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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 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
...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
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
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!
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
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
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.
Happy 19100 :-)
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
"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.
it is ROT-13
jryy vg ybbxf yvxr gur l2x oht qvqa'g erne vg'f htyl urnq.
well it looks like the y2k bug didn't rear it's unly head.
lrc. gur qbbzfnlref unir orra cebira jebat lrg ntnva.
yep. the doomsayers have been proven wrong yet again.
qvq lbh frr gung gbb?
did you see that too?
ubhfgba. jr unir n ceboyrz
houston. we have a problem.
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.
The right answer is 1 B.C., if we accept Dionysius Exiguus' count. So, Christ was born Before Christ, on 25/12/1 B.C. 1/1/1 A.D. was the day he was circumsized. But, from historic records, we know that king Herodes died on 4 B.C., so the real date must have been before that.
Still, it's hard to believe that the Romans, who were very active bureaucrats, would leave no record at all of Jesus' crucifixion. There is no record of a Barabbas either. Therefore, scholars who have an objective viewpoint on this matter assume that Christ lived before that time. I think the most accepted date for his crucifixion is 88 B.C., there are historical records of a rabbi who was crucified in that year. If he was 33 at the time, he was born on 121 B.C.
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.
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!
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...."
Drat. i didn't realize it was rot-13'd, (drinks still wearing off) but caught the 13 difference between each char.... and deciphered it manually... such things happen after drinking too much. :) oh well, still figured it out myself.
:)
Hapy 1900, everyone! (or 19100 if you'ew just cat'ing your dates still!
David
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
The roman had no year zero ... but on top of that, ask people in 10AD, they did'nt even know they were in 10AD!!! Therefore, the actual 'zero' is much later ... the new millennium probably start in something like 3210.
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?"
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
Live was supposed to play their hometown show in Hershey last nite, but they crapped out when Ed got sick, and apparently he passed it onto the rest of the band :-(
:-(
If they hadn't gotten sick, I WOULD have had plans last night
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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
well, there's some other evidence. Here's what I remember. On the shroud that Jesus was buried in for example, (yes we have it today, it's at the Vatican, and it's a long story how it got there and how we know it's authentic) there were 2 coins placed on Jesus' eyes (Jewish custom) which were minted by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in around 28 - 33 A.D. There was also the star - iirc, a supernova that there are records of. Herod the Great who was king of judea at the time Jesus was born was known for being a rather cruel king (executed 2 of his sons, that sort of thing) and probably wouldn't have had a problem killing all the baby boys under 2 years old if one of them was going to replace him. IIRC, there was also some stuff with Emporer Tiberius, I think when St. Paul went to Rome - I don't have my history book with me (trying to get *away* from school this vacation)
I knew that!!!
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
.... 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,
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?
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