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Am I Alone After the World Collapsed?!?
My trusty Linux box seems to be working. No nuclear-looking glow from Washington DC (20 miles South of me). Guess all that's left to do is drink up the the stock of bourbon whiskey I accumulated "just in case."
No word from Holland, Michigan yet, but I suppose if the Midwest had been nuked or otherwise returned to the stone age, somebody would have submitted it by now, so I guess CmdrTaco, Hemos, CowboyNeal and the other Geek Compound denizens are okay (aside from possible massive hangovers, but you didn't hear that from me, oh no no no...)
So here we are in Y2K, preparing to face a crisis The Mainstream Media hasn't hardly mentioned: The Wetware Rollover Bug!
Do you have any idea how many people are going to write the wrong date on checks and other documents for (at least) the next month or two?
A frightening thought!
But Happy New Year anyway. ;-)
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
(on behalf of sleeping friends and co-workers everywhere.)
First Post of First Article of the Millennium! or something.
God Fucking Damnit
Now if sites like www.y2ksurvive.com would only get rm -rf'd. =)
It's 1:05 PM here in Finland and everything seems to be OK. No power outtages, no melted nuclear reactors, even network works.
Amazing. Happy new year.
Joanna
as long as natalie portman is ok, i can't imagine what else really matters.
thank you.
Now let's see what kind of loser would be on the computer right after midnight instead of at some party... whoops, that would be me.
[gildaradner] Nevermind. [/gildaradner]
--Tom
Tom Geller
All systems are go here. Happy new year everyone.
kafer.
Red Hot Chili Peppers and 311 rocked the LA Forum into the 2g!
...and I feel fine.
/. folks. Hope all of your geekery is successful in the near and distant future.
A much better song to usher in the 2000s than Prince's stupid "1999", in my opinion.
Now that the afterlife has started for pretty much the whole world, things don't feel much different, but there's something downright weird about saying farewell to the 19xxs. It's like a door has closed. Hopefully, another one has opened as well.
Best wishes you
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I was at a new years party and one of the other geeks there needed to log into the systems at his work. So he fires up his laptop (provided by work). Jan 4th, 1980... It even had a Y2K ready sticker on it. We all had a bit of a laugh. As for the systems at work, all up and running fine. They were all UNIX boxes of one sort or another.
On the way home I went past one stoplight that was out. Don't know if it was Y2K related or not.
Only joking...
don't stop drinking.
Actually I've seen a couple of badly programmed Perl scripts around the world (They at first displayed the year in a two digit format, '99' became -> '100'), looks kindof funny :)
1-1-100
12:16 in Sweden and all is OK. :-) Except for a hell of a lot of snow that is.
I suppose that, given the amount of people that, whether they would really admit it or not, actually thought something momentous would happen, this might actually have been the end of the world as we knew it. Maybe now people will really start to think in the long term. A victory for Danny Hillis. Either way, it is now 3:18 in Los Angeles, and we're all still here. Happy new year, everybody.
-- I'll be more enthusiastic about thinking outside the box when there's evidence of thinking going on inside it.
Over here in Australia, I woke up in the early afternoon, (and was surprised to see that my old Sparcstation IPX _did_ rollover to 2000 correctly)... I was then even more surprised to see that no new articles had appeared on slashdot for hours. Everything was fine here... though I heard a rumour about some troubles with Japan's nuclear reactors...
I'm wondering how the wacko cults are handling this...the world hasn't ended. Armageddon hasn't happened.
:)
And I still can't believe that my apartment managers decided do shut down the elevator before midnight "To show that management is prepared for Y2K".
Please! In this supposed time and age, why do people insist on believing outright fallacies...UFO's, alien abductions, the Aurora Project , Y2K bug, armageddon, demons, virgin Mary visions...the list goes on and on.
What will be the new demons of the next century? Solar flares wiping out life on Earth? The conjunction of the planets coming, I believe, in May, causing major natural catastrophies (like, all the volcanoes on Earth erupting at once...talk about extra fibre in your diet!). Or maybe there'll be a widespread and deadly flu epidemic...Or perhaps the world will be destroyed sometime in 2040 like some nostradamus enthusiasts believe.
Choose your poison...but hey, maybe it'll make you rich!
At any rate, hear's a toast to those of us who aren't hiding in makeshift bunkers!
May this year be the Year of the Space Moose!
;)
Believe with me, my saplings.
A nuclear power plant in Japan had a radiation monitor fail shortly after midnight. CNN story here. No leaks or anything, just a failed monitor. They not certain if it was Y2K related or if the timing was just coincidence.
Has anyone heard any reports from places like Iraq which had allegedly done no Y2K preparation at all?
Ideology is for ideots.
This sucks! I thought the world was going to end.
now i have to find some way to explain to my boss that i didn't really mean those things i said to him last year. Hmmm... I really wish i hadn't quit my job, and invested all my money in 2 ply toilet paper. Oh well, i will figure something out by monday...
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
Funny thing is, everybody expected a worst-case-scenario.
Not here in Europe we didn't. Millennium paranoia (stockpiling water, food, guns & ammo etc) seems to be almost uniquely an American phenomenon.
British concerns are really more or less limited to the effects upon business. Apart from that I guess we're only expecting some minor inconveniences over the next couple of months.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
As I was on my way to look for happenings of this kind I stepped over heise's newsticker. They reported that two japanese nuclear powers plant seemed to have some Y2K-problems. Although they were (according to japanese officials) not really threatening it worries me to see people pretending to be Y2K-ready and then really having some major problems!
to the rest of the IT industry - we pulled it off! The biggest scam of the last millenium!
We knew all along there was nothing to worry about. Most programmers have thought they were working in 2001 for the past twenty years anyway.
We worried the banks, we scared Wall Street witless, we even joined forces with Micro$oft to spread the word of doom.
We told the suits-that-hold-the-purse-strings that all our computers needed replacing immediately, when we weren't due for a real upgrade for another 18 months.
We convinced everyone that IT staff would need to be paid extra for millenium cover, but knew all along we wouldn't get a single serious call.
We got all the braindead Windows@Home users to rush out to their nearest PC stores to replace perfectly good 166mmx's, and to stock up with a years supply of tinned beans on their way home - simultaneously bringing down the prices of PC's and geek-food ATST!
In short, we win!
insignificant sig
I rebooted my Win98SE box about 2am local time (GMT) and it promptly refused to go back into windows (gets stuck at the waving flag boot logo). My motherboard and BIOS are supposed to be fully Y2K compliant (and DOS boots OK anyway), and the Microsoft Y2K page doesn't list *any* known problems at all. And my Linux box which has the same Aopen AX59Pro (rev1.0) motherboard in it, is still going strong.
:o(
So, either Win98SE *does* have a fatal Y2K bug and Microsoft just aren't talking...or else I've been hit by one of those Y2K viruses. I *did* have Norton Antivirus on my system a few months ago but was forced to remove it because of the stability problems it seemed to be causing
Catch 22 eh?
I'm running that old NAV from the rescue disks right now. It's been going for about 9 hours now and still hasn't found anything. But they are not exactly up-to-date anyway.
Has anyone experienced any similar problems? And does anyone just happen to have, handily downloadable from their home page, a set of NAV rescue floppy images with up-to-date virus defs? Pleeeeeease?
Happy new year everybody. Even Microsoft.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I'm sorry to say that the world did end for me. My computer crashed horribly, which released the safeties on the small nuclear arsenal I keep in my dorm room...the arms race between myself and a suitemate escalated, and both of us were obliterated by retaliatory fire. Our rooms are heaps of glowing ash, and we can only assume that our tragedy was repeated on a large scale with the nuclear destruction of most of the inhabited cities of the world.
Well.. Whilst you all may be rejoicing over the survival of your linux boxen etc.. Down here in australia things havent gone so well..
/. yet :(
As you know we were one of the first countries to go through the rollover, and whilst your media was preparing to televise and stream your parties, they seemed to neglect the tremendous chaos that was going on down under.
As the clock approached midnight, i was at a friends apartment for an intimate gathering, and we had the tv on with a big display counting down.
00:05
00:04
00:03
00:02
00:01
00:00
Cheers everywhere from the drug induced gathering, except for one guy who had his watch upside-down and was convived we still had 6 hours to go.
Anyway, my point is that nothing went wrong during the actual rollover, but during the next few hours things started failing... the first thing i noticed was the some street lamps, and some shopfront lighting dimming. I was drunk, so i didnt take much notice of it, but in retrospect it was the beginning of the end.
As people crammed on the special 24 hour public transport, some trams started to fail. Most people figured the heavy load at 3am was stressing the system, and although mentioned briefly over the city-wide PA, the announcers were cautious to stress that this was not Y2K related.
I came home at around 4am, between 2 parties to have a quick shower, and check slashdot.. Just wanted to see how the world was faring up against this genormous evil that was facing the computers.
Slashdot didnt have much to say, nor did my computer.. I switched it on, heard the HDD start spinning, and jumped into the shower whilst my pc booted. I got out of the shower to find that my computer (which i was quite sure was Y2K compliant) was just booting, spinning the HDD, and rebooting.. I was a bit baffled and went to turn up my dim lights... Although when i got to the switch, they were already on full, but only shining half..
This scenario was not new to me, we have a power pole with a transformer on it just outside my window, and every now and then a possum manages to fry himself on the terminals and gives us a brown-out. So i popped outside, expecting to see a fried carcass.. But it was hard to see, all the street lights were out... Now that was fscked up, because the street lights run on a different grid in out street. Some serious shit was going down.
Anyway, i stayed at home for the next few hours, phones were dead, and lights were dead.
To cut a long story short, its 10:30PM here, and all the computers are still screwed, and we are without power.
I havent even been able to see
I think im gonna start suffering withdrawal symptoms soon
Um, doesn't the millennium start in 2001 ?
PS: my websites down, i forgot to pay the DNS fee.. Any windows geek wanna pay it for me ??
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I bet there's quite a few people down in bunkers in Montana and other places who are feeling a tad foolish right now.
Hey guys, you can come out now. No, we are are not radioactive zombies who want to eat your brains.
Honest.
(heh heh)
Ideology is for ideots.
All is well in Puget Sound. You could hear the sounds of rebooting in Redmond miles away.
Even though they cancelled the Space Needle party, the crowd in Pioneer Square just outside Zazu was an acceptable substitute. (not to mention the 3 or 4 SPD officers stationed just outside each bar)
The funny thing was, since there wasnt a giant clock to watch, you had this huge mob of people standing around looking at the their watches/pagers/cell phones, waiting for the big moment.
As far as rioting goes -- there wasn't any at all where I was. The only injury I sustained was getting stuck in the leg by some guy's lit cigar.
I'm goint to start dating my checks January ##, 0 or even 1900 just to see if it causes an issue..
"One of these days... milkshake... BOOM!!!!" - emb
so you truly are awaiting the new millenium
-sometimes the majority only means that all the fools are on the same side
Happy 19100 :-)
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The amergaddon people are now saying that it will be a slow death - technology will kill us within a few years, not a sudden fiery death on 1/1/100. Notice they said that on the 1/1/2000 paper, not before.
I always did chuckle when their newsletters asked for renewal submissions for after the new year.
Keep bringing on the beer, I say!
I heard on the news that here in sweden the problems were. 1. A retierment home's alarm system went ded. 2. Am alarm centre went ded. Two verry similar problems. The same manufakturer? How is that last word speled?
I'm wondering how the wacko cults are handling this...the world hasn't ended. Armageddon hasn't happened.
Well quite a few will be trying to figure out what to do with a two year supply of canned beans. Perhaps a few will kill themselves to escape the embaressment of being so paniced about the biggest non-event of the milennium. But I figure most will just find some excuse about how the NWO canceled their evil(tm) plans because the nutbars were too ready for them, or some such nonsense.
On the up side, we should see slashed prices on generators. Giving us all a great way to keep our machines up durring power outages.
Hmm.... roping y2k into all those others is really casting yer net too wide.
:-)
y2k is a real problem, turned into a surreal media frenzy.
the story resonated and gave justification to any loon's cockamamy (sp) reason for why the universe will implode on y2k.
The formula goes: Problem + Media = Random Number Generator
Wonder if there's a bit of chaos theory in there... try to predict how the media will *report* the problem to viewers... as compared to the actual nature of the problem.... can't be done
Well, I just logged into the network at work and discovered that the NT server is locked up. All the Linux boxes are still humming along!
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
We here at Louisiana State University have used the Y2K bug to propel us much further beyond other institutions.. In fact our Web page proudly proclaims the date a good 190000 years ahead of the rest of the world. Thank god i'm not in computer science here.
www.lsu.edu
I am that that is, not that that is not, that is.
This keeps getting asked but the reason is purely historical. The Romans had no concept of the number zero so the first year after Jesus of Nazareth's birth was assigned the number 1. You could argue that the first day of a month is not day 0 however you dont go around saying the first day of July is June 30th now do you ;)
God Fucking Damnit
<useless comment>
I love that book! It reintroduced me to something that American society is slowly forgetting to teach its youth... SKEPTICISM!!
</useless comment>
Actually, you can teach a donkey how to sing, but he will still sound like an ass...
--
Kir
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
...except my little alarm clock: Casio Digital Light Clock TCL-100 stubbornly shows date as
12.31
Anybody else out there with the same model by chance? :)
The only trouble so far. Did not have to make a door stop out of my Palm IIIx, my Linux box is humming away peacefully... Weather is great: it is sunny and still...
--AP
UF's first strip for this new Millennium (i feel cheap just for saying that...) seems to be encrypted is some way, or just plain mixed up...(also check the copyright year-left side of middle frame, pretty subtle...)
Here's what i can figure out so far (pretty difficult since Pitr is known to have, well, "unaurthodoex" grammer: Encrypted=Decrypted
L=Y
X=K
(i assume he's saying Y2K...)
N=A,I
V=I,A
if G=S -> B=E
if G=T -> B=O
F=S (?)
QVQ is said twice...
Any thoughts?
To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish. ---Euripides
Our whole year system is based on Creation being on 4000 BC and the world was meant to end on 1000AD. Jesus was recorded to be born on 4BC.
Instead of recording years when some Roman religious nuts decided to we should count the date as seconds from when Unix was created.
Also lets be good C programmers and say the new millienium starts on 2000 not 2001.
It's turtles all the way down.
damn /. won't let me post an empty reply!
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
"Oh, no! The world hasn't ended! Oh, wait...silly us...the new millennium isn't until next year. Keep preaching it, brothers!"
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Generally speaking when Anglicizing words K's are replaced with C's. Stupid, I know but English is a pretty stupid and difficult language.
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
i discovered that webalizer 1.22 went from 1299 to 010 ...
No problem with Netscape on Linux.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
OK, I wasn't near a computer to type this before, but as I'm visiting my friend in Germany, we had an ubercelebration and we had it first here! WOOOOO! Happy New Year's all! :: Hail Eris!
--
BlackHat Linux 6.66 (Discordia)
Dan Kissam e-mail: teeheehee@yahoo.com
"We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."
Schmendrick the Magician
And unfortunately, this is from my brother who's a Lutheran Pastor (ELCA unfortunately). He's way too damn liberal for me and I wish he would just stick to AD. (Ano Domini I belive (sp?))
rodent...
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
In fact the world did end, this is just a reasonable duplicate created by the producers at hollywood. Unfortunately they forgot the plotline, concentrating solely on the special effects, so this gets a big two thumbs down by me.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I have to go to work this morning, just to check everything out.
Management decided to take all computer systems down: the servers, the digital phone network, the elevators (even though the building was locked yesterday afternoon), and the electroninc locks on the doors.
Obviously nothing went wrong, I have dialed into the server that I didn't bring down and it is fine. So, I get a day of comp time for going in and playing Unreal Tournament.
Y2K: The biggest hoax ever.
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
Sure enough, the bios sez 01-01-2100. :-(
So I assume my PC is not Y2K1 compliant.
Apart from that I heaven't heard of any problems. I even did some online banking (pay my bills) w/o a hitch. Okay, the streets seem a bit duller than on other saturdays, the eyes are a bit redder and the heads by some degrees more tilted towards one or the other side.
So, IT industry, the Y2K Goldrush/hype/hoax is over. Now concentrate on IPV6 and your fridge not getting that beer for with the tacos because the system ran out of IP addresses.
What could panick the world more: no money on the teller or no beer in the refrigerator? Whoaaah!
(This, of course, applies only to Zurich, Switzerland)
Use The Source, Luke!
I hang out on a message board about urban legends, we debunk them and generally ridicule all people who get suckered by them. You know, people like /. that post stupid things like the post office taxing email...
Believing in a global conspiracy to cover up Y2K problems is monumentally stupid.
Anyway, I work in state government. If the levels of organization at this level is any indication of governmental organizational skills, I seriously doubt the existence of a global Y2K cover-up conspiracy.
Further, it is patently stupid to believe that the media would willingly pass up what they would undoubtedly trump up as "the story of the millennium!" Therefore, the cover-up would have to be with all governments working together to keep things quiet...that just ain't gonna happen. Hell, Yeltsin just resigned. They don't stay in one place long enough to construct a global cover-up!
So, I'd just like to remind you that there are other television programs besides the X-Files.
They *WANT* to report the world has ended. As soon as anything went wrong, the question was asked, "Is this the y2k bug?". The only *major* y2k-bug event I've heard of is the monitoring system in the nuke plant in japan, but last time I checked, "Its currently unknown wether this was caused by the y2k bug, and wether any further nuclear power plants will suffer similar problems in the future"...
One thing I did find funny was Mercury Power (a power provider here in NZ) had ads weeks before the date, "There WILL be a power outtage in New Zealand on Jan 1 2000, just like there is one almost every day. More often that not, its caused by this: ***insert picture of car slaming into power poll***. Drive safe these holidays."
Well, they were right, in Ottago, a drunk driver plowed into a power poll last night, and cause a 30 min outtage. Whats strange is the media were still saying its unknown if it was caused by the y2k bug AFTER it was established as being a drunk driver.
Anyways, onto the topic again, New Zealand had the first millenium baby. (infact, I believe the first 3 or so). the very first one, a healthy baby boy was born 1 minute past midnight in Auckland. However, the family (good on them), are insisting on a media blackout. No reporters have been told any other information.
Now the media WANT this millenium baby, but can you imagine what will happen to the poor kid. Then again, it could also be a good thing, if the parents run into financial trouble later on in life, they can just come forward as the parents :).
As I've said to all those I've talked to, as I predicted, the bug will mostly be lots of small problems. We've already heard about a few, and come monday more will come, and come Mar 1, err, Feb 29, there will be more. Though I suspect most of the Feb 29 ones will be about wrong day of week for things. (You'll get paid one day later ;)). If we are very lucky, our banks will have problems, and you won't be charged for a days interest :)
I admit, at the last minute I grabbed a few empty big coke bottles and filled 'em with water, but it was all for naught. Maybe in the year 3000 when we are REALLY computer automated we'll have some big problems, till then, its time to ask
What am I gonna do with my .50calibre, the 10,000 rounds of ammo, and this damn bunker in my back yard?
Happy New Year, keep on coding, and don't forget. Y2k is over, we can now start prepending all dates with "20" and only storing 2 digits again!
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
The Linux Counter was only briefly affected by the change of the millenium, seeing a slowdown in traffic between the hours of 05:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT.
See the traffic statistics for details.
Geeks are a faithful bunch.....
Put together Y2K and "nuclear" problems and you get the two stupidest fears humans have today. Well, Y2K is gone now, but how could we possibly make people understand that nuclear power is one of the safest technologies we have?
MadEagle
My flatmate works in a big Accident and Emergency department serving Edinburgh and a whole lot of places around it. They've drafted in scads of extra doctors who haven't been seen in years. The extra doctors are all sitting around reminiscing about the way the hospital used to be, because people don't seem to be doing themselves injuries at the rate expected.
The total absence of Y2K related badness is almost suspicious...
--
Xenu loves you!
Having to go into work AGAIN....and test all the systems you know are still functional AGAIN, because you spent most of the summer prepping the whole damn infrastructure...paranoia in corporations is legendary, especially when fueled by the press, etc..
I envy anyone sleeping right now. What the hell, if I can blow out of this damn popcorn stand -- I've got a LAN party to go to today!
Fragging with UT/Q3A on new years day -- that's the REAL fun.
Thank all the gods of electrons that we have power today...ever see a geek with no coffee/espresso? It ain't pretty.
OH well -- enough rambling, I gotta go - assuming my ignition module wants to cooperate.
LoopBack
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Dungeon/547 6
Even as the (millenium - 1) rang in, the hype was in overdrive about the mostly clean rollover, like Aibo was supposed to catch digital rabies and go on a killing spree. Wow, the sparklers and fireworks are "Y2K Compliant!" So is most everything else on the planet, since "compliance" seems more like "liability immunity" than system robustness.
As usual, the verdict is already in before the opening arguments are complete. I guess the press needed something to do, and since there was no crisis, they reported the party as if it were a crisis. "The Y2k preparedness center has just received word that the entire town of Elko is out of beer. FEMA is on hand to deliver 6-packs to those left beerless by the disaster."
The main impact, if any, will be on date calculations (duh? DUH!), like receivables, payables, debt collection and/or writeoff, bill creation, payroll, etc...It will take some weeks (or the whole year) to shake out the remaining bugs. All of this "No problems, told you so," is a bunch of self-congratulatory feelgood bs for a splashy headline.
We'll need to watch the message boards for inside info on who got bitten, because no organization I can think of is going to stand up and say "Hey, we lost $xxx,000 this week because __________ didn't calculate dates correctly...."
All the best for you all!
Not here in Europe we didn't. Millennium paranoia (stockpiling water, food, guns & ammo etc) seems to be almost uniquely an American phenomenon.
I quite agree. As an Englishman living in New York I have found US citizen to be a very panicky lot. Case in point: various vague threats were made by the usual bunch of terrorist lunatics and the authorities actually sent out warnings to people to 'keep clear of crowds', and so on. In the UK the reaction to such threats is "business as usual", they are ignored. Perhaps it's because Britain has been numbed to it by years of IRA threats.
Good idea, I'm sure OS religious nuts make much better time systems than Roman religious nuts.
I am so happy the Y2K hype s finally over. I had to threaten to quit to get out of working...my boss is an MCSE with ZERO experience in this industry...so he wanted the whole IS staff on site. As my favorite pseudo writer Kilgore Trout would say "Tingaling you son of a bitch!"
/. READERS/POSTERS (and the rest of the world.)
I need to go nurse my headache now...
HAPPY NEW YEARS TO ALL THE
Jaxn
"Being alive is a crock of shit." --Kilgore Trout
Visit the Y2K Boredom webpage www.geocities.com/y2k_boredom This is for all the Tech support people working during the Y2K rollover. please submit your stories and pictures of what you did to keep the boredom from driving you crazy.
Am I the only one to find the smart asses who keep educating you about the fact that 'the new millennium starts in 2001' utterly annoying?
More annoying than Open Source Nathalie Portman and the grits troll ... and even worse: They exist IRL (In Real Life) insted of being limited to slashdot!
That's when the 32 bit Unix time will roll over. Pity, there will be some Linux boxes with 17000 days of uptime.
I know one french guy who was fucking freaking out. He 's in an apocalyptic cult, so ... But I know of many more merkins who are freaking out. Oh yeah they'r christians, that's why. When the god you believe in is depicted as such a rude and demanding one ("don't do this! don't do that! do this or you will burn in hell! do NOT look at naked women EVEN if I made you fancy it!"), you can understand it.
Now, Monday, I will give them a ring, "Hey, whassup dude? How's your apocalypse going?"
... but we can see it from here.
- John Mellencamp
Remeber, the Media has told us it could take weeks, even months before the full effect of the 'Millennium Bug' is known. We should hold onto John's words until around June.
Well, at least some hackers are still alive... or rather 2 of them are :) MTV 2 Europe has been given a little make over by some bored people without any firecrackers....
Georg
The phrase "Y2K bug" will take the place in the English language formerly occupied by "making a mountain out of a mole hill"...
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
First response to first post of new . . .
_________________________
On today's cartoon if you press "Previous" you get a non-existing page :-) Oops...
Buon Anno!
Keep 'em comming!
Visit:
http://go.to/y2kmistakes
To see screenshots of websites affected by Y2K.
PLS send screenshots or URLs to:
y2kmistakes@mail.com
Thanx!
According to that article I was relying on they surely were.
Don't get me wrong: I think nuclear power is the future but I hate seeing people playing things down a little bit too much.
BBC Radio One hit by
Y2K bug...
Updated Mother Shipton
fired by Register
Posted 01/01/0 9:08am
I think that it's particularly funny that it's an article making fun of other people's web pages. Maybe it's subtle humour?
North Dakota's gov. Ed Schafer:
"It was the biggest nonevent since Geraldo Rivera tried to open Al Capone's vault."
"ah well, i needed a can-opener, anyway."
:)
Fross
I found a sitting spider on my computer sometime around 12:30AM EST, so I named him the official millenium bug & celebrated by taking him to the porcelin water slide screw ride. When I pressed the metal handle to start the ride, I could tell he was having a great deal of fun celebrating his millennial status, swirling all around on the ride and everything.
But something happened which I did not forsee -- the drain at the bottom of the ride was about 1000 times his size, and there was no mesh for protection. It was a short celebration, but I'm sure he was happy, being the official bug & everything. But the way his legs were moving around, seemingly trying to scramble up the sides of the ride -- now in hindsight, I'm not sure.
On the up side, we should see slashed prices on generators. Giving us all a great way to keep our machines up durring power outages.
Good answer! I NEED one for this winter since we get power failures all the time normally (except last night when all was well). Should be pretty cheap!
JADBP
Am I the only one to find the smart asses who keep educating you about the fact that 'the new millennium starts in 2001' utterly annoying?
Them and the "millenium is spelled millennium" losers.
Apart from the mystery fog and old people sitting on their porches with shotguns (I actually saw a few...), everything's sane.
The mysterious, lung-burning "mystery fog" which I encountered was later determined to be a combination of smogfog and fireworks smoke.
What the people who announced forgot was that TIME STARTS AT ZERO! So today is the new millenium.
Anyone know how to prolong a hangover??
You think the world went through midnight without problems? Wrong!
:)
Actually, you are all dead already and this (a world where net access still works) is just your personal paradise where you have been placed. To demonstrate my point of being in geek paradise, watch for flying cars etc. coming this century.
Those darn computer technologists, taking over our airwaves and making TV movies and filling news broadcasts with Y2K stories.
Hey, The first words heard after midnight at the party I was at were:
... a really cutting review. And the later the publication date the better. That way we can honestly say that information about preparation for the Y2K non-event was available. I'm guessing from the lack of responses the last time I asked for recommendations on such a book, that none of us were reading any of them.
"The lights are on. We still have power!"
"Let's call Gary and congratulate him on a job well done."
Half the people at the party were on call last night. Not a single pager or cell phone went off. And better still, mine didn't start going off at 6 am today. It was a quiet night.
I still want to find the most alarmist Y2K book for a review in a few weeks. I want one that made lots of specific predictions of disasters. I want power outages and plane crashes and nuclear melt downs. I want to give some hysterical author and publisher who spouted gloom and doom to increase sales exactly what they deserve
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
According to Calendrical Calculations (a wonderful book on calandar conversion and computing with dates), the Jewish calendar starts when the world was created, which would be October 7, 3761 BC on the Julian calendar.
argh... Thank god these were my personal pages.
No Zen is good zen
The first one was published in 1952 (!!!). Things don't change that much.
Also you should visit the website for CSICOP, the organization that tries to spread sanity thoughout the world. Carl Sagan was a card carrying member of CSICOP.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Hopefully this will be a wakeup call to the government and businesses: don't use old-ass COBOL-based systems!
Who wants to bet that in 2031 the media is gonna ride the Y2034 bug?
not only are they a hefty investment, my grandmother was smart enough to get 20 printed in hers instead of 19! Saved her quite a few bucks I must say!
The hotel where I stayed last night stopped the elevators between 11:55 and 12:05 last night.
They said it was because of fear of power loss and NOT due to Y2K compliance issues with the elevator itself.
But.. still kinda too precautionary for me.
I personally turned on ALL my computers last night before I went out just to see if the logs would show anything funny.. (everything is working normal)..
I sat down to write checks for several bills this morning. The date field on my checks already has a "19" filled in for the first two digits of the year. I toyed briefly with the idea of just writing a "00" after this, so that the checks would all be dated a century ago.
Sometimes I get these Pounding Headaches, it feels as if my head is in a vice, and usually I find that's exactly the problem. Happy New Hundreds everyone.
spoo
while i agree that a lot of the y2k problem thing was a bit overhyped by
clueless media. (i guess more in u.s. then here in europe) but i think it
would be wrong to ridicule people who made careful but sane perpetrations
just in case... (all i did was buy one extra six pack of beer - just in
case). (and it is not clear yet weather or not the logistic software at the
supermarket or the brewery does not have any problems. i suspect there will
be more glitches with application software then with system programs).
well the point is: it is wrong to ridicule the people who made
preparations as much as it is wrong to ridicule people who use safety belts
in the car or wear a helmet on their bicycle. most of the time you will not
need the safety belt. you can drives somewhere and nothing bad will happen if
you do not wear it. you can drive tomorrow and you can probably drive 10
years without any problem. but someday you might have a bad car crash and
the safety belt will safe your life.
the y2k preparations are the same: we all knew that major problems where
not all to likely but no one was able to estimate if the odds for some major
problem is 0.1% or 1% or 0.01% or 10% in any case i would say that the
chances where at least higher then those of you having a car crash tomorrow.
still we use safety belts.
plus: we have no way to find out what would have happened if people did not
check their systems throughout.. there was one power plant in vienna that is
said that it would have failed if it would not have been checked... (and
what could have happened when it would have failed: the guy in the power
plant calls anther guy to bring up some spare plant and this guy is not
prepared for that and makes an error and then there are 2 plants that are
not there and suddenly a power outage that causes problems elsewhere and this
causes problems elsewhere.. the nature of y2k is that it can be like domino
stones: if small problems occur at systems that are not critical nothing
much happens. if a few small problems occurred at some critical points then
all our infrastructure might have fallen down like domino stones in a raw..
so really: i don't thing it is fair to ridicule the people who made
preparations..
greetings from vienna, austria.
mond.
My girlfriend's american. My cousin's girlfriend's american. My uncle lives in California. Some of my best friends are american. So yeah, I think I have some clues. ...
Are americans christians? Well much more than the french. French politicians don't bother showing at Church to get good press. When French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin says he's an atheist, nobody thrashes him, unlike Jesse Ventura.
BTW my girlfriend believed the american motto was 'in god we trust' (which was just added on the bills in the 30s I believe), whereas it's 'e pluribus unum' if I'm not mistaken. So
No, they didn't. If they had, we'd have seen far more stockpiling of food, bottled water, etc. than we did.
But really, we're not out of the woods, yet. The power hasn't gone out, nuclear weapons aren't launching themselves, and our credit cards are (mostly) still working. But it's possible and maybe even probable that more subtle Y2K-related flaws exist in various institutional software (particularly in developing nations) that will continue to have effects in the months to come.
I can't believe we got away with that myself. IT folk are the greatest! I was hoping for more rumors of all sorts of $h!t going down....but it turned out to be dull news. Maybe our worst fears will come in 2001 when we are all unprepared, then we're all f*cked! Enjoy the new year everyone!
We know we have REAL Y2K problems when....
.. then when everyone goes to pick up their voice messages (which they know say something along the lines of "I'm still alive") using their cell phone. Either there are no cell channels available, or the pager system is overloaded. (This happened to me for about 15 mins after midnight.. kept switching between phone has busy system, then pager has overloaded system)
..
1) A First post message (done by someone other than the person who wrote the article) gets a score of 5!
2) When you're watching the Y2K countdouns all over the world and you KNOW they're NOT using XNTP to synchronize time, because the time on the countdown on the TV is DIFFERENT from the countdown in the actual party which is different from the clock on the same TV which is even different than your sattelite clock synched XNTP computer
3) When we suddenly discover the real power of theory of relativity because we are suddenly 17100 years in the future (19100) or 190000 years in the future (192000) and the technology hasn't changed.
4) When we realize we travelled back in time to the year 100.
5) When everyone get's paged just after midnight
Well.. Last night I turned on all my 4 computers @ home just to see if I can find anything in the logs over the midnight period.. It was nice to see no downtimes anywhere near the rollover.. my cable provider did go down for a few seconds this morning.. but nothing Y2K related.
For those of you interested.. the year 100 and 19100 are perl script errors due to concatenating the year 99, or 100 to the end of "19"
The year 192000 originated from problematic Java/Javascripts.. Java was written very stupidly.. If the year is = 2000 it would suddenly report a 4 digit year. this would make it slightly annoying to program something that is Y2K compliant and Pre-Y2K compliant.
it would have to look something like
if (now.getDate() 100) document.write(1900 + now.getDate());
else document.write(now.getDate());
Anyway.. Enjoy.. Happy Y2K.. l8z
Troll? Hahaha.. No offense, to the moderator who did that. But, who, exactly, is he trolling against or offending?
"Y2k is nothing but vaporware???? is not!!!! screw you!"
or perhaps y2k is a user/person on slashdot and felt offended.
slowly forgetting? I don't think so-- American society has always thrived on ignorance...
I'd be careful speaking for all of Europe. I've got two friends in Italy--who don't know each other--who both went to France for the new year so as to be away from anything the Italian government was in charge of. It was very much along the lines of how I "stockpiled" wine (any excuse) and food (in this non-Apocalyptic world, the foods I chose happen to be the makings for a good paella). Or how CmdrTaco's preparations included a bunch of whisky and frozen lasagna. In case Italy exploded, they were safe(er) in France, in case it didn't, oh look, a trip to Paris/Marseille!
While the world hasn't suffered any major Y2K crises, some of the rosy corporate PR releases are bogus. I was on a team surveying systems at a US automaker through the rollover, and as we were recording bugs, we read a piece on cnn.com, posted at 1:30am EST, that the big three American automakers had reported no significant rollover problems. At that point, only about 5% of this company's US vehicle plants had even reported anything to the Y2K center. Either the corporate PR team was referring to Asian and European plants, or their statements had no connection to reality. I'm not saying there were big problems, but the company certainly didn't have much info at that time.
As for the bugs we came across, there wasn't anything that would stop vehicle production, but there were some problems related to data collection, some mobile robots hangs, and other non-critical failures. Of course the plants are in shutdown right now, and things should be fixed, or workarounds put in place (like clipboards and pencils!), by startup.
Yeah, and don't forget to watch out for next year's coming apocalypse: Y2.001K
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
-t
Holy hyping hyper-hype!
My email addy goes better without spam.
Assuming that 1 AD/CE was the first year of the common era, Jan 1, 2001 is the first day of the new millenium. Of course, that decision is almost entirely artificial and was not decided upon until much later. I think we should simply artificially insert a year 0 AD/CE (even though the people who lived around 1 AD/CE didn't necessarily understand the mathematical concept of zero :-). I don't see what is the point of arguing about such an artificially generated system, anyway...
:-)
Btw, shouldn't we be happy to bring in 2000 as the first year of the 3rd millenium? This gives evidence of the most intuitive counting system begining with 0, not 1
Yeah, that's right. Look at the values for the articles.pl query-string. It reads
0 9&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/01/05512
You know what that means, don't you? Article 0551209 of January 01... 00?!?!?!?
Good going, Rob! I hope you're feeling good about yourself. Y'know, I think you should read ESR's Cathedral and the Bazaar, in which he points out that "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow"... and release the Slash source already!
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
First Reply to First Reply to First Post to First Article of the Millenium. Bwa ha ha. :-)
void recursion (void)
{
recursion();
}
while(1) printf ("infinite loop");
if (true) printf ("Stupid sig quote");
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
really i was the first persojn to past a reply
We just won't mention that whole irrational fear of mutant corn. :^)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I knew that!!!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
"Do you think that the Y2K bug already has made a
few troubles, but the media just don't want to put an end to your parties?"
We were talking about that a bit last night whilst drunk, and I think we figured they'd tell us, because keeping quiet about it wouldn't gain them anything, except for government-run stations. Then I fell over.
The gravity had to have shifted. why else is the world spinning and my head pounding? The world ended and I need some black coffee to make me feel better.
you have been 0wned by media HyPe !?!
.... are invalidated? Wasn't 1999 supposed to be the big year for the massive natural disasters, world war with nukes, etc?
;)
Inquiring minds want to know.. Any Nostradamus junkies out there looking to revalidate the master?
Happy new year!
Your Working Boy,
Now I'm all pissed that nothing blew up. Apparently, those darn terrorists missed my message.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Ventura never got attacked for being an atheist. He got attacked for attacking other people's beliefs. Of course, tolerance only goes one way for Europeans.
What's your problem with Europeans? I think we should all be much more tolerant of other people attacking our beliefs.
So for example it's OK for Ventura to attack religious bigots if that's what he feels is right, and it's OK to attack homosexuals and other perverts too if you feel it's wrong.
People performing these attacks are just expressing themselves in a completely natural way. It's unhealthy (as well as unfair) to force people to repress their deepest feelings.
(I think...)
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Besides Americans being more Christian is better than the French being more adulterers.
Well, it's just a blowjob, so it's not adultere, right?
I just saw a fascinating special on the shroud on the Discovery Channel. First, simuluations showed that exposure to the type of fiery conditions endured by the shroud did not affect the amount of C-14 present in known samples and therefore this was largely dismissed as a source of error for the radiodating (which contrary to what you claim is quite accurate for determining when very old dead things once lived...given that the shroud is made of linen, which comes from flax, this is an appropriate technique for dating the shroud). Second, some physician whose name I can't remember discovered tiny microbes (fungi and bacteria) living in the fibers of the shroud. Since they're alive, this may have skewed the radiodating..perhaps giving a date that is the average of the microbes age (present) and the shrouds age. But the shroud would have had to been composed of 50% microbes to move the shroud's date all the way back to Jesus's time! Since the microbes' mass is in fact a tiny fraction of the shroud's composition, the error these critters produce in the analysis is probably negligible. One demonstration that really was compelling was one in which they (various shroud researchers) simulated the markings that would be left on cloth if a human body was wrapped in linen. The face would leave a very wide, distorted, moon-faced impression on the cloth rather that the very natural, human one seen on the shroud. This is due to the depth of curvature of the face...a face would produce a 'projection' onto the flat cloth quite unlike the face itself. Think of the impression left after wrapping a piece of paper around an inked sphere. The impression seen on the shroud, however, is very consistent with wrapping linen around a properly dyed bas relief sculpture of a face which has much less depth than an actual face. It's most likely the work of a medieval hoax.
AD:
(Latin) Anno Domini:
Transation: In the year of our lord.
It is called AD because it is based on the birth of Jesus which was 1 AD which means that the Millenium starts in 2001 which is off anyway because people aren't all that bright and the Millenium really occured a few years ago. Thank you and good night.
-----
There was meant to be a pseudo html tag for "irony" in that post but Slashdot swallowed it...
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction