From: Kyle Schmitt <kyleaschmitt@...>
Date: 2008-12-12T04:26:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Out of range on Dates beyond 2038/01/19

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 6:58 AM, Fernando Guillen
<fguillen.mail@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi people,
>
> I'd just found this issue trying to parse a date:
>
>>> Time.local(2038, 1, 19)
> => Tue Jan 19 00:00:00 +0100 2038
>>> Time.local(2038, 1, 20)
> ArgumentError: time out of range
>  from (irb):33:in `local'
>  from (irb):33
>
> It looks like Time class is not available to manage dates bigger than
> 2038/01/19.
>
> I have found this conversation:
>
> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/190564
It's not a ruby bug per say, it's a general problem that 32bit systems
have with unix time.  Unix time is stored in seconds since the epoch,
in a native unsigned integer, which on most systems is 32 bits.  On
64bit systems, this obviously isn't a problem.

See the link for details.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem