar.isleap(year)

    2. Dagg Silver badge

      Re: Just one of those thing /s

      Just who the f~1 are they getting to write their software?

      Exactly! When I did my compsci degree I remember one of the first year assignments was a date calculator and it had to manage leap years. Pay peanuts get monkeys...

      I'm just gobsmaked as to how anyone could make this mistake!

  13. Joe Gurman

    For some of us, no.

    "We have all that still to look forward to" in 2038.

    Not all of us. I expect to have no more computer time or any other kind of problems by then.

    "OK Boomer" you may well say, but sometimes it's reassuring not to have to worry about things. "Right. We can just cross that one off the list."

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: For some of us, no.

      I'll probably still be around but I'm not entirely sure my mind will be.

      (child of a boomer, so have an upvote)

      1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

        Re: For some of us, no.

        My systems are fine until (digs into memory) 2107.

        1. heyrick Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: For some of us, no.

          Econet timestamps will outlive the both of us.

  14. Wiretrip

    Y2KY jelly

    ...helps fit 4 digits in a space with only room for 2.

  15. Plest Silver badge
    Facepalm

    That's just career-ending embarassing!

    Sorry but if I was one of the engineers who worked on those fuel pump's software I'd be so ashamed, I'd certainly start looking for a new career as software development isn't your thing if you can't even work within standard calendars.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: That's just career-ending embarassing!

      Not to mention that this must be a fairly new bit of software or at least has a had a major update in the last four years. I suspect the latter since it seems to be being used across a fairly wide range of customers. But either way, someone wrote or updated those date functions in the last four years or they'd have already been hit by it and fixed it in 2020.

    2. Antron Argaiv Silver badge

      Re: That's just career-ending embarassing!

      IIRC, the correct way to avoid embarrassment is to use the built in library routines of your chosen language. That way, any errors aren't your fault, but the fault of the library developer.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: That's just career-ending embarassing!

        Exactly. C# has TimeSpan. Java apparently has Period(). C++ appears to have std::time_point.

  16. Gene Cash Silver badge

    BBC article

    The BBC had an article about "leaplings" and many of them complained about not being able to enter their correct birth date into many forms

    "When taking out a new phone contract, she failed the credit check because 29 February didn't appear as a date on the system. "

    "the dropdown boxes on online forms will only list 28 days for February"

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68404617

    1. heyrick Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: BBC article

      It's okay, AI will make it all better...

    2. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      Re: BBC article

      If you were born on February 29th, could you have two birthdays in each non-leap year? The day after 28th Feb and the day before 1st march?

    3. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: BBC article

      She's lucky. Non-leaplings don't discover the company is clueless until after they've signed up.

  17. DS999 Silver badge
    Trollface

    You know how certain businesses

    Will send you birthday greetings each year for good customer relationships (i.e. local businesses like dentists, auto shops, restaurants)

    Or maybe that's just a US thing. Anyway, I receive a few around my birthday each year. I have a friend born on Feb. 29th, and she once said she only gets those things every four years. Because her "birthday" doesn't come up on those systems the other three years!

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How many days in a leap year

    One of my investment portfolios has a poor web interface, especially when searching for documents: date ranges are impossible to choose if they stretch outside two calendar months. To work around this (so they must be aware people need to) they offer some presets: last three months, last six months and last twelve months. This morning, I needed to use "last twelve months", and it dutifully set the range to 01/03/2023 to 29/02/2024. Great! It worked! So I click "OK" and get "Error - date ranges of more than 365 days are not allowed".

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Re: How many days in a leap year

      And presumably it will continue to fail for the next 12 months.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In my dark days in the mid-90's in College doing some obligatory web design course, I ran into this exact bug. Pushing random values into the National Express website; the user could select the 30th February or 31st September. This would of course promptly crash the form.

    I think the point being that these organisations just don't care if it works. Slapped together, untested, on the cheap by some outsourced outfit. Dick Jones and his ED-209 programme ala Robocop is out in full force.

    Considering that ideas presented in said film were supposed to be deeply satirical, that so much of it is now in fact reality...

    One day, Starship Troopers will be considered a visionary film too, one suspects. For now, cult following will have to suffice!

    1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

      Do you want to know more?

  20. STOP_FORTH Silver badge

    Temporary temporal problem

    In about 4 million years leap days will no longer be necessary.

    Actually, I only came here to complain about you stripping me of my silver status.

    Can anyone suggest an unpopular sport for me to try at the next Olympics? Obviously, if there are fewer competitors I'll have more chance of winning, given that there isn't much time left for me to train. Gold would be good, but I'd settle for Silver.

    It's a shame that posting snarky comments on the Internet isn't an Olympic sport yet.

    1. jake Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: Temporary temporal problem

      You need to post 100 times in the past year to get Bronze.

      On top of that, you'll need 2,000 upvotes to get Silver.

      You already have the 2,000 upvotes, so I suspect that if you "test" post 100 times to a junk thread over in the user forums, you'll be silver again. Well, 99 times ... you've already posted once. The user forums are kind of hard to find these days, so here ya go:

      https://forums.theregister.com/section/user/

      Welcome back. Have a beer :-)

      1. STOP_FORTH Silver badge

        Re: Temporary temporal problem

        Well, that would be cheating! I worked quite hard at getting Silver in the shortest possible time. (Didn't quite manage, took over a year.)

        Thanks, I'll have a think about it.

        Only 98 posts to go now.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Temporary temporal problem

          Or just post. It's not like the badges mean anything ... We already know who you are.

          Badges? We don' need no steenkeen badges!

      2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

        Re: post 100 times to a junk thread over in the user forums

        No need. Just post a throw away comment in a thread about Brexit and that will keep you busy for a while...

        1. STOP_FORTH Silver badge

          Re: post 100 times to a junk thread over in the user forums

          Too easy!

  21. WrenM
    Facepalm

    It's a matter of priority

    It is a big issue on the day.

    A temporary workaround is issued.

    The permanent fix task goes in the work backlog...

    Then descends the priority list - well, there are another 4 years to get it fixed!

    In 4 years time, it fails again.

    ... and no one is left in the tech team or the business stream who even remembers.

    Been there.

  22. MichaelGordon

    So much new code?

    What I find interesting about this story is that it implies there's either a huge amount of new code out there that's never had to live through a February 29th, or a huge amount of code that didn't get fixed the last time this happened.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So much new code?

      Or there is a commonly used but incorrect library somewhere on t'net that has been added/updated in the last 4 years.

    2. david 12 Silver badge

      Re: So much new code?

      a huge amount of new code out there

      It will be an error in the date validation code in an interface. By report it's a problem with the credit card interface. Date calculations within a program are pretty much a solved problem, but interfaces between disparate systems, using 3rd-party channel definitions, are not a solved problem, so you have validation applied at the interface. And yes, there is still a lot of new code being written for applications connecting to backends over interfaces. The whole IOT space is new, and the BTB space is still evolving.

      1. Dagg Silver badge

        Re: So much new code?

        but interfaces between disparate systems

        You could be on to something! The EFTPOS interface ISO8583 or equivalent should not be a problem as other things would have stopped as well. But I'm interested in the firmware in the actual pump. Strange that it just happened this leap year and not last leap year...

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    time zones

    The date/time problem I remember falling over, many years ago, is that not all time zone offsets are whole numbers of hours...

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: time zones

      See the tz database, sometimes called zoneinfo.

      A quick look shows a pretty good rundown at the always suspect wiki:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hey Sophos, how was it for you?

    Yes, looking at you Sophos!

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Hey Sophos, how was it for you?

      Sophos still exists?

      Huh. Who knew.

  25. martinusher Silver badge

    What problems?

    Everything in our house worked just fine yesterday. A lot of the bits and pieces are quite old so even survived the 2000 non-leap.

  26. steviebuk Silver badge

    1999 cause I can't spell Millenium

    So they always say the Millenium Bug was nothing, that it was hyped. I always said its because stuff was fixed before it. Doesn't this prove it could or would of been an issue if nothing had been done?

    Funny, boring story is I was still in college in 1999, just finishing a HND and I never remember anyone mentioning Y2K to us. So when my brother in law asked me a quiz question at the time that was in the paper I knew nothing about it. Don't know why I missed it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 1999 cause I can't spell Millenium

      My place were all over it, mostly because half the hardware they had needed BIOS updates to keep working. Those old 486s with poorly coded BIOS were soldiered hard and long!

      I'm sure some of the contractors of the era took the pish with Y2K bug threats; but there were genuinely places and patches that needed to be done. I'd say it's only in the last couple years with the attention moving onto cyber security that BIOS updates are back on the radar of many operators. IME and AGESA firmware being so complex and likely sources of exploits alone being the obvious examples of why you do actually need to stay on top of them.

    2. jake Silver badge

      Re: 1999 cause I can't spell Millenium

      "Don't know why I missed it."

      In the 2 years leading up to 2000, I got paid an awful lot of money re-certifying stuff that I had already certified to be Y2K compliant some 10-20 years earlier. Same for the embedded guys & gals. By the time 2000 came around, most of the hard work was had been done a decade or more in the past ... the re-certification was pure management bullshit, so they could be seen as doing something ... anything! ... useful during the beginning of the dot-bomb bubble.

      Look for similar bullshit/misdirection leading up to 2038 ... despite the fact that all of the important systems that would be affected either already have been, or can easily be modified, making to so-called"problem" non-existent. (Certain hardware that was stupidly hard-coded being the exception, but most of that will probably be landfill by then anyway.)

      1. david 12 Silver badge

        Re: 1999 cause I can't spell Millenium

        My dad was offered a bunch of money to certify an expensive business-critical system. He was already too old for that shit: he explained to them that, if the system was not Y2K compliant, the dates printed on the optional paper copies they didn't print would be incorrect, and since they didn't care about that, they could just wait and see.

    3. Dagg Silver badge

      Re: 1999 cause I can't spell Millenium

      The millennium bug wasn't nothing. I worked my butt off replacing a banking package that wasn't Y2K compliant. Got a shit load of frequent flier points enough for a round the world with accommodation for two people.

      It didn't happen because a load of people did a load of work.

  27. Bebu
    Headmaster

    Highly recommended

    One of my treasures:

    Calendrical Calculations

    Nachum Dershowitz and Edward M. Reingold

    Cambridge University Press, 1997

    First edition but there are a few later editions which would have enlarged on this fascinating topic. Mine came with a cdrom with scheme(lisp) code implementing the book's calculations.

    I think the Hobbits had the best calendar - something like 12 months each of 30 days and get blotto for the extra five days - bit like Xmas - NY. Over time probably over-observe the blotto period by the odd day or so that it averages out 5.25 days per year.

    The first day of the Hobbit new year started on the same day of the week so calendars and diaries were reusable. :)

  28. Bitbeisser

    How can some software, in the year 2024, not properly account for the additional day in a leap year. The rules for when there is a February 29th added (or not) exist for several hundreds of years, well before there was even a remote inkling of computers around.

    It just comes to show that there are far too many "programmers" around these days that might know about all the latest paradigms and other fluff in programming, but have lost all connection to real world problems...

    1. jake Silver badge

      "It just comes to show that there are far too many "programmers" around these days that might know about all the latest paradigms and other fluff in programming, but have lost all connection to real world problems..."

      Well, what do you expect when Management in the Corporate World is firing old programmers and hiring wet-behind-the-ears new graduates[0] with absolutely zero street smarts? Throw in so-called "DevOps" and its insistence that QA can be dispensed with (as a money saving measure, don'tchaknow) along with Marketing's attitude of "just ship it, we don't care if it's useful to anybody, some schmuck will buy it!" and Bob's your Auntie.

      The proverbial thinking man can probably see that it's only going to get worse before it gets better ... and a techie with an entrepreneurial bent can undoubtedly figure out how to profit from this shortsightedness on the part of marketing and management.

      [0] Round about 2000 I started interviewing "programmers" fresh out of school who didn't know what the heap and the stack are (much less how the compiler uses them) on a fairly regular basis. Nowadays it's normal for the youngsters to have many gaps of that nature in their education. I fear we are losing something very important that is going to prove to be almost impossible to get back.

      1. STOP_FORTH Silver badge

        Interview question

        Try asking them about microcode!

        Maybe everyone should be forced to code in something low-level for a year or two.

        START _FORTH!

    2. J.G.Harston Silver badge

      Hear Hear! Back in 1990ish I'd written 6502 code that correctly converted dates to days-from-400year-epoch (which then gives you day-of-week by MOD'ing by 7), and increment-this-date-to-next, all working. (Converted it to PDP11 a while back). Being a finite and managable set of inputs, it was easy enough to code some scafford to run through the entire set and check the output was correct. Dunt people do testing today? Or even basic sums?

    3. gnasher729 Silver badge

      Getting it right is easy. Figuring out what you need to get right is hard. Someone reported their software calculated “average revenue for the last 5 years” and failed on Feb 29th in leap years because “5 years before today” didn’t exist.

      Now imagine they wanted “average revenue for the last four years”. The difference is that the date “four years before today” will always exist until Feb 29th 2104. That’s the first time when “for years before a leap year” is not a leap year.

  29. -tim
    Pint

    Thank you for all the birthday greetings

    Long ago in the before times, I set up a facebook account. They insisted on a birthday but I didn't trust them so I used the 29th on an odd year.

    /beer for all the facebook friends who forgot the important part

  30. STOP_FORTH Silver badge
    Alien

    A modest proposal

    All computer time systems and clocks should use MJD and UTC internally.

    Convert to local solar/lunar calendar and timezone for the meatsacks.

    You know you coding monkeys can't really cope with non-integers.

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