SANS has highlighted future dates that may impact computing. New standards would most likely address these design issues:
Milestone dates ahead - Affecting future computers
http://blogs.sans.org/appsecstreetfighter/2009/10/29/the-day-the-world-will-end/
QUOTE: With a new movie coming out about how the world will end with the (supposed) end of the Mayan calender, I figured it would be nice to get a list of software related “end of calender” issues:
Dec. 31st 1999, 23:59:59 GMT -- The famous Y2k issue. We made it… (so far)
Dec. 21, 2012 -- end of Mayan calendar. Just listed here because everybody is talking about it. Should not affect software (other then the fact that the world will end that day).
Jan. 19th 2038, 03:14:07 GMT -- The end of the Unix epoch. Unix uses a 32 it signed number to express time. The last date that can be expressed using unix time is Jan 19th 2038. After that… who knows? This can already be a problem. Imagine you are a bank and handing out 30 year mortgages?
Dec. 31st 9999, 23:59:59 GMT -- The end of 4 digit years. Well, we got a while until that will happen.