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Xdaliclock Fails Y2k (But Everything Else Seems Fine)
Tracy R Reed writes "Like any real geek I was near my computer and used the xntpd-synchronized time to determine when midnight really struck. As soon as it happened, xdaliclock did something strange!" Besides the terrifying xdaliclock crisis, 2600 had a great page up that seemed to fool quite a number of Slashdot readers. Several other joke websites popped up, and several others had real (minor) glitches. So far I've heard rumors of an ATM system that went down for a few minutes, and some radiation monitors that messed up for a bit. But apparently that was about it. The most overhyped event in years. Enjoy the day off if you get one!
Hey, my old PC thinks it's 1980! Oh yeah, it always does that. Word Perfect still works on it, I'm set for the next 1000 years. Hurrah. I'm going back to bed.
Don't forget Star Wars Episode 1
- 2 Ears, 1 Mouth, Think 2wice as much as you post -
However, on slashdot, its 2 eyes, 1 brain, and 10 fingers. so post 5 times more than you read, and 10 times more than you think.
Solution is to upgrade to 2.4.0b1, out since Christmas, or the later b2. See the ChangeLog.
Ben Caradoc-Davies
if that were how it worked, it would be simple. However, the real problem is that the phone companies create virtual circuits on demand over a limited number of real circuits. if the number of virtual circuits exceeds the number of physical circuits, then some people don't get a line. This results in a fast busy signal, or a recording.
Your explaination sounds like something our esteemed newscasters would say in an attempt to simplify things to the point that their viewers will understand.
It always amazes me how windows users are estatic when they only have "minor" problems.
yay w2k!
time.nist.gov
time-a.nist.gov
time-b.nist.gov
time-a.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov
time-b.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov
time-c.timefreq.bldrdoc.gov
I cannot believe they are all being slammed into uselessness continupusly over the last 17 hours. The following non-NIST sites do work:
utcnist.colorado.edu
nist1.datum.com
However, I am unsure of the time source for the non-NIST sites (for all I know they sync to the NIST sites and just act as relays, and are now slowly drifting out of sync). I get jittery if don't KNOW that my Linux box is synced to some sort of multi-million dollar cesium beam clock staffed by several dedicated employees. I usually have cron re-sync the clock four times per day.
Looks like a Y2K bug (naturally occurring or deliberately induced out of paranoia (like vw.com disabling their web site "just in case")). *sigh*
try this with your nearest php3 interpreter
I'm kind of offended at the tons of posts saying: "NOTHING HAPPENED!!! See, I told you so."
ABSOLUTELY! No one in their right mind expected the world to blow up yesterday evening, thanks in part to the hard-working techies out there.
But remember that we are not out of the sticks yet. Come Monday, a lot of people may find that some of their systems don't work. At the end of the month we may still see problems when our phone bills, paychecks, welfare checks etc. arrive.
One of the two 3 86s I run here for a POS system has a similar problem... loses date (but not time) on cold reboot. Some earlier tests lead me to believe it'll go away after today: When I tried the 2/28/00-2/29/00 and 2/29/00-3/01/00 transitions all seemed well with power on or off.
(BTW, "POS" here means "Point of Sale", and is not intended as a characterization of a system still running 386s in the year 2000. Ahem!)
Unless you were trying to catch a bus/train in South Australia or Tasmania. It's all relative.
Oooohh - you're in trouble now!
Not ecstatic (this is what I assume you mean, not something related to do with lack of movement), just pointing out that Windows/NT aren't as unstable as some people like to purport.
Grrr, I need to get a copy of Grammar For Dummies. I hate when you spot a mistake in something you write after it's sent...strike the "do" from the parenthetical statement. Or don't if you prefer.
And here I thought it was a cool thing to program in 1991
Hey, we predicted that the Millennium Bomb would be a damp squib, but the press weren't interested: Ross
The small app for WindowMaker dock, Y2K.app, has mangled it's display after Y2K rollover. Some strange effects. I guess it is NOT easter egg :-) Edheldil
Yeah, you were the saloon table in the 3rd episode.
For an amusing Y2K failure, look at the date on Microsoft's Terraserver. [after checking link accuracy] Oops -- they just deleted the date display on their web page. It was saying January 1, 19100.
I rebooted my Linux box so I could start my personal uptime record attempt (previously 402 days) from exactly 1/1/00. Besides, it gives me a chance to toss in that PCI sound card and upgrade the network cards to 100Base-T. Anyway the box came back up... an hour ahead! WTF? Oh wait, I forgot that using date or rdate to set the clock doesn't set the hardware clock (which was still on daylight savings time). Set the correct date, then run setclock. All is well. And 100Base-T doesn't like Cat3 cable. Dang.
this is what happens when 5 billion people pick up the phone all at once to check if the phones work.
telephone grids only have a certain amount of power running through it, so when you pick up the phone, a jolt of electricity goes to your phone and creates that nice dial tone. when everybody does this (and call people), power drops.
simple.
As a Sysadmin I agree whole heartedly that the reason we had no problems was due entirely of people like me and you working our asses off making sure everything was compliant. I still had a few problems today such as a pop3 service crashing on my linux box. But I just moved the service to another server and will trouble shoot on monday. This pop3 server puts through 30 million dollars worth of e-comm sales a year so is fairly critical but its downtime was less than 2 hours because of some hard work.
Yes, XdaliClock was made by Jamie! hehehe. Send flames to him.
I saw this too. The bios clock was set to 2094 like someone else here said. However, that far into the future will overflow a time_t on a 32-bit system. My workaround was to set the year in the bios to 1994 and leave it reset the system time (but not the hwclock) upon boot via NTP.
visit:
http://go.to/y2kmistakes
Yeah, and you really impressed us.
Please tell us more about your great wisdom and please teach how to put down people so you can feel superior... wait a sec... I changed my mind... I'm not an insecure bastard like you
's just gibberish today...so, are we to assume that Iliad's brain has suffered some form of Y2K bug?
This has nothing to do with the y2k problem. The problem is, everything was just trying to call out! In Europe you would have had serious problems trying to use a GSM Mobile Phone. In Zurich the three major mobile phone networks rejected lots of calls (diax, one of these three networks, did not work at all from 11:30 pm til 4:00 am ...)
When you hit the "previous comic" button, it generates the "jan00" directory instead of "dec99", so there really is a y2k bug in the strip's page. As for rot13, "tr 'a-z' 'n-za-m'".
Welcome to the wonderful world of 1972. :-) Does your parents 486 really NEED to have the correct date? ;-)
The Outlook bog-down bug is pretty common. If you have the "Performance Boost for the Foreground Application" slider set to None (slightly different setting in W2K), it doesn't affect other services running on the machine.
Unlike normal applications, Outlook ties into this MAPI subsystem thing which makes it difficult to kill in the normal way. You often have to log entirely out of your user session.
Well one date related bug solved. Now we have the integer rollover problem which affects various dates depending upon OS (I think 2069 is for Unix, correct me if I am wrong.) After that, how many know that 2100 is not a leap year (Leap years occur every 4 years except when the date is divisible by 100 but not 400). Any others I forgot?
From a92399:
The Bank of America's online account access website is down, don't know whether it is because of a Y2K problem or not. Here's the text:
"Online Banking - Temporarily Not Available We are currently experiencing an Online Banking service interruption. We apologize for this inconvenience and are working to restore your service as quickly as possible. Thank you for using Online Banking. Click here to visit the Bank of America homepage. "
I was surprised how quickly it was all denounced as hype, scare mongering and time wasting. Surely this is like saying "the boat didn't sink, so why did you spend all that time mending the holes in the bottom?"
Can you prove that?
"Yes I do!"
No - I don't.
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
my old 486 has no problems at all
"Oh well, I'll write a ASM program that will run on bootup..." Why don't you write it blindfolded? Then we might be impressed. That is what you were trying to do, right?
But it's good to know our government is at least using Perl.
There were no meltdowns or plane crashes. I don't know too many people that thought those things would happen anyway. But I think it's funny that now everyone is saying this was overhyped, and all that. For one thing, why the fuck do you think not much happened when it hit? Because we were lucky? No! Because we spent one (or two, or three) years working on this damn problem! What the hell do you think would have happened if this "non-event" wasn't "overhyped"? The other funny thing is how people think, "Whew, it's all over now and we're just fine!" Wrong. There is going to be a shitload of things that are just all screwed up for the next few weeks and months. And it's going to get worse, because people like you think, "Y2K's a non-event." So when some wise-ass turns to a geek and laments (or lambasts him) about the over-hyped, non-event of Y2K, I hope you'll remind that asshole how it got that way. Sheesh... (And if I hear one more stupid ass in the media tell me we're now in a new millennium, I'll spew!) -thomas
Why the HELL is the /. default set to "HTML formatted" when posting?? Am I missing something, or are there a shitload of people posting HTML that I must have missed!
I like my paragraphs to start and end where I lay them!
-thomas
I just got three messages from AOL dated 1944!
Date: 11/9/44 4:25 AM
Received: 1/1/00 4:33 AM
From: ******@aol.com
This, after the system was down shortly after midnight, with a "Please try again later" message.
Subject says it all... Go read User Friendly now and see for yourself!
If there are too many people using the phone network, you get a very fast sounding "busy signal" on older networks. On newer ones, you'll get a recording saying something to the effect "All our circuits are busy now. Please try again later."
dawgzsz
Anyone else having similar problems like this??
It's a 1992 Ford Mustang.
myth 2 thinks that the date is 01.01.100
We had clock -w fail on some of our old RedHat workstations, don't know if it's the soft- or the hardware. ;)
Don't care for that matter
My pops was out roaming the streets for an ATM this morning, and his card expiration date is "49" so the machine told him his card was expired, but it really expires in 2049, so he went to 2 other machines, both doing the same thing, the third machine swallowed his card :( check your atm/visa/mastercard cards for problems! This sucks. Anyway I had a great party, chilled out with friends, played dreamcast, and watched the various cities go haywire.
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
if (date == 0)
{
}
The code that follows this appears to reverse the pixmap if clock >= date.
NNTPcache V2.3.3 NEWGROUPS Command Gives an error since today.
While BigClock (ver 2.5) survived the rollover just fine (running on palm IIIe, os 3.1) bigclock turned on the backlight and ran a fireworks show to celebrate the rollover.. Just a little tidbit while we're mentioning computer clocks.
David
bash: ispell: command not found
This sig left intentionally blank.
You and Jennifer are going on that date tonight in your new pickup truck, and your (now much thinner) mom approves!
Your dad is no longer a wimp, and just celebrated the printing of his first science fiction novel.
Biff is now a craven coward, and works for your Dad.
Doc isn't dead!
No, what the previous poster was saying is that 1972 is a good "replacement" date for 2000. The days of the week are all the same for a few years.
Though, if you can fix it in ASM, go right on ahead.
Perhaps a bug in Netscape that the page takes advantage of? The getYear() func I believe is being phased out in favor of another function that is more "sensible" ...
The reason IE does that, though, is that ECMA script defined that as the proper behavior, and suggested that future scripts should not use getYear() ... I wish I knew what the proper replacement func was. {shrug}
Well, I see 11/9/44.. You're assuming that it's 1944? Why not 2044? It's closer after all :)
...a friend of mine (rapidly moving down that list, as you can imagine) called me at 8:30AM today, to see if my computer was okay and to see if I had finished a flyer for a concert he's promoting. He nearly became the first documented Y2K fatality in Florida.
On the other hand, all of these folks saying "all's right with the world" won't really know until about 10 AM Monday, when the millions of corporate drones show up, get their first cup of bad coffee, talk about the lack of events this weekend, and fire up their twenty-year-old accounting packages...
Well it looks like the y2k bug didn't rear it's ugly head.
Yep. The doomsayers have been proven wrong yet again.
Did you see that too?
Houston. We have a problem.
It appears that Netscape's version of the getYear() function returns the correct year minus 1900; while in Microsoft's, it returns the correct year minus 1900 only if the year is earlier than 2000, otherwise it simply returns the year. Neither is great (why not just return the stupid year?), but at least in Netscape's version it behaves logically.
I looked up the ECMAScript Language Specification. (Thanks for mentioning it; I had not heard of it before.) It is careful to point out that getYear() is not officially part of the specification, but the definition given is based on Netscape's getYear(), not Microsoft's. The function it recommends that is part of the specification is getFullYear().
Check this out:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calen dar/
In my copy of Netscape Communicator 4.7, the current date is filled in correctly. In my copy of Internet Explorer 5.0, the date is filled in with the year 3900. Could it be a bug in getYear()? Microsoft's support site says I am up-to-date with patches. And I haven't seen any company put out more Y2K patches than Microsoft.
I refuse to feel obligation to "prove" anything to an Anonymous Coward.
Actually there are such languages. CF Pascal for example. It might even be possable in Java. The big problem is unrestricted pointers (i.e. C style) make it impossable to prove anything.
There is another problem. You can prove that program X matched mathmatical model Y, but that doens't say that Y solves the problem you wanted. This wasn't treated as a big problem in my CMSC classes (back in '91), but it feels like a big problem to me. For example if model Y had two digit dates, then program X could have a bad bug, and the proof wouldn't find it, because it matches the bug in the model!
Also, for me at least, it was far simpler to write the code then to prove things about it. Like by at least an order of magnitude. A simple simple simple 10 line function would take hours for me to make formal statments about. I expect others do better. But as far as I could tell this level of effort could only be justifyed by life critical applications.
There are some pretty good results you can get by modeling part of your program logic. Like if you can model the locking hierachy of a multithreaded program the SPIN tool is a major help in finding race conditions, lock inversions, and deadlocks.
I was at My Linux box at Y2K rollover and have a xlock -digital and a xdaliclock.
Xclock work with no problem(is still running) but
xdaliclock start with one 1 at left.
Was funny!
Oliver
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
It is not only this. The formal specification of a program/algorithm also is usually much more concise and closer to the domain language used for informally talking about the problem. As a result it is (if the right framework was chosen) easier to find conceptual flaws in the formal specification.
But you are of course right in saying that there is no such thing as a 100% verification.
Chilli
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
Happy New Year and thanks to all who have helped squashing y2k bugs.
Chilli
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
heh, did you notice that if you hit the "previous" link to get yesterdays comic you arrive at this invalid url:
:) of course, s/jan00/dec99/ will fix that...
http://www.userfr iendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jan/19991231.html
looks like the strip the characters arent the only ones having problems
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
Don't be silly, Pintos have been spontaneously exploding long before anyone knew what the Y2k bug was. :p
If it hadn't been for you, this particular slob would now be whimpering and shivering in a cold dark corner of his house, cursing technology and wondering where his next meal was going to come from...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Well, just to prove that Linux is not "invulnerable" to Y2K bugs, my web server got itself all wrapped up in knots and had to be physically rebooted ("init" wouldn't even respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del!). It was fine at midnight, but sometime later in the morning, a runaway process chewed up all the memory, to the point where I couldn't even get a console login.
I suspect the "nist" time update utility from www.icce.rug.nl (which I run in the root crontab) is the guilty party. I checked it and found that it choked on a "00" year. I managed to get it working, but it appears to be full of other Y2K bugs (leap year stuff in particular). I've found that cron tends to go wild when you suddenly change the system date by 100 years or so... ;-)
This is the sort of thing I think we will continue to see for the next few months into the New Year. Not a biggie, but enough to bring a computer or two down...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
IF IT AIN'T BUSTED, DON'T FIX IT.
Surprise, surprise, but there are still a lot of people out there running very happily on old 486 boxes. If all you want to do is run an old word processor (e.g., MSWord 6.0), or write email, why spend money on a new computer? All it gets you is a new set of headaches (i.e., Win98), with new interfaces to learn and new drivers to update and new software to buy, all for no perceivable change in functionality!
A few lines of code to fix the RTC, and you're off and running again.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
rot13 anyone?
Your Servant, B. Baggins
tons of sites that use that matt wright script for a bulletin board say 19100 as the year for new postings... not like anyone should bitch since jwz and wright and others wrote this stuff years ago and provide it freely to us...
...site isn't Y2K compatible. It displays dates 01/01/100 and the strips won't show.
http://www.slagoon.com/
The university department I work for ran into a slight problem. My boss just gave me a call (pretty calmly, but a little upset) saying that she had just tried to login to our (ie my responsibility) secure website to check and make sure it was still working. When she did, she got an error saying 'Certificate Expired'. Fortunatly, I only had to roll into the chair next to my bed to check it out on my box .. no error for me! Turns out she had Netscape 4.05, and the Authority Certificate (not ours, but the RSA Data Security Certificate) in 4.05 and earlier expires on Dec 31 1999.. This is something our IS guys didn't think of (we always upgrade our netscapes when the come out, but other people don't often).. I wonder how many other people missed it? First thing I did was go to netscape's website, and sure thing it's right there on the right hand side. The boss said that Netscape's website was really slow when she was downloading 4.7. I bet a bunch of people went to purchase "101 Things to do with a ton of rice, three drums of whiskey, and a shotgun (for Dummies)" on Amazon.com and got the same certificate error.
OBActualY2KProblem: At least 8 power plants in the US lost their synchronization signal from the GPS satellites. No loss of service, since their computers still knew what time it was). It has been fixed, but if it had gone undetected for long enough for the clocks to get unsynchronized. That would have been a problem!
Drink! OHBC >O+
I use nist 2.00a to set the time on my machines and it has a y2k problem.
NIST reports the year as 00 ... nist 2.00a has code in it to set the year ahead by 10 if it's less than 90 ...
This makes it report the year as 1910. simple change is to fix nistserver.c so it adds 100 instead of 10, and y2k works fine.
Some website glitches were captured by the folks at Memepool. Currently (11:58 PST, 01 Jan 2000) their top story. There's also an older one with some stuff dated 1900 at the MS website.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
Good trilogy you are quoting :-)
I participated in the set at universal studios.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
- in Lille, France the Metro system has been down for at least 2 days.. no reason given, so I dunno if it's a y2k bug or not...
;-)
- customers of Eplus, a German cellular phone company, could not use France Telecom or Bouygtel as a roaming provider after 1/1/00... officially not a y2k bug, but the "workaround" given by the service rep was so lame, I am pretty sure it was a y2k issue.
Can you guess where I was for new year?
Otherwise the world's still in the same fucked-up state as it was when I last read Slashdot/the news.. Yeltsin resigned? My....
To me, the dali clock doing something strange... Just seems so fitting. They didn't call it the Dali clock for nothing. You would think that if you name it after Salvadore Dali it would be expected to do something strange. Isn't that what surrealism is all about?
_joshua_
That was reported on CNN. I saw the whole thing. Some problem with a clutch or something.
Very neat looking wheel, BTW.. They got it running yet?
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Well, CNN had their 2000 coverage, and they showed midnight hitting in every timezone.. anyway, they were laughing about the wheel not working when everyone thought it did. However, it sounded more like they _decided_ not to turn it on for safety reasons, because a precheck had revealed a problem with a clutch on one of the spinning bits or something. No details anyway. I don't remember them saying anything about a fizzle when the guy tried to turn it on.. Pretty funny anyway.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I can use the rest of the system (albeit, slowly) - then that's a strange defintition of a "lock up"
If you are rebooting because your system performance has been affected by a crashed userland application, this is a Bad Thing.
It may not strictly be a lock-up, but it seems to me to be very poor behaviour on the part of your operating system to have the performance of other system services be impared in this fashion. Suppose you were running a server under fairly heavy load and this happened? All of your users would be adversely affected by this, and you DON'T have the ability to reboot - you have to wait for however long it takes Task Manager to catch up with the problem.
But humans don't. A large fragment of code written has been written by humans. Furthermore, people have been spotted doing data entry - and rumour goes they use a decimal number system for their data entry. But that's just rumours. I'm sure your credit card has a binary number, and an expire date in binary. And could you repeat your birthday again, in binary please?
-- Abigail
I put up a mirror of the "Y2K" page: http://www.dougal.org/2600.html
It's now well into the first day of the new Millennium for those of us in 'lil old England. We haven't had any major problems (yet), however, remember that most people are not working today so there could be problems around the corner. Did anyone else notice how badly the BBC covered the Millennium "Bug". They were plain wrong in most cases, trying to create public histeria. Anyway, I'm off to finish my lunch, have a great Y2K all, Jonathan.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
That had to give those people at home a good chill.
Imagine the scenario. A family, gathered around the TV to watch the ball drop. "3.....2....1...." and then nothing but a bright glow from the now snowy tv.
heh heh.
Karnal
sounds like a lock up to me..... unresponsiveness, that is.
Karnal
hype = relentless in the leet0 media
stop watching so much tv and free your mind
Tin supplied with Debian Slink thinks all the newsgroups in active are new (in NNTP mode). Tin supplied with potato crashes when it reads its configs. Anyone else notice?
POKE 36879,8
Working as a computer tech in jan 99 we had a flood of people comming into our shop with computer that "wouldn't boot" after they tried a "Y2K" test that some local news media suggested. Some of the computers were pentiums but don't think that we had any PII's. Any way the best was a coach at a local high school who set his clock in BIOS and watched the screen shut off when it hit roll-over.
"all the IT and CompSCI people out there weren't really worried"
I'm kind of offended at your arrogant post that implies that all the IT and CompSci types are clueless and that the wonderful "engineers, technicians and programmers" are the only ones who understood and sorted out the problems. There are thousands of clued up CompSci types who understood the problems and worked their butts off preparing systems for Y2K, fixing problems BEFORE THEY HAPPENED; the problems were VERY REAL for them, and they are just as deserving of praise as you guys who do embedded systems etc.
I'm sorry if you ran into a few arrogant clueless CompSci people, but don't form any generalisations from that. There are plenty of arrogant clueless engineers too.
Watch out for your crappy old bios/RTC. Some were found to have date errors known as the Crouch Echlin effect. You may not see a problem for two or three weeks.
I'm out of this business by 2038...
ah, the time.h bug. It'll be even harder to explain to idiots too...
"Clocks will be weird" vs. "It just won't work..."
______
everyone was born right-handed, only the greatest overcome it.
http://leftorium.net
I've seen a few posts from people talking about the phone system "hiccuping" at the stroke of midnight, and attributing the failure to Y2K. I'd like to share my experience.
:-)
Our NOC was fully staffed through the date change, to keep our customers informed and monitor any possible DoS attacks or other problems. Sure enough, just after midnight the majority of our POTS voice lines puked.
It was easy enough to say "Ahh, man, of course, it's GTE, they forgot to check some equipment" or something along those lines.
After fighting with GTE all night, we finally get a truck to come at 7AM this morning. Before the tech even looked at our equipment, he knew what the problem was.
You know those idiots that proudly shoot their guns in the air to celebrate the new year at midnight, forgetting that what comes up must come down? Apparently it is fairly common for the bullets, on the way down, to knock out telephone service by hitting the copper lines on the poles.
It's a good thing that there weren't any Y2K-network issues, otherwise we could have had a disaster... the lines won't be fixed until Monday.
Funny... we thought of everything to make sure we'd be up and online through the night. At least we thought we did.
--globalnap.net, product of pure caffeine--
did anyone find any "strange" behaviour in other programs?
Well the older version of tin is convinced every newsgroup is a new group. The newer versions have a tendencey to end up in a "Reading attributes file..." loop
Or you could see what havoc it causes...
Aparently it confuses IE. I don't see this as a problem. Also isn't it mentioned in one of the RFCs that this is going to happen so the clients must be able to deal with it?
Can you think of any better way to get one heck of a nice grant than to be the only country in the world to have lots of major problems with y2k? I bet the US state dept is currently offering them lots of aid. Looks like Gambian is in for an inrush of new funds.
We had a simarly thing in the UK with the 'Eye of London' (a big ferris wheel.) Tony Blair pressed the button to make it turn for the first time. Lots of fireworks, lights and music, but a very stationary wheel.
We giggled. None of the press here have reported it. History has being rewritten.
Is it an Award 4.51PG by any chance? AFAIK these are the only BIOSes that have real problems with Y2K.
Well, I wouldn't know because as far as any of the press here seems to be concerned it was working all along!
The builders said it wouldn't be ready until the end of January, so I expect it will be going for real around that time.
2000 came with nary a flicker or a siren last night.
On behalf of all the guys and girls who weren't skilled enough to be in the trenches making things Y2K compliant, I'd like to thank you and people like you for the months and years of work.
Look at that URL. I'm reading http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/01/095421 1&mode=nested
Is this a bug? Or a feature?
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
Production is based on time sychronization. You need to produce so many of an item at such an such a time. The union workers have their bonuses based on these quotas, therefore all of our production data systems are time synched. Then there's shelf-life of products, and appropriate labelling systems to go with that...etc, etc.
When you program these systems, you have one integer word reserved for the last two digits of the year. All of the programming on top of that is based on this one integer word.
You do the math.
PS. Some of the systems didn't even get to that step. Their hardware literally locked up at 00:00 01/00
Well, I have to say I'm really happy I'm not freezing my ass off and eating green beans out of a tin right now. But it does seem really weird - the rollover was such a non-event that I can't quite believe it's come and gone. Nothing, absolutely not one single solitary thing, went wrong here. Not that I *wanted* anything to, it's just hard to believe that after all those months of hype, there's nothing! (This makes me happy, though, because otherwise I'd have had to have gone into work at 4:30am instead of using my laptop to dial in and find... nothing wrong with the systems.)
;) What, did everyone's radio batteries die, and they're all still hiding out downstairs in their basements, sitting on a pile of canned goods?
On a side note, the streets, restaurants, and stores around here are all strangely empty. There's almost nobody out - good for me, means no lines when I go food shopping
That is damn right. I remember the same whining from y2k "gurus" or y2k "pioneers" as they were known. They arent spending bazillions, something must be wrong! yeah right. And Japan also has 1/30th the ratio of lawyers .. so by that logic, they have no system of justice as well. Bah. Y2k consultants, I've seen and had to deal with dozens of them over the last year .. words cannot express the frustration felt by reasonable people as these losers, usually failed programmers, project managers or auditors, have tied us up with red tape, placed the fear of god and lawsuits into non-technical upper management. The Japanese were much more sensible.. plus their native systems work with the year of the reigning emporer anyway.. All this whole y2k effort was just a big bug hunt in one small area, in a pathetic attempt to achieve perfection by idiots with no skills wielding CEO authorized get out of jail free cards, completely ignoring all the other bugs that run rampant through all the other systems and software in use out there. Get realistic. If the US had bothered to look at things sanely, they would have figured, sure, we need a bunch of cobol overtime put in.., and test anything that is mission critical, and then forget about it and get back to improving things steadily. But Noooo! we gotta have 6 month development freezes, stockpiled water, and career cry-wolfers running around appearing on TV, writing books and frightening little old ladies into jumping into the basement. Tell you what this is, this is techno religion priests telling the flock they can protect them from techno hell. I tell you what : lets have a Y2k post mortem audit, lets turn the spotlight on every manager that sat in a leather chair opposite the board and asked with a straight face for a budget of $300 million to fix systems. Lets find out how much of this money was wasted, or used as an excuse to upgrade equipment, inflate staff sizes or whatever. You'll now hear the bleats of: but wait! the leap year bug will be next! or the social security overflow bug! or the unix epoch bug! forget it, get those shotguns you thought you needed to save your family and go hunt down some y2k experts and get an explanation of where your dollars have gone, and why the per capita expenditure in the US was so much higher than less consultant and lawyer ridden countries. Sorry I raved didnt I? but really.. now is not the time to shrug and move on.. the y2k bug is more a bug with technology management, laywers, and the media. That is what needs to be fixed!
Was it a slow busy or a fast busy? Generally, if the reason you're getting the busy signal is because of too many people using the phone network, rather than the line you're calling actually being busy, the busy signal tone will beep much faster...
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
CWRU has changed their page just a smidge. My personal favorite is one of their sidebars off to the left of the page
CWRU Events
Sat. Jan 01 1900 EST
No events scheduled for today
Events Calendar...
-- BlueCalx | http://nickd.org/
I agree. Y2K is not a non-event! It has been an event for the last 3 years. Just because today is quiet doesn't mean "Y2K" wasn't a problem. It's a catch 22, now all of the nay-sayers will say I told you so. As for me (sysadmin) I am burned-out...
My blood pressure is at an all-time low! 106/78 Wahoo!
DS
"Please do not reply if you're an evil alien! Thanks"
Thats odd, I've got a pair of 486's here, they both boot on every try. Yes, when we turned them on they both said Jan 4, 1980, but then we manually reset the clocks using the data command and it seems to hold every time we reboot them. Hmph, must be a different bios.
-- Point? None! Cob.
I seem to remember Russia and Japan coming under the heaviest criticism (much from U.S. media) for their lack of Y2K preparedness or for failing to take it seriously, with the spotlight also on the low spending on Y2K in the Japanese financial sector.
Looks to me like a lot of companies spent far too much money paying "consultants" to fix "bugs", to the extent that a program originally intended to output 2 year dates was deemed buggy, and "fixed" to output 4 year dates.
Because my parents refused to heed my warnings that their 486 might not fare too well over the Great Date Change, I got to do a little observational research this morning. The PC will only boot successfully every third try or so, and the date is now Jan. 4, 1980 (ah, the good old days!), with no hope of correcting it. As of yet, however, they've found no problems with everyday word processing, solitaire, and the like.
I didn't catch it until the third pass. But it was New Year's Day. It took that long before I was up to typing anything about it.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
No idea whether this was y2k or general screw-up, but I tried to call parents at about quarter-past midnight, and my mobile phone dialed, then promptly hung up. I tried calling other people, including those on mobiles, and that had the same problem. I thought it might be that the network was busy, but I'm sure that the last time that happened the phone said 'Network Busy' on the screen. Oh, and my sister, also on Vodafone (UK), reported the same thing.
I tried to call the message centre - which failed. Although it did call me back 5 minutes later to deliver a message.
I personally think it was the rush of everyone to call their relatives - seeing as I'm having trouble with the idea y2k interferring with the networks. Anybody else have the same problem?
Kokij
"The most overhyped event in years.
Well, maybe so, but, then, the only reason that nothing major happened was that a bunch of us have worked our asses off for up to 2 or 3 years, in some cases, to prevent it from happening. (By "us" I do mean Slashdot readers specifically, geeks in general.) I expected the "overhyped" and "non-event" descriptions from vanilla news sites, but not Slashdot. Please don't play it down as something that never would have happened. Billions of dollars and manhours went into insuring against it.
Not to take away from your comments, but I think the majority of the people are referring to the junk that nuts have been spewing about planes falling from the sky, power turning off at the first coo-coo of the clock, and pintos blowing up when looked at wrong (well, okay, the first two are exaggerated).
A better way of looking at it is like this. You go to your dentist whom tells you that you need a root canal. You mention this to a buddy at work. The next thing you know, everyone is getting your next of kin information because surely you're going to die from this terrible ordeal. It doesn't change the fact that they're all idiots, but it still needs to be done and isn't going to be fun. IMOHO, this pretty closely mirrors the idiots that feared Y2K while pointing and screaming revelations.
Personally, the only concern I had of Y2K was the people factor. It's like someone yelling "fire" and having dozens of people killed in the stampede when in reality, there wasn't a fire; just some kid yelling, "wolf." I was hoping this would not be the case in the market. It doesn't look like it was.
Enjoy! Happy New Year!
Richard
UF
My machines are running fine. In fact I left one of mine up for the change over and it didn't blow up (Despite what every one was saying on the news last night).
I am suffering from one Y2K glitch though. My news server forgot who I am. As bad as their service is I should have expected it.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
There's this cable TV channel called Moon TV, specialised in computer/video game reviews and music. They displayed whole last night a series of Y2K puns like "This channel has been hacked" and stuff. And, oh yeah, the "Your TV needs a blabla plugin to view this program". Kind of funny the first time round...
So what would you expect a bunch of geeky guys to do on new years's night but play Half-Life and Action Q2, watch Babylon 5 original pilot and read comics? Well, there was this 1-meter long, 3" inner diameter home made cannon and the illegal professional-quality fireworks. I carried the damn tube strapped under my trenchcoat for an hour in a crowd and after finding a safe place & shooting the bombs we slipped away just when the police arrived.
NOSPAM@REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
went digging when i noticed it...it is an easter egg, but if ya run without seconds, its also a bug...the formatting gets messed up, and the hour never updates...my clock currently reads '38:01' backwards...
I dont have the xdaliclock code in front of me, but from a quick peek at the gif, it seems odd that at one particular time the display would be reversed. It seems more like a hard coded-in 'cool thing' for people who were in front of the screen at midnight.. and with the 2600 page, yeah well.. i wish i had that idea too.. so many places coders could have taken the opportunity to scare the poop out of ppl with all this y2k crap that was going around last year.
ps: the millennium doesnt start till 2001
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
No....I was merely stating the fact that there have been some problems (since no one else seems to be having them), and stated the fact that I could write a program so other people wouldn't write back saying, "Here's a program for you." because I'll be able to get it done on my own. That's all that I was stating.
Their entry page shows the date as Saturday, January 1, 192000...
Oops.
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
Well this well known but I just thought I would point out that Windows (not the beer and smokes) will still suck in this new year. It will still crash a whole lot and frequent reboots are still the norm.
If it's from Microsoft, it has to suck
Happy new year.
_________________________
same thing with dragonballz.com =\
There was a bomb in Niles, Il. Reports are sketchy so far (i sound like a reporter), but there was a bomb at a transmiting tower.. i'm not sure what exactly that is... but they mentioned it was over 150 ft... i mean.. they mentioned it served power
Regaurdless, the bomb was 5 minutes before midnight, and the power only temporarly flickered. Hell, i was doing something and i swore i saw the power flicker just about then, though not m any other people did. I wasn't near my APC, but my friend was near his and he said that it went on in the same timeframe.
But, if you were to blow something up, do it right. I mean, if your gonna do something that could put you in jail, put some real effort into it.
Ok, that was a little messed up, my post, but here's an rticle at the chicago tribune about it...
The night was not completely uneventful for Commonwealth Edison Co. An explosion in northwest suburban Niles knocked out a support for a transmission tower for 130,000-volt lines, briefly knocking out power to 4,000 customers, a company spokesman said. The explosion occurred five minutes before midnight and did not appear to be Y2K-related.
I'm not sure if this is y2k related... but PCWorld's search isn't showing anything... you try
The cseng-sections Just Published and Coming soon -listings are suffering from a timewarp back to the beginning of the century when no books had been published and everything is coming soon... Listings start from 1976.
Welp, it is 1/1/00 and everything seems to be working ok..... wait a sec, what the $*!% is wrong with xdaliclock? no no no this is not happening. This is not happening. OK wait think, I can live without it until they get a patch. It is open source so it will be fixed really soon. Breath. Remain calm. It is not the end of the world as we know it. Well, maybe it is but I'm feeling fine. I'm feeling fine.
I'll go make some breakfast.... oh no! I can't get the lid off of my black raspberry preserves! oh now, my jar of preserves are not Y2K compliant. NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
urh oh, watch out! The agents are already surrounding your house. Only a matter of time til the decide to move in.. LOOK BEHIND YOU! ACK!...
This message has been brought to you by the fund for a better nothingness.
Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for the change to take effect. Reboot now? [ OK ]
but come on... WIN2K will save the day!!!!!
-----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I quickly modified the perl code to fix the problem, but then I noticed that a fix was already posted on the site. Silly me.
--
WorldServe Consulting
I know Xdaliclock for X11 doesn't work too well because of the y2k bug, but the Palm version seem to be working all right!
Thanks JWZ!
http://www.redhat.com/supp ort/errata/RHBA1999061-01.html
Nobody else did in my family, but I was laughing when 1:00 came before 1:59.
So that family in Alabama whose cable went out at midnight had an hour after the ball drop before they lost service.
Sorry to disappoint all the "If it's from Microsoft, it has to suck" people out there, but our old crappy Printer server, running a first-edition, non-upgraded Win95, and having a crappy old bios, survived the rollover with no problem. It claims that the date is Jan 1 2000, it's still printing things that it's told to, and in general everything is working okay.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
I've messed around with xdaliclock a bit, and it seems to do this whenever it wigs out... does it still do this after you close it and open it again?
I've decided that the best part about this Jan 1st being gone is that this means there are only 18 days left for the Transmeta announcement...
Hmm, the page says Internal Server Error, and returns a response code of 200, which means OK. Observe:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2000 01:12:14 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix)
I've been unimpressed with 2600's attention to detail. They are mostly a political organization, and not a script kiddie training squad like everyone thinks they are. I still buy the mag and show up to the pdx meets though, and I appreciate what they do.
On most of my boxes there is no error. But on 3 boxes the error mktime() failed unexpectedly (rc -1). Aborting. is output.
Two of the boxes are running RedHat 5.2. One of the boxes is running the equivalent of RedHat 4.2. Other boxes running RedHat 5.2 are not affected.
Checking the library which is used by /sbin/clock, the 4.2 box is using libc 5.4.44, the 5.2 boxes are both using glibc 2.0.7. Other boxes with that same libc do not exhibit this error.
The linux kernel version is 2.0.36. It doesn't seem to be a hardware error... strace shows the process trying to open /dev/rtc and failing, but this also happens on another box which doesn't exhibit the error. Weird - no common denominator found yet.
WIndows and other OSs count by years. And Unix clones and macs count by days. SO Unix clones and macs had no Y2K problems. Why was everyone so scared?
On the Stroke of Midnight 1 January 2000, astonished onlookers gasped as the
World dramatically didn't end.
Rumour has it that one of the Four Horsemen had to go back to check that he hadn't left the kitchen light on. Others say that there was a Y2K bug in their alarm clock.
They'll be back, mark my words.
Now, where's my sandwich board?
The END is NIGH!
It is, really! Look, everyone can make a mistake, OK? We forgot to account for parallax when we were doing the entrail thing.
Why won't you believe me! It's true I tell you!
The END is NIGH!
Oi! Stop walking off when I'm talking to you...
I mentioned this phenomenon on the "Y2K pledge" thread. I call it a self defeating prophecy. Someone says "if we don't do something, X will occur by 2010." Then they do something about it and avert the problem. But somehow, when 2010 rolls around, you're gonna have a few cranks saying "You said X would happen by 2010, and here it is and it isn't happening. We've been had by hysterical fear mongerers out to make a buck!"
The problem is, when there is a serious catastrophy possible, no one is going to just write it in a sealed envelope so they can have bragging rights at the post apocolypse party. You do what needs done, then get no thanks after.
So for you who labored so that we could gloat, my greatest thanks. And hopefully I'll have a moment to write the Boston Globe a bitchy letter like you wouldn't believe for their "top of the webpage" story Was the Y2K bug a big ripoff?. Flaming assholes.
...will work for Chick tracts...
http://www.2600.com/mindex.html
This post has been certified Y2K complacent.
Wow, I just finished watching that. What an odd synchronicity.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
You can still get to 2600 through:
www.2600.com/mindex.html
Okay, scratch that. I wasn't paying attention to detail. I discovered that there was one important detail in the man page for mktime that I missed.
/* years since 1900 */
int tm_year;
In the above post, I assumed that tm_year was an absolute year number. That's what I get for not double-checking the man page. I should have remembered that UNIX system time starts in 1970, so year 0100 dates are an impossibility.
So yes, this is a y2k easter egg.
My post should have read like this:
What daliclock is doing is comparing the current system date/time to January 1st, 2000. It checks this each iteration through the main clock function. If the clock is set to a date earlier to this, it flags it. The next time through the loop, if the clock becomes set to a date equal to or greater than this (The y2k rollover), then it reverses the digit images.
So, if daliclock is running when your clock switches from Dec 31, 1999 to Jan 1 2000, it will flip. (literally). By design, so it doesn't actually "fail y2k".
To return to normal, just quit daliclock and restart it.
Busily extracting foot from mouth (keyboard?),
Eric
NetShadow
Looking at the source, the interesting code is in digital.c, starting on line 1261.
What daliclock is doing is comparing the current system date/time to Day 1, Year 100. It checks this each iteration through the main clock function. If the clock is set to this date or earlier, it flags it. The next time through the loop, if the clock becomes set to a date greater than this (day 1, year 100), then it reverses the digit images.
This is interesting.. Presumably it was used for debugging purposes during development at a point there were problems with the date being read into daliclock.
As a bonus, this causes daliclock to flip the image around if your clock ever gets set to a very early date (year 0, for example) and then set to something saner. This seems to be the "y2k failure" that has been observed, really just a symptom of the fact that your system clock is doing some strange thing, and not a bug in daliclock.
It would be trivial to comment out the aforementioned code and recompile, but if you clock is going back and forth between pre-y100 dates, then you have a bigger problem.
Eric
NetShadow
Please. Most overhyped event in years? If it were not hyped at or near the level it was, we would have seen disasters. Call it the most useful hype in years.
Kari Hurtta at the Finnish Meteorological Institute has been maintaining a patched version of Elm for a while; here's a page with his patches.
Say the software is only expecting dates from 1980 onwards. Then the Y2k bug hits and gives it a date of 1900. This figure is way out of the ballpark.
If the software is well written, it should see that this is the case and raise an error and maybe stop working. However, this is not always the case and maybe the software performs no check for a valid date - it simply takes whatever is passed to it - in this case, the year 1900.
Now because the date is so wrong to what the software is expecting, it may cause the software to act unpredictably - maybe it might write data to the wrong memory area, cause a stack overflow etc.
Bingo - the whole system malfunctions.
So the Y2k problem is not so much that the system uses dates, but that it also might cause a system with minimal error checking to behave unpredictably.
Field Marshall Stack dun said:
First off, it was a slow busy (literally as if half the connection had dropped); on my end the phone literally hung up, whilst on my dad's side the line was still on (in other words, it thought it still had a connection).
Secondly, I know how Bellsouth's lines tend to behave during busy traffic periods (for example, after the tornado that hit the Mt. Washington area); you will either get a fast busy or you will get a message stating all circuits are busy (I had tried to call my folks to let them know I was ok and making sure they were ok; they live close to Brooks, where the tornado touched down, and I was in the Mount Washington area where the tornado caused F4 damage around a mile northeast of us). Same for when we had a severe snowstorm in 1994 that knocked many of the power and phone lines down (people were asked to stay off the phones, and when the circuits got too busy you either got fast busy signals or "all circuits are busy" messages).
You did not get such funkiness as the phone line hanging up across HALF the connection (which is what it literally did), tying up the phone line to an extent it was impossible to connect to the other side till te circuit finally realised it had hung up on my end. Also, the slow busys were on attempts to RECONNECT; before 7 pm EST we had made a successful call to my husband's folks, and I had begun the call to my folks just before 7 pm EST (which was when the phone hung up and I got slow busy signals).
Furthermore, we had no problems after that point in trying to contact friends whom we were visiting for New Year's, at that.
Furthermore YET, this was at 7 pm EST, not at midnight EST. Nobody reported problems before that time, and I've heard of no problems (save for some stuff with international calls over Bellsouth's circuits, around midnight EST) after that time. It was just the momentary, two-minute hork RIGHT at 7 pm EST (which would be 0000 GMT 1 January 2000); that, and that alone (well, that combined with having witnessed a lot of Bellsouth incompetence and having had to deal with it firsthand to the point that every day I pray to God/Goddess/Cthulhu/[random deity here] that someone else comes in to break Hellsouth's monopoly on phone service--been trying to get bad lines fixed out here for over a YEAR which affect my entire apartment complex AND a major mall, and Bellsouth STILL refuses to admit it's their problem) that made me suspect it could've been a Y2K burp.
I'm prolly gonna check with my sister (who works at a telco) over the next few days to see what sorta funkiness could've caused those symptoms...I've certainly never had the phone lines behave like THAT, though. Not even in Bristol, TN during fall Winston Cup racing weekend (and trust me...it is pretty damned close to impossible to place a call in or out of Bristol on that weekend...even by pay phone, much less cell phones). :P
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
The small West African nation of Gambia has emerged as one of the only countries in the world to be seriously affected by power blackouts and other disruptions in the New Year.
The International Y2K Cooperation Centre, based in the US, says the Gambian energy sector experienced significant power outages while air and sea transportation, the financial sector and government services have been crippled.
Failures have been reported in the Gambian Treasury Department, the National Tax Service and at the Customs Service.
[More at URL...]
Just for spite I decided to turn on my laptop at about 11pm for a couple hours, simply because everyone was saying how "you should turn your computer off until after midnight!" Bah! Linux didn't care. Python didn't care. Emacs didn't care. So pffft! to them :P :)
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
That is not true for all computers. Many older and slower computers use BCD for dates and times. If you are programming an 8-bit microprocessor without hardware multiply/divide, it is easier and more efficient to use BCD. If you need to display or print the date/time, a BCD digit can be converted into an ASCII character with a single addition operation. BCD is also easier for humans who are examining hexadecimal core dumps and packet dumps. Serial time codes such as IRIG-B and NASA-36 are also in BCD format.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This illustrates a real problem in the software world, if you *really* need to know that something is going to work, it takes a tremendous effort to get there, and you're never really 100% sure you've got it right.
This problem isn't going to go away, even if the Y2K (and the 2038?) problems are declared dead issues.
(Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)
There are some reports filtering in on the
redhat-talk mailing list about PCs with older
BIOSes that are refusing to boot now.
Don't assume that everything is okay on your
box until after you've rebooted. If you wanted
to be really paranoid, you'd first check the
website of the company that made your mother
board, download any BIOS upgrades, and install
them before reboothing.
(Me, I upgraded my BIOS about a year ago, so I'll
probably just cross my fingers....)
I'm offended too. After working hard to ensure that my sites are Y2K compliant (prevention is better than cure) I now have to contend with a bunch of short-sighted managers saying that Y2K actually turned out to be a waste of resources.
The fact is that if we hadn't made the changes to our systems and infrastructure we would be in a real pickle now.
Oh well.... time to try to educate.
This is no Y2k bug, it's merely that your wtmp file has been rotated or wiped, so the last login is listed as the Unix Epoch (the date you state is precisely Thu Jan 01, 1970 at midnight UTC, i.e. the Unix Epoch).
It happens to me all the time (because I rotate my wtmp files faster than I should, I guess). Except that since I'm in the +0100 time zone, the date printed is more immediately recognizable as the Unix Epoch.
Well, all my messages going out via elm (my primary mailreader) are sent from the year 100. Great. I've got the word "fool" stamped on all my messages. And, there hasnt been an update for elm in ages. Is this thing an orphan?
Guess I have to dig into the code to save face.
I really appreciate it! I wish I could mod you up!
I thought about that response, and since it's a geek's primary responisbility to educate others (thus boosting his/her own self image), I didn't like my answer...
The 8080 used 8 bit words. The 8088 used 8 bit external bus and internally was 16 bit. Thus any interface it had with other hardware was 8 bit.
A lot of PLC equipment is still based on this standard. Thus the hardware (Input/Ouput cards) communicate with the main processor on an 8 bit backplane.
8 bits give you a maximum integer value of 255. Therefore a year like 1987 won't fit. The best you can do is save the last two digits (ie. 87).
The only fix to this problem was changing the hardware... no software fix available.
Make Sense?
(I guess I didn't want you to do the math after all.)
Even though you could see the digits at the base of the ball spell out "2000" before they lit up, I was desperately hoping that when midnight hit, they would actually light up "1900" instead.
/that/ joke.
/Everybody/ would get
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
(Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)
Me neither. Consider:
Suppose you have an automatic software validation system. It will require as input a specification of the correct behavoir of the software, in a formal language that it can parse. Rendering the specification into the formal language amounts to writing a program. How do you prove THAT is correct?
Therefore a general formal correctness prover is impossible. You micht be able to automatically prove that two expressions of a program are equivalent, or that a particular program matches a particular formal specification. But you can't prove that the program is "correct".
Which is not to say that such tools are useless. I have yet to see a method of testing a program that doesn't amount to expressing the program and/or its requirements in two languages - as distinct as possible - and then comparing the two. Typically this will be the code versus a human-readable spec, pseudocode, or profuse comments, and the comparison will be done by humans: a team of programmers or software QA engineers. The process might include code walkthroughs, writing and running automated tests, coverage analysis, etc. But an automated tool comparing code against a formal spec would be a very useful labor-saver, or an additional tool in the kit.
The important thing is that expressing the program in two distinct languages results in two distinct sorts of thinking as the two expressions are written. Most bugs tend to occur only in one of the thinking modes, and are thus exposed when the diverse expressions of the program are compared.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So Sun Dec 26 went down to Fry's with the wife and got a copy of Red Hat 6.1 and his-and-hers Compaq 5888s. (Didn't get monitors - had some old ones and am expecting a big price break on LCDs this spring.)
Loaded Linux onto mine on Mon and started configuring on Tue. Had to patch the ethernet driver to suport the diamond "homenet" / ethernet card. (Stock Red Hat driver is hardcoded to use it in the "homenet" mode - 10-base-T port dead and trying to do a 1Mbps link on the telephone wiring.) Winmodem is dead of course, I don't think the install found the DVD drive (though the CD/R is working), and the power button is software driven so I have to unplug it to shut it down until I get that configured, but it's close enough for now.
Reason for the migration: I'd been running my home network on an old Sparc with SunOS 4.1.3, and didn't want to drop mail on the floor. Hung an external modem on the serial port. Beat my head against sendmail.cf for a while. Taylor UUCP's automatic config file translator worked beautifully. Finally got it all working and cut over at 9:10 PM New Year's Eve. (Had also copied all the files from the SunOS to the new machine for safekeeping and salvage. Old disk was 2G and hitting the wall. Whole thing takes up Shut everything down (to guard against crossing-the-boundary bugs) and went out to party.
1/1/2000 turned things back on again - and discovered that shutting down had been the last straw for the old Mitac monitor. B-( Horizontal oscilator won't even start with the video in 640x480 mode. (Played musical monitors to check that the computer was OK.)
So back to Fry's and dropped another $400 plus tax on a new 19" Princeton Ultra95e. (NICE, SHARP display. Time to get new glasses so I can take advantage of it.)
The most annoying part, of course, is that SunOS 4.1.3 came up fine and said the date was Jan 1 2000. So it probably would have kept working well enough to handle the mail after all.
Oh, well. At least it gave me an excuse to cut the whole home network over to an Open Source OS and my workstation to a 700 Mhz Athlon.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
(Not an attack- I'm genuinely curious:)
Even on small systems like that, how could Y2K be a problem? Computers store numbers in binary, not decimal, and with the number of bits required to store two BCD digits (that is, 8) you could also store any number between 0 and 255 in a straight binary representation, which would put the Y2K threat on New Year's Day 2156. So why is it that the problem would have happened yesterday?
-jacob
To the people who say "See, Y2K was all bullshit!" :
:)
:)
If you're thinking Y2K was all hype and a load of crap, etc, then you obviously had nothing to do with it or only experienced your own small part. As usual, in these kind of cases, extrapolation to the "whole world" from your small experience is incorrect!
Over the past two years, I worked at the corporate level for a major telecoms company, a state government transport department (trains, buses, etc), a major insurer, a union and a medical education institute. I also advised numerous clients and even wound up digging into software I'd written "on the side." (YUK!
All I can say is that had we done nothing, the phones would have slowly ground to a halt, billing would have been screwed, premiums incorrect, etc etc. Y2K was real and it was only the efforts put in that have resulted in the "anticlimax" that we have experienced to date.
Don't forget, it's still early days yet. Small to medium business hasn't returned from holidays, the Leap Year is still to be passed, end of Financial Year calculations, etc etc etc. The show isn't over and won't be for some time. We still also have the Unix/C epoch date (2038 - yes?) and fixes for all those "windowed" solutions (eg: = 30 = 1999) - what happens in 20 years when that code is still in use?
'Scuse the ranting - just that it burns me a bit to see all the "Told ya so's!"...
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
that behaviour in xdaliclock looks more like a planted easteregg than an actual bug... the behaviour really is bizarre. i doubt it's a malfunction.
on that note, did anyone find any "strange" behaviour in other programs? i was expecting windows to do something strange, but apart from crashing as usual, it seems normal. anyone find any other y2k easter eggs in other programs?
Fross
My parent's 486's BIOS has a problem with Y2K. I can set the year in the BIOS, via DOS prompt, or via Windows and it will report the date as 2094 upon booting. Oh well, I'll write a ASM program that will run on bootup...
That's an interesting observation.
How is one supose to tell, exactly, if the one-a-day-BSOD is y2k related or not?
For what it's worth, I got a phone call from my uncle who left a message on my machine at a little past midnight last night, telling me that his windows box 'has that blue screen again' and asked if he should wait till the next day to reboot.
_________________________
Three cable TV systems in Alabama failed at the stroke of midnight.
The wait for tech support doubles every 18 months... Any likelihood they can solve your problem halves. Foosters
I was so sick of people saying the definitely nothing would go wrong and everything would be fine. Sure in the end that was the case - but that is with hindsight and after all the effort that was put in beforehand.
Looking at the posts about various systems still up and running, many of them seem to be of the sort: "Hey, Windows/Linux/whatever is still running on my desktop - bah, I knew that the Y2k bug was all hype."
Having worked in both the engineering and enterprise IT industries, I have worked with many many large systems, and you are right redtoade, many systems are old and archaic ... and also essential in the day to day operation of the business.
Collegues who have worked with me in the past year on the Y2k problem anticipated that the transition would be a fizzer (ie quiet) after all the work that they had done, but no-one would be so naive to claim that Y2k was all hype.
These comments come from guys on the front line. Most people don't have this experience and extrapolate their limited experience to the rest of the world - ie. it was easy to check my system, the rest of the world will be fine.
As redtoade pointed out, many systems failed during testing and it is only through all the preventative efforts that there were no problems on the night.
How anyone could certain that nothing would go wrong is beyond me. Sure, one could be quietly confident (especially after all the effort that was put in), but to be absolutely certain?!? I still shake my head at the number of people who think that the Y2k bug was all scam and groundless hype.
Well, it seems the worst that happened with me and Y2K (besides the 19100 bug on several sites--right now that seems to be the most common bug, which is probably a Good Thing) was a rather odd little hiccup that occured around midnight GMT (I'm in Eastern time, btw)...
I'm calling my folks to let them know I'm off and to wish them early Happy New Year's and all that so they don't get all worried about Y2K and all.
Upon which--mysteriously--the phone hangs up. I try redialing for a good five minutes. Phone line is busy (really damn weird...because my folks have call waiting, and the LAST time the phone line gave busies there was when the tornado hit in the Brooks/Mt. Washington area just south of Louisville in 1995).
I finally get through..."Dad, did you hang up?" "No...I thought YOU hung up..." Both of us are counting this down to a momentary fart on the part of Bellsouth Kentucky, aka the one phone company in English-speaking North America that makes US Worst actually look good. :)
"Bellsouth reporting no problems", my arse. :) At least in Kentucky, I'm fairly sure the phone lines did hiccup...then again, the phone lines are generally wonky here... :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
I bet this made a few people's hearts beat faster when it happened.
I'm with you ... I didn't have to do any ASM recoding this year, but I have to agree with your stance. Many people have asked me if Y2K was over hyped. I usually say 'yes and no' -- that is, it wasn't hyped enough to get businesses to react as quickly as they should have (upper management) but it was hyped too much as an end of the world scenario (bunkers and food stores and the like).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Last login: Wed Dec 31 1969 19:00:00 -0500
Unfortunately, you can't fool uptime:
12:32pm up 46 days, 21:03, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
I was stuck at work during the rollover, and the only real problem we had was a fax server thinking that it was in the year 1899. And the countdown screensaver we've had for more than two years finally crashed.
Y2K World Dispatches
Y2K Security Tracker
One of my favorites from the World Dispatches was:
---------
Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?
---------
There is no try at jedinite.com
For those of us that had to work Dec 31, y2k is real.
In the sense that:
All phones now forward to bosses office.
For somewierd reason random computers had thier bios changed to longer recognize the hard drive.
You now have the best chair in the office.
Various settings on computers are screwed up.
You have uninstalled solitare on bosses computer (going to enjoy him debating wether to ask tech to reinstall just so he play game and look like a fool or just sit there)
Quake III is now what loads if you click on any shortcut (in WinNT)
The clocks are all an hour slow.
People have random meetings scheduled in there planners that they left on the desks.
Backgrounds on monitors show the boss and his secretery... involved in a rare act that his wife would kill to find out.
So bosses out there... the lowly computer programmers you made work Dec 31 - New Years Day... Have gotten thier revenge... muahahhahahhaha
(currently figuring out to change building security code)
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
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Pretty odd, eh?
--Mike--
With false american pride I ask . .
Here we go:
From the Auckland International Airport Limited we have this little date jem:
Y2K Update
Dated 02:58 1 Jan 100
Auckland Airport Confirms Business as Usual
From the bury-your-head-in-the-sand-till-it-goes-away dept., we have this one from audiusa.com
Sorry, we have temporarily disabled this module. "While Audiusa.com is fully prepared for Y2K and beyond, we wanted to keep our databases clear of the millennium madness everyone seems to be talking about.
From www.tvtoday.de/tv we have this little assending date snafu jem:
Samstag, 01.01.100
Then from the people at pleaseread.com we have another assending date from hell: ;)
Saturday, January 01, 19100
Award-winning text-to-speech software applications utilizing
the best technologies in the world.
(Editors note: Best technology? they can't count to 99
And from the make-it-stop-make-it-stop dept.
we find AllAdvantage.com thinks the best way to comply is to not partisipate:
Happy Y2K from AllAdvantage.com!
As a precautionary measure, we've disconnected our servers from the Internet and are watching the millennial date change from the sidelines.
Most of these small errors (19100) are caused by one small piece (printf("19%d", tm->tm_year);) of sloppy code (as previously posted on /.). While these little didbits make for a good laugh, I'm happy to see that non of them add up to the 'show stopper' everyone has been hyping. Happy New Year!
_________________________
Anyone else notice the countdown error during the ball drop in times Square? As they started counting down minutes and seconds, it would display 15:01, 14:00, 14:59. It did this all the way to midnight. And Sam Donaldson said nothing was wrong.
I'm kind of offended at the tons of posts saying:
"NOTHING HAPPENED!!! See, I told you so."
I'm sure all the IT and CompSCI people out there weren't really worried about any Y2K stuff... but we control systems engineers (level 1 production types) were terrified of it.
Anxious as we were, we tried to get management to fund an inspection of all systems... and since management is usually made up of non-geek types, there was no way to squeeze a penny out of them for what they felt was unneeded computer work.
BUT, thank God for all of the Y2K hype!!! If management hadn't seen Dan Rather explaining (in small terms) what the possibilities for Y2K were, we wouldn't have received time and funding to inspect our systems.
So after 7 or 8 of my clients found 85% of their systems to NOT function after a clock change to Y2K, we spent MILLIONS of dollars this year to fix them PRIOR to the actual event. These weren't Intel based processors mind you... these were Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and older Distributed Control Systems (DCSs), some even based on Z80 and 8080 technology. The industrial/manufacturing world is still decades behind in it's control systems... so while you guys are lounging in your linux alphas... we're still doing machine code.
I guess what I'm saying is Y2K was VERY REAL for us... and you can thank the thousands of engineers, technicians and programmers who fixed the problems BEFORE THEY HAPPENED for a very quiet new year's eve.
Happy New Year everyone.