ApocalyPS3: Party like it's 1999

While I was getting my PS3 fixed, the guy who repaired it popped in Uncharted to show me that he had, indeed, fixed the problem. The PS3 loaded the blu-ray and the game so I thought everything was fine. I did notice two things that were out of the ordinary...

1. There was an error message on the screen when the game loaded up. But I thought that was due to the fact that he had ejected the game disc while the game was loading.
2. The date was wrong. It read December 31, 1999. But I thought that was due to the fact that he had just opened up the console and inadvertently reset the clock.

I found out later, after some quick internet research, that what I was experiencing was symptomatic of a larger problem with older PS3s. A hardware bug had crippled people's ability to log into the Playstation Network and play games both online and offline. An internal clock error had apparently miscalculated the date and thought it was February 29, 2010. Which you know, if you own a calendar or can do simple math, that date doesn't exist. And so did the PS3s to some degree because they couldn't handle the invalid date and went kablooey. Even though the problem was widespread, it was no consolation (if you'll forgive the unintended pun)... I wanted to play my PS3.

Haven't we learned anything from Y2K? Wasn't the whole half a decade in the mid-90s leading up to the year 2000 enough to warn us of the perils incorrect date calculations? (Though I shudder to think how many of you out there aren't old enough to realize how big of a deal this was back in the day...) The Playstation 3 was released in 2006, a full 6 years after Y2K, you'd think that someone somewhere would have seen this coming. But the PS3 isn't alone in its date confusion, Sony's console rival Microsoft had issues with their portable media player, the Zune, at the beginning of 2009 apparently because of the same leap year miscalulcation. Ironically, Sony and Microsoft's solutions were similar... essentially, do nothing and wait for the problem to resolve itself.

Luckily, the problem did resolve itself the next day and luckily, it wasn't that big of a problem to begin with. I mean, a few million PS3 users can't play Uncharted 2 for a day? It really sucks, especially if you're Sony, but in the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal just a minor inconvenience. But it makes me wonder what else is on the horizon?