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Apocalypse Not
"Why did we fall for this hype?" e-mailed one member of a Year 2000 online discussion group. "I feel cheated, betrayed, misused, abused, deceived and everything else!"
It's a good question, and it was being asked all over the Internet, and in much of the world. Were we duped or saved?
There were minor equipment failures at a handful of hospitals and nuclear plants. Financial industry employees around the world completed their second day of testing and said they encountered few, if any problems, and anticipate little trouble when U.S. markets opened today.
This after an incalculable drumbeat of alarm, hysteria and wild speculation. For sure, genuine problems had surfaced, and hats off to the planners, programmers and engineers who spent the past few years fixing them. But the reality was wildly divergent from the hysteria that preceded it. If anything, the Y2K obsession suggested just how central technology has become to much of the world, and just how little even the so-called experts really know about it or how it works.
By this morning, it was no longer clear whether Y2K was a miracle or a disgrace.
Friday afternoon, a wave of e-mail and reporters in Australia and New Zealand signalled the fizzling of one of the biggest stories in the history of technology. By Friday night, bored and bewildered TV reporters were broadcasting live from someplace called the Y2K International Co-Operation Center, but they had no news to report, and by midnight, some federal workers could be seen dozing at their terminals. The FAA Control Center in Virginia had giant screens showing thousands of airborne blips moving peacefully to their planned destinations. There were some heart-monitors down in Swedish hospitals, a U.S. Army cash register malfunctioning in Okinawa, and slot machines in Delaware out for a few hours. A spy satellite went on the fritz for awhile.
Otherwise, in an act of spectacular defiance, even heroism, tens of millions of people all over the earth gathered in urban centers to celebrate the new century. They did not stockpile food and water, as they were advised to by many newspapers, TV stations, government agencies, and local Red Cross chapters. They did not hoard cash. Much more than their pundits or elected leaders, they put their faith in technology.
They celebrated the new century with a defiant global outpouring of optimism and faith. As was the case 100 years ago, technology was a central theme of the century change, from the Millenial Dome in England to the techno-themed ferris wheels rotating along the Champs Elysee in Paris. A curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it's ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration.
The big news may be that people don't really have to rely on bureaucrats and journalists anymore -- a reason, maybe, why they were so calm and happy. More than 6 million people logged onto New Zealand websites to learn for themselves early Friday that the Y2K had arrived without harm or injury. This good news was followed on the Net from East to West all day long.
"Was the threat of technology failure overstated?," asked the New York Times on Sunday, "or did spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fix things avert a catastrophe?"
Most engineers and programmers seemed to agree that there were, in fact, real problems associated with Y2K bugs, and that real trouble had been averted by the billions spent globally to upgrade and de-bug.
But it also seems obvious that Y2K problems were wildly exaggerated, online and off.
Modern media are almost continuously irrational when it comes to covering technology. The Internet has given the off-line world a rolling nervous breakdown, from which it has yet to recover. For much of the past year, TV stations, networks and newsmagazines sounded a steady stream of alarms about Y2K - the very term became a household world.
Last week Wired News, irked by all the greatest -hits lists emerging about the 20th century, offered a refreshing look at a "century of spectacular failure" from the Titanic to World Wars I and II, the Challenger launch and Chernobyl. They called their report "A Century of Spectacular Failure," citing one techno-disaster after another.
It was a healthy antidote to all the heavy breathing. This past century, we were assured by journalists and politicians, was also going to end unhappily, in a nightmare of collapsing programs, off-line banks and utility and transportation programs.
Countless individual humans pulled us back from that supposed abyss. There were no spectacular failures. They got the 21st century off to a great start.
But the biggest Y2K question looms even larger this morning than it did on Friday. Was the Y2K scare real? Was it a catastrophe averted or invented? Jump on in:
The only thing Y2K did was cost me a night of sleep, as I had to work (as I'm sure many of you did).
Yes, some things would have failed had people not prepared. No, I don't think the world would have ended, or even close to it. 'Better safe than sorry' is what I'm hearing from those who advocated those huge Y2K budgets today.
The really funny thing is, IT spending is expected to rise AGAIN this year, after all of the (some wasted) dollars spent on the 'Y2K Bug' (it wasn't a bug, it was a feature!).
I just want to catch up on my sleep now...
Actually, it is a bit early to celebrate the Y2K worldwide computer crash as a non event. Wait until the end of the month when invoices are due to be paid etc. Especially in the field of small and medium enterprises there might be a few nasty surprises lurking in their Foxpro databases dating from the early 90's. If enough of them have their bookkeeping systems going on their knees some funny chain reactions might go on. Or may not, after all. Basically, we don't know yet.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Most engineers and programmers seemed to agree that there were, in fact, real problems associated with Y2K bugs, and that real trouble had been averted by the billions spent globally to upgrade and de-bug.
But it also seems obvious that Y2K problems were wildly exaggerated, online and off.
This is Y2K summed up. Nothing more need be said. Not that that'll stop anyone.
(lol: sarcasm; satire)
I think the marketing folks around the world saw the Y2K "probelm" as just another way for them to make a fortune. Did anybody happen to go into Barnes & Noble on the 30th? I did, and there were lines of 20 people waiting to buy one of those cheesy "y2k: end of the world" books written by someone who knew absolutely nothing about computers, much less the truth behind y2k.
=======
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Just like Fox Mulder conspiracy theorists need something to believe and Y2k was it.
Y2k was just an unrealized, untested house of cards anyway. I personally know of one person who quit thier stable job and moved out int the rural countryside because they thought that the apocalypse. They bought a residence and stockpiled on all sorts of things including a generator and lots of what? *looks at audience* guns. Quite sterotypical and quite literally the truth.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
But what can you expect from an almost 10 year old underpowered beast running Wfw?
It still sends email, but with a 1980 date, which is kind of amusing, but I certainly wouldn't want to try to do anything financial with it.
Y2K was real, and the geeks saved the day, though the potential impact was probably overblown.
George
Gee, I bet there are some really bitter survivalists out there somewhere in there bomb shelters with a years worth of canned baked beans. I love america!
I don't think it's hard to say that some company invented this whole Y2K fear as a cheap shot at getting exposure. Sure, there was a problem from the original coders but it was blown way out of proportion - and that's not hard to see.
I don't think we could expect anything else though, companies are in the business to gain a large audience by a shock factor, and basically doing what they do to make money.
_____________________________________
sortakinda.ca | canadian paraphrasing.
In that way, its just like the market for computer virus protection, except Y2K can only happen once, whereas the virii market keeps on and on.
Actually, the world did come to a screaching halt as the clocks struck midnight at the end of 1999. The shock was so great that everyone was instantly sent into a deep hypnotic state of shock in which we have hallucinated that everything is find, with only a few minor glitches on periphial systems.
Any day now, we will begin to wake up to find that our world is in ruins, and that hardly anything is working. We have no electricity, no water, no food, no computers, and no Internet connection.
Mike Eckardt meckardt@spam.yahoo.com
I've already seen problems. My mother's notebook computer reset to 1900 in the BIOS and 1980 in Windows 95. Meanwhile at work, an NT Machine with an external Parallel ZIP drive now crashes when the ZIP drive is connected... guess I'll need to download the latest drivers for it.
--Bahamlabs
Hey. 1 K is 1024 Bytes right? Well, doesn't that make Y2K the year 2048? Is there still a disaster ahead!!
-JJ
Beans.
The biggest problem with the Y2K thing (and a lot of other looming computer disasters) is that if we do our jobs right, nobody will ever know a thing. More to the point, nobody will ever have any idea how big the problem could've been. Folks are used to 'real' disasters like hurricanes, where the threat is real and exists independent of its effects. With computer disasters (and most technology created or averted) the threat only materializes when disaster strikes.
In fact, as of Monday no human being was known to have died or been injured - or truthfully, even significantly inconvenienced - as the result of any computer-related problem at the end of the century.
So you don't consider spending an entire night in a hot room (AC is turned off at 6) waiting for nothing to happen a SIGNIFICANT INCONVENIENCE?!? Gee, I wish I had known that earlier, or I would have paid you $5 to sit there for me so I could go out and have some fun that night.
Mycroft-X
Y2K is a result of early computers being designed to only record dates as two digits for the year. Now that most of the machines are set up using four digit year fields, Y2K is not too serious of a problem. But what happens when we roll over to 5 digit years? Will our computers be able to handle the new dates, or will everyone suddenly think that we are back at year 0? This is a serious problem, and we better start thinking about it. There are only 8000 years remaining until Y10K!
Mike Eckardt meckardt@spam.yahoo.com
I have been working on this problem in one of the largest financial institutions in the nation, and let me tell you that you're kidding yourself if you think y2k was a hoax. yes, the media and some individuals over-rated the event by even talking about the world ending, but this was indeed a very serious problem.
i have seen what happened during the early tests, when systems with production environments were launched ahead into 2000.... most just quit working, quite simply.
I really wish there was some way to show these people who are calling the event a hoax the parallel universe on 1/3/2000 that did not invest the money in fixing this problem! I'm sure they'd change their tune.
the credibility of this is that it is coming from a techie who is immersed in the systems, and not from some media idiot, or some manager-type who wants to look good...
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
And the rioting is getting dangerously close! Just kidding. It's difficult to get a handle on how widespread the problem was because over the coruse of 1988 and 1999, companies were not broadcasting "We had tons of serious bugs, but we fixed them." Now that it's all over and the companies look ok, maybe true confessions will start to emerge...
Since the media seems to be hopping on the "stupid geeks, working us up over nothing" bandwagon, despite the fact that they were the ones spilling hype themselves, it only seems natural what will follow next. The next major forseen disaster will go unacknowledged. We'll jump and cry and scramble to get things in working order, but the media will dismiss it as "crying wolf" again, and only the employers with the most vision and foresight will think to fund any emergency efforts.
;-)
That's the problem with things being fixed and going well; there doesn't appear to be a problem at all. If Hitler was killed before he rose to power, no one would realize the crisis averted, because millions of people might not have died. Ours is a culture that thrives on villians, not heros. Horror movies get hundreds of sequels, but hero-central films are lucky to get a few. So rather than praising the computer community for taking care of a potentially dangerous issue, we're going to be seen as freaks who overreact.
Almost makes you wish the power HAD gone out
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
while i agree that a lot of the y2k problem thing was a bit overhyped by
clueless media. (i guess more in u.s. then here in europe) but i think it
would be wrong to ridicule people who made careful but sane perpetrations
just in case... (all i did was buy one extra six pack of beer - just in
case). (and it is not clear yet weather or not the logistic software at the
supermarket or the brewery does not have any problems. i suspect there will
be more glitches with application software then with system programs).
well the point is: it is wrong to ridicule the people who made
preparations as much as it is wrong to ridicule people who use safety belts
in the car or wear a helmet on their bicycle. most of the time you will not
need the safety belt. you can drives somewhere and nothing bad will happen if
you do not wear it. you can drive tomorrow and you can probably drive 10
years without any problem. but someday you might have a bad car crash and
the safety belt will safe your life.
the y2k preparations are the same: we all knew (at least the techies amoung us) that major problems where
not all to likely but no one was able to estimate if the odds for some major
problem is 0.1% or 1% or 0.01% or 10% in any case i would say that the
chances where at least higher then those of you having a car crash tomorrow.
still we use safety belts.
plus: we have no way to find out what would have happened if people did not
check their systems throughout.. there was one power plant in vienna that is
said that it would have failed if it would not have been checked... (and
what could have happened when it would have failed: the guy in the power
plant calls anther guy to bring up some spare plant and this guy is not
prepared for that and makes an error and then there are 2 plants that are
not there and suddenly a power outage that causes problems elsewhere and this
causes problems elsewhere.. the nature of y2k is that it can be like domino
stones: if small problems occur at systems that are not critical nothing
much happens. if a few small problems occurred at some critical points then
all our infrastructure might have fallen down like domino stones in a raw..
so really: i don't think it is fair to ridicule the people who made
preparations..
gretings from vienna, austria.
mond.
Nothing happened. OK, I think the media needs to invent a new news story now. I'm getting sick of all this hype. I was atleast hoping for a riot or a plane crash or something. Oh well.
Where I work, Cisco, we found a few Y2K related bugs in the early stages of the Y2K project. As the months went by we found other non-Y2K bugs that we fixed while we were at it.
IMHO, that's the major benefit of all this hysteria. IT guys (like me) were given time to look at our systems and fix anything that they found.
Okay, I didn't like spending the night here at work but it wasn't all bad. We had food and games to keep us busy while we were waiting for the clock. Now, the systems are better off because of the effort we put into testing and fixing code.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Now what am I going to do with all that ammo? http://www.apocalypsenot.com/
As someone who has been working on Y2K in the financial industry for the last 3 years I can honestly say that there were alot of problems out there. I don't know how many person hours were spent in our company alone to fix, test, refix and retest all the possible scenarios to ensure our customers suffered no loss of service or assets.
The fact that there were no problems atests to the amount of work and sheer sweat that technical teams around the world put into averting any disasters in all the industries, be it financial, utility, or government just to name a few. For the media (who in my opinion are responsible for the doomsday hype in the first place, not the geeks fixing it) to jump on the "Was it just a scam to grab more tax dollars?" bandwagon is just sheer hypocrisy. Good news doesn't sell papers. Conspiracy theories and money scams certainly do.
I personally think we should all give ourselves a pat on the back and then forget about Y2K. Move on to bigger and better things in the coming future.
Just a thought.
It'll be interesting to see if an occurance so incredibly hyped by the media, just not happening like this will help the masses realize just how uniformed their informers are. How many times does the media have to be entirely wrong before people stop listening. Especially in regards to technology.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Click Here to get Ed Yourdon's assessment of the Y2K situation. Ed is a noted software engineer, author of "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" and one of the more influential Y2K doom-n-gloomers.
Just pick up a book and try to read it. Or better yet try to meet new friends or anything else that you don't usually do. This will cause the potential for some process stopping biofeedback.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Now that it turns out there was no disaster, my local newspaper (St Paul Pioneer Press) is wondering if all those billions of dollars needed to be spent in preparation.
There was no disaster BECAUSE those billions were spent, idjits.
---
120
chars is barely sufficient
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
I think the good news about Y2K is that good engineering is more widespread than we thought. I'm not a pro by the standards of this community, but I write enough math-oriented C code to see 'overflow error' and know what it means. When I see it, funny thing, my computer doesn't crash. I have to quit, edit and recompile, but I don't have to reboot. I chalked that up to good engineering. The system recognized that something went wrong, but that did not slow down its normal funcioning. As I understand it, Y2K was a potential overflow error - an increasing number would suddenly drop in value because of a limited storage space. So yes, I was worried about Y2K, but primarily I was worried about bad engineering. I was concerned that a badly-designed chip somewhere crucial might become useless because it didn't know what to do with an error flag. What did I do personally against Y2K? Stocked up for a bad winter. Hey, I just moved to DC from Phoenix, I needed to do that anyway.
I think what bothered some of us was the initial response to our warnings about the problem. Government seemed to respond with a collective shrug at first, the corporate boneheads couldn't grasp it either. We knew that it was a big mess to clean up and that there wasn't time to waste.
I think that if it weren't for the Gary Norths stirring up Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, things might not have been fixed as soon as they were.
slashdot broke my sig
2000 was anticlimactic. I was hoping that something would happen, even if the power just flickered. Someone should have just flicked the power off in New York for a couple seconds as a joke (OK, so it might have caused mass panic for a couple seconds, but it would be pretty funny).
The real question is will 2000 bring any change in the worldwide mindset, or will we just stay the same with the collective mind in the gutter?
Your village called: Their idiot is missing.
Well, the US did not instantly turn into Somalia last night; New World Order "storm troopers" did not foment riots on Time's Square; and Mad Max type survivalists are not yet careening down my street here in the sticks, pillaging houses at random and taking all the fertile women.
....
:-) - a BIG, and risky short term run-up in most stock indexes due to Y2K relief and euphoria, followed by a major blowoff (bear market). This economic distortion is probably the current single biggest risk. I think this contention is valid because expectation and 'irrational exuberance' and not technical nor value indicators have governed our markets for several years. I know how I felt when my partner and I were toasting New Year's last night as we watched every time zone go by with no problems, no terrorism --- massively relieved! I was expecting MUCH worse at least in terms of terror from the 'fatwah' crowd, and nothing. Multiply that attitude across the entire economy and you will have a MAJOR 'pop'.
OK, so everything's "cool" for now. My opinions
- Have been reading commentary in various online papers stating in effect, was Y2K remediation money wasted? My take - "bulls***"! - NO, the fact that everything went smoothly around the world was testament to timely preparation. But this type of second guessing is so similar to corporate life in IT! If there's no crisis when someone does their job well, everyone around them clucks that they 1) wasted their time and someone else's money by "being too careful" and 2) the care taken was unnecessary. Anyone who states that Y2K remediation was unnecessary is either a complete idiot, uninformed, or an ambulance chasing lawyer. I think, JUST THIS ONCE, a united effort to fix a pervasive major problem was successful.
- What of the vast Y2K survivalist preparation cottage industry? Expect MAJOR bargains in freeze dried food in the coming year. Likewise for slightly used generators (as with most excessive Y2K preparation, a generator purchased in anticipation of Y2K power outage is idiocy, like you're going to keep a 200 gal. tank of gasoline in your basement? Yup!)
- Likewise, the dead trees publishing industry has wasted major quantities of wood-pulp on apocalyptic publications which will be destined for "Half Price Books" or your favorite remaindered book reseller. My question: are these books simply trash or could a decent library of Y2K related publications be considered collectible in 10-20 years? I am thinking the latter because most Y2K books, etc will go straight to the trash, as a burr in the side of anyone who paid good money for em. Finding mint copies of these books in 2015 might be as rare as a mint #1 edition of "Mad Magazine" is today.
- Back to Y2K preparation bargains - how about survivalist lots in the sticks? I wonder how many people went into hock and headed for the hills? Wonder what the foreclosures could be like for lots and houses in remote areas purchased with heavy mortgages and small down payments with little thought to paying them off? This might be an *excellent* time to look at rural acreage.
Now, the BIG issues - IT and the general economy... Even though the general economy is not just IT, I think that the general economy *has* been heavily influenced by the 'holding one's breath' aspect of Y2K anticipation, IE, IT and the general economy have probably been synchronized somewhat in terms of anticipation and dread.
The economy, and particularly the stock market, may well *take off like a rocket* at least for the first month of this year. Optimism and relief over no major Y2K problems will drive it. I suspect that, regardless of the current nutty high P/E ratios and valuations, a lot of investors have actually sidelined themselves in cash looking to see what will happen. THEN we may have a MAJOR blowoff.
Some economists have stated that we may get a recession out of Y2K due to delayed effects upon smaller companies. We may have big surprises in store, but I am guessing not - that problems will crop up gradually, be recognized gradually as most operational problems have been diagnosed day to day, and fixed as they happen. So no big deal.
Again, what I am personally expecting - I am no psychic nor do I play one on infomercials
The hype strikes me, now, as a negative-fulfillment feedback loop. It's a lot like the virus scares. In general (not always), the more noise you hear about a given virus BEFORE it goes off, the less damage it will do.
:)
:)
The really devastating failures are the ones that take you by surprise. If we hadn't done anything -- if everyone had poopoohed the idea of a Y2K failure, it's likely that there would have been catastrophic failures, and people would have died.
However, as I was telling people all the way along, the distribution networks wouldn't break down. If necessary, most places can still do things on paper if they have to. There's no way that Safeway (a grocery store out West here) is going to let their shelves get bare. It's not like the goods and products suddenly ceased to be manufactured. And if manufacture of some goods were to stop for a few days, it wouldn't create more than a ripple -- a bit of economic damage, perhaps, but nobody was going to starve to death. The one intelligent thing I heard suggested was to stockpile 10 gallons of water per person, as there were some last-minute worries about the water supply. Water is something you need NOW. Anyone can live without food for a week. It's a bit uncomfortable, but you won't die.
That said, the Y2037 bug in Unix has me worried. In 37 years, there won't be very many people left that really understand the fundamental architectures of today's machines, and you can bet that plenty of today's machines will still be in service, faithfully performing the jobs they were designed to do. By then, our networks will be very very complex, interrelated to an astonishing degree, and individual failures will be able to have far greater ripple effects than they can today. Y2037 might well be a disaster. It certainly wouldn't destroy civilization (unless it was tottering on the brink to begin with), but it could take years to recover from the systems crashes.
2037, for those of you who are non-Unix folks, is when the Unix counter for time overflows on 32-bit machines. Unix machines measure time in seconds elapsed since 1970, using a 32-bit counter, meaning they can only go to 4 billion seconds or so. 2037 is when 4 billion seconds will have passed, and an awful lot of today's machines are going to be VERY confused at that rollover. 64-bit machines shouldn't be affected for 4 billion times longer than that -- in other words, by using 64 bits to track seconds with, a machine could outlive our Sun without getting confused about the date. Just shooting from the hip, I think 64 bits' worth of seconds ought to be about 240 billion years. That's quite awhile.
Personally, if I am still alive, I plan to come out of retirement in about 2034 to start fixing all those old machines, and I plan to make a bloody mint.
"In 1967, you thought we were a bunch of clueless propeller heads. In 1997, you learned better.
"Y2K Consultants, Inc: It's Time to Pay Up (tm)"
(stolen from Entrepeneur, an older-but-fun game at www.stardock.com.)
I think that the world as a whole was extremely well prepared for Y2K. All this hype was indeed enough to prepare the world for what could have been a disaster. I think the hype was warranted because Y2K could not have only been a disaster, but one we could have averted. The key thing is that we DID AVERT IT. I am very grateful for everyone who has made Y2K a smooth ride. The human race couldn't let itself fall down that quickly...
the real at&t mix
The reason we had so few problems was that an unprecedented amount of effort was put forward to proactively fix the problem before it could become catastrophic. Clearly underdeveloped nations are less computerized and were therefor less vulnerable, but in the developed world this had the potential to really be unpleasant.
The irony is that, were it not for those dire warnings early on that got us all off of our asses and fixing our code for the new century, we probably would not be sitting so happy today. Some of the people enduring the greatest mockery (no, not the idiots sitting in their bunkers) are in many cases the most unsung hero's of 1999. We used a few ounces of prevention in '99 and cured a whole lot of poundage of difficulties for 2000, and it shows with how smoothly the new year actually went.
As it was, when I went to get my usual $200 for the weekend from the ATM, the bank limited me to $60, obviously fearing a run on their cash reserves. Irritating, but not a real issue (I'll get more out today to last the rest of the week). I'm sure there will be other minor irritants as the new year drags on, but the major issues appear to have been identified, addressed, and successfully resolved.
Just because we managed to hit the breaks in time to avoid going over the cliff doesn't mean the cliff wasn't there.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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
Reminds me of the exams I studied hard for in college. After aceing (sp??) the test, my first reaction was always that I didn't need to study so hard for it. However, would it have been so easy had I not prepared? Would "The Event" have been so uneventful had the world not prepared so diligently for the past couple of years? Granted, stories of the complete breakdown of society always seemed far-fetched, but the hype behind Y2K may have forced businesses to thoroughly prepare for it and avert potential problems. My biggest problem with the whole New Year event is the sticker placed on a loaf of bread at my local supermarket labelling it "Y2K essential stock".
The whole Y2K thing was created IMHO to increase worldwide technology sales. A flurry of Y2K compliance buying happened and tons of major tech firms got piles and piles of money from it. People stockpiled food, thusly agricultural companies boomed. Now, roll in the quasi-millennium celebration and the resultant hysteria is enough to make any person with a Willpower of 6 or less fly into a Frenzy of buying food and everything else. Thousands of retailers and their "Millennium Sales" and "Last Chance This Millennium" deals capitalized on human ignorance. Even MTV perpetuated the mass stupidity at every turn with such things as "The Last Music Video Awards This Millenium." What? You're not going to do it again next year? Dang, I liked watching those. Oh well, I have no control over it.
.cig - what you do after winning a good flame war
Surely you get paid the standard overtime mandated by federal law or else some people are breaking it.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Y2K problem was not only hype. If nothing has been done catastrophe would appear and the world eventually would return to the XVII century. But Many consulting firms, analysts and programmers exaggerated the problems and the quantity of time necessary to eliminate the bug.
But I think the real villains are the media and the journalists. How a person could talk or write about a subject which he don't know? Journalist profession must be rethinked. I believe it even don't exist. The best person to be a journalist is a specialist in the area in whick he writes. In the economy section we put an economist, in the political section a sociologist, in the tech section a engineer or physicist. A person who know nothing about everything is as useless as a penguim in the tropics!
"Learning, learning, learning - that is the secret of jewish survival" -- Ahad A'Ham
The way I see it, what happened was that the people/geeks that understood the problem said "Here's what might happen in a worst-case scenario" and all the media types (who know that bad news sells WAY better than good news) said "Here's what will probably happen" (which morphed in some cases to "Here's what will happen").
No Y2K problems? Think again. This one looks rather serious to me: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-0 1/02/135l-010200-idx.html
...while camping out in the desert, no less!
Nuthin' serious -- just an amusing glitch in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park's computerized campsite registration system. My campsite registration receipt informed me that I could occupy my campsite until March 10, 1988.
Aside from that, nothing out of the ordinary for 1/1/2000 -- the scenery was beautiful, the sun was warm, and the beer was cold.
I would love to see the media which helped hype this y2k issue so much go and reinterview those doomsayers and ask what happened to their end of the world predictions. Of course according to the doomsayers God had it all under control. Excuse me a month ago they were sayng God is going to destroy the world. Let the media reaped what it sowed and take a dump on this issue like they should they were part of the probloem and nowhere near the solution
I live down in the South, where there was true honest-to-God Y2K near-panic. For example, I went to Wal-Mart on the 31st, and the place was packed. The only parking was half a mile away. I go in, and I see all sorts of people in camoflauge taking two or three carts around filled with canned goods. They have a cart full of bottled water, and throw some ammo in there. I got out of there as soon as possible. Also, a good friend of mine who I believed was quite reasonable when it came to Y2K was stockpiling food and (believe it or not) Cokes. 4 assembled cabinets full of soup and Dinty Moore Beef Stew, and they bought out the local supermarket's entire supply of soda (I saw it). I did everything you were not supposed to do for Y2K--car had 1/4 of a tank, no bottled water, not a ton of food, and I left my computers on for it. And I'm here today!
Well, it's probably safe to say there will be
no disaster but I imagine lots of strange things will pop up in the coming weeks and months.
Awww...the media didn't get their disaster..:`(``
:)
Not because I was worried that computers would crash, but because I was worried that the hype itself would cause panic among uninformed people. A person is smart, people are stupid.
If something small was to go wrong (ie. power outage), I was afraid that the people around me would assume that the end was nigh.
I am sure glad they did not. Now I have a nice supply of water and ammo, a shortwave radio, and a bunch of really good flashlights, things I should have around anyway. -Donut
My Ohio Savings bank account says that it's year 100. Every time I attempt an online transaction it says - Date too far in the future. Believe me, when you can't get money from your bank it's a crises.
At Salt Lake Community College, none of the staff can do any work at the moment because all routers and servers are turned off. Okay, actually that was on purpose. So I'm experiencing the effects of a "Y2K bug bug", or hysteria over the predicted fallout.
The Y2K bug inconvenienced me and a lot of people in my office here at a telecommunications company in Austria, when our billing system interface started showing the year as "100" today, which, when the data was attempted to be saved, caused either a crash or a bunch of annoying error messages.
(This is probably because "struct tm" (man 3 ctime) uses the year field as number of years after 1900 and the interface wants to display the year with two digits and just uses tm_year directly without taking into acocunt Y2K).
Anyway we found out pretty quickly that we just needed a new version of the interface that we already had but the office was in a panic over here for a while.
I can also tell you by looking at all the fixes we got for Sybase and HP software to make them Y2K compliant, that there were quite a few bugs to worry about. Y2K was overhyped, but a lot of work definitely paid off making it as smooth as it was.
OK. Here is my take on this whole Y2K mumbo jumbo.
I'm a student in a Technical High School where I am studying computers, so naturally I try to keep up on the news surrounding computers. I sucked down every document, every broadcast, and every rumor that was floating around and tried to make my own assumptions about what was going to happen.
The scary revelation that I came to was, this is all a bunch of hype. If you really listened to the reports about what was supposedly going to happen, you would have realized that a lot of what they were saying was total fiction. The message that was being conveyed was that any device with a microchip in it could be affected and stop working in the year 2000.
That's right. They were implying that any device, whether it was date dependent or not, as long as it had a microchip, could possibly screw up. They went on to suggest that heart monitors and things like that could stop functioning if they were not updated. Pardon me, but when was the last time that a heart monitor was dependent on the date? Sure, it displays the time and date up in the corner, but what does that date really affect?
The answer is, nothing. Absolutely nothing. And that's just what happened. Nothing. Everyone ran around panicing and trying to update things so that they were Y2K compliant when many of these devices would have worked fine.
As a computer technician it was clear to me the benefit of getting people worried about Y2K. The money. Anything that causes fear can be exploited to get money. Just look at how much money was spent on this whole deal. The amount is astonishing. And where did all this money go? Right into the pockets of the very people who got people all upset in the first place. The people who warned us of the impending danger of Y2K were more than happy to help us get over our trouble, that is, as long as the price is right.
Looking back, although it may have cost you a lot of money, you have to admit, it was a pretty good plan. Odds are that most of the people involved in the whole situation were just as fooled as everyone else, but they still were able to benefit. What everyone else blames on laziness on the part of some programmers many years ago, I chalk up to planning for job security in the future.
-----
To fix it in an existing document:
LetterJ
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
As I have been saying to everyone I could the past year, the "y2k bug" was mainly a myth in that there would be terrible disaster and everything we know and love would come to an end - but there is an up side, such as certain Dal Dreamforge ircd's reporting this :- ;)
[S+Z] deranged.blabber.net Monday January 3 19100 -- 18: 28 +02:00
And rumours that Auckland airport's y2k compliant system was reporting the year 100 (unconfirmed) - Or the swiss time website also having a defective year indication..
I'm sure there's many more - keep an eye out
They had an episode where some kid decided to shoot up a group of people in some assembly because of some crappy medieval prediction.
To tell you the truth eliminating computers would just make things greatly more simple in terms of dealing with problemw. Most of the survivalists are out in the western part of the US right? Big ol' bunch of hippies are there too right? Well tat would make for a nice little thing called martial law that the government can enact and just bring in the army "for the children".
There is nothing stopping people from operating on a method of using pencil and paper; and businesses will not argue ever with a fist full of American green backs for anything.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
looks like nedstat experienced some Y2K trouble (compare the 'daily' and 'weekly' stats on this site)
So the media et al blew Y2K out of proportion? Of course they did, it was inevitable.
What was Y2K? An engineering problem. The only thing unique about Y2K as a engineering problem was the fact that you couldn't move the due date. In every other instance I can think of, you could to someone higher in authority and say "Hey look, we're not going to make it, can we push the end date out 1 month?" (or 1 year, 1 season, etc.). In this case there was no one to appeal to.
The combination of unslippable deadline and a lay person's lack of understand of how technology works combined to create undue worry over what was just another engineering problem.
And it wasn't a *hard* problem either. Not technically. Finding a fix for Y2K-imperiled code tended to be easy; scheduding and managing the upgrade of live systems with no disruption of service was in many cases hard. Coming up with the resources was hard for some companies. But the fixes themselves tended to be pretty obvious.
What really cracks me up is that developers routinely solve much harder problems with no such fanfare. Getting Windows to run at all with all that legacy software, now that took some brainpower (however misdirected). Compilers, major apps like MS/Star Office, and researchy-type apps typically face *hundreds* of more technically challenging hurdles during development.
The legacy of this will be that management/lay people will think there was nothing to Y2K and that IT folks just overstated the case. Not true. Furthermore they will extend this to trivialized daily jobs of software folks.
The core of this is the growing gap between the have's and have-not's in terms of technical understanding. Are we approaching the medical and legal professions for perceived disassociation from "average" citizens?
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
The more I hear from other members of the 'CLASSICCMP' (Classic Computer hackers) mailing list, the more I think media and politicians blew this whole Y2K thing way out of proportion.
;-)
Many members of said list (myself included) have some pretty old systems in active use, including (but not limited to) IBM XT's, 286's, S-100 bus systems, DEC MicroVAXen and MicroPDP-11, and others too numerous to list.
With only a couple of exceptions, brought on by clocks that needed a manual nudge, even these old workhorses handled the century rollover without so much as an electronic hiccup, and are still in use this morning.
I think this whole Y2K business may go down as the biggest non-event in tech history. Bravo to those who ignored the call to panic! We need more smart people in the world!!
Keep the peace(es).
It was friggin hilarious. One of the reporters was taking about a glitch in the weather reporting stations somewhere on Ohio, and they were fixed in a couple of hours. He literally slammed his hands on the table in frustration after reporting this! Me and my friend were laughing about this for hours afterward.
I liked one comment: "Is there any Y2K news to report?" "Well, let me say that we should focus on the fireworks and forget about Y2K 'cause there's no news to report." I toasted to that one. :^)
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
There is one reason for this. The "experts" on y2k were in a position to make some big money consulting on y2k projects. Yes there was some problems, but by creating so much FUD about y2k, they put themselves into a position that created a large amount of demand for their services. It wasn't totally a scam, but largely it was. How many software vendors said that they weren't sure about the version of their software that you were running would work, but the upgrade (only $59.95!!) is guaranteed. Truth is, your version would work fine, but the software company benefited from the increased sales. Yes, i think the whole bit was mostly a scam, but no, not 100%. Just 100% smart marketing. While the IT consumers (particularly the large buisnesses) spent a large amount of money, it's the sofware companies and y2k "experts" laughing all the way to the bank (which also overspent on y2k assesments)
-Dan
If it had been a real problem, that we managed to avert by all the money and effort spent on it, there would have been at least a few major screw ups. What are the chances that we would nail every single major bug??? Since nothing happened, I submit for your approval that there was never any wide-scale problem to begin with.
Now, as to where that money and effort really went...
So yes, the lights didn't go out but there are smaller problems to be dealt with. Time for me to get back to the phones..
I'm not saying that no systems needed their code updated to prevent a fatal error, but I think that in a lot of systems, there isn't a whole lot of processing that's done to the date- and in systems where there is processing done, I doubt that many of them have code included to check for an incorrect date and halt the system. (This means that while we might find systems generating the occasional incorrect output- bills dated 1900 and whatnot- and doing things that are errant, very few, if any, of those errors are fatal.)
While error checking is a good idea, functional systems often seem to do just fine without it. (Consider HTML which requires no error handling. While there are quirks in interpretation of code that is technically not valid, HTML documents themselves don't crash. [This isn't saying that Javascript, Java applets or browsers don't crash, just that the HTML itself doesn't generate an error condition.]) This lack of error handling isn't good practice, but here on the other side of the date flip we find it to be functional.
Just as the Y2K problem was created by a lack of foresight, the same lack of foresight blunted it. (The irony is that the best engineered code is/was the code that really needed to be fixed.)
We fear that which we don't understand.
:)
I am constantly amazed at the amount of 'yellow journalism' heaped upon the internet. Young girl seduced by a psychotic ON THE NET! Scam artist ripped people off ON THE NET! Prostitution and pornography ON THE NET! These are things that happen in everyday life, people. Just 'cause it's on the internet doesn't magically make it a catastrophe.
The media realizes the net is a huge unknown for the majority of the population. By playing the 'fear of technology' card over and over they have been able to boost their ratings. Y2K is just another example of media overhype.
I do agree there were legitimate problems, they just weren't as catastrophic as we were led to believe.
My only hope is that Y2K will convince people that the media has been crying wolf, and that we should take everything they report with a huge grain of salt.
If only all news sources could be as professional and objective as slashdot.
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
From some of my experiences as a systems consultant to large corporations, it seems to me that there will be instabilities related to the hasty and ill-conceived replacement of systems deemed 'non-compliant', though no reasonable effort was undertaken to discover whether or not the system would actually have failed.
Simply because, for example, the OS vendor makes no guarantees about specific versions of their OS, entire systems are replaced, on a tight deadline, by already overworked systems staff who probably don't understand all of the functions performed by the system (which they may have inherited and treat with an "it seems to work--don't touch it" attitude).
As the "deadline" approached, the more hastily these systems were replaced.
The major effect of this will likely be an increased load on systems staff as they stamp out various brushfires, possibly leading to a little churn in the industry.
Then again, I suppose those who wish to may, for the nonce, continue to live under the spectre of being plunged into darkness, chaos, and strife.
--Jim
Meanwhile we all know that software systems fail all the time with all kinds of bugs, and the world doesn't end. Why should Y2K be any different?
The faulty assumption made by non-coders was that things work perfectly all the time.
Anyway, at my New Year's party I insisted that I, and other programmers, have saved the world again and we should be given homage! (it didn't work :-) )
...richie - It is a good day to code.
This little ol law says that if any bank goes under the ogvernment (yes that "eeeeeevvvvvil" uncle same) will insure my bank account up to 100,000 dollars.
This prevented Y2k from actually getting any thin dime of my money.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I think y2k went off more or less as the majority of computer-savvy people expected, minor glitches and a few worrisome issues.
There are telephone systems out in France and Italy, there were nuclear reactor alarm systems that failed in Japan, plus the things Jon mentions above.
Most of all there's lots and lots of computers that are only revealing their y2k bug as they get rebooted, since by far the most prevelant y2k bug is in the BIOS. Usually (not always) you can reboot again and hand set the date, just hope you didn't dump bad data into your database meanwhile. Anyway.
As far as I can see, the media created a huge hype that y2k was going to utterly destroy civilization. Now the media is saying that nothing happened. Neither is true, and Jon - despite his opening reverse-hype lines, admits it. There were problems. The world did not end. Anybody who is both technically savvy and remotely close to sane understood this. The only news here is an interest story in the peculiarly warped outlook of the media.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
But did this guy just slam America for not doing something visionary like building a really big ferris wheel?
I'm sorry. Maybe we'll have it figured out by 2100 and build the worlds largest stone axe or harpsichord or something that will demonstrate our grasp of the future.
As I summarize it, computers generally view time in one of three ways:
1) Real-time. Computers run machines without human intervention.
2) Interactive. People sit in front of computers and see them operate. (PCs, etc.)
3) Batch. Computers do work without human intervention, but just pound out paper monthly or so.
Many/most real-time systems don't give a hoot what year it is; they work in seconds or milliseconds. So the nut cases were worried about failures of real-time systems (electric, water, etc.) but those rarely cared much about date. Maybe some paleo-PCs will have reboot problems. Most of these were remediated; this is where the hype and reality were way out of sync.
Interactive systems can have visible clock errors. But humans can work around them. Few Y2K bugs showed up. Big surprise, not.
Batch systems are most likely to use old COBOL code with spotty source decks. Those are the ones that had the most Y2K problems, and those problems won't all turn up for a while. Mostly they're miscaluclated interest, payments, etc. They're not apocalyptic and can be fixed after the fact when somebody sees a billing error. This stuff did cost a fortune to fix and it had to be done, but it's not the stuff of bad TV movies.
I wonder how the economy will do now that the Y2K has passed. (At least the date, though the diagnostics will continue for awhile I'm sure.)
I kept reading how much money the world's businesses have spent on Y2K fixes. Citigroup supposedly spent something like $900 million over the last couple years.
So, they're not having to spend so much money on this fix anymore, how does that bode for having that much more money to invest in actual business expansion?
i think it's awful that people, in the media in particular, are being so vocal about being disappointed by the lack of problems following Y2K. that really is unbelievable, like they were expecting to get their money's worth of doom and gloom and destruction. they should be grateful things didn't go wrong.
/. i believe, one bank had Y2K related problems which resulted in their credit services (affecting about 10000 outlets) becoming unusable for five days. had this been magnified to cover the vast majority of banks, pandemonium would have broken out. the sudden lack of confidence in the banks could have triggered a money run that would have dealt the economy a severe blow. implications this severe can be levelled throughout the affected industries.
:)
the almost perfectly smooth transition from the 1900s to the 2000s is a result of the largest ever collaborative effort from all aspects of the computer and computer-related industries, spanning most of the last decade. that everyone woke up to the potential damage it could have caused, and worked swiftly to avert the problems, is the reason it went so well.
that withstanding, there were very small disruptions, which hint darkly at what could have happened had we not been so prepared. in the UK, as was reported on
the problem was there, as anyone who worked on a Y2K team can testify. the sheer amount of work put in over the years more than justifies the global expenditure, to say nothing of the effort put in by those who were standing by valiantly as the moment approached, in case everything went wrong. had nothing been done about the problem, i think the repercussions would have resulted in the greatest catastrophe to mankind possibly ever. the key is the potential for damage was enormous, and the lack of any significant resulting problems is testimony to the effort, organisation and preparedness of all involved.
well done to all, and you can put your feet up for the next 7999 years
Fross
1) Hillary Clinton no longer laughingly claims to be from New York.
2) Mysterious Windows Popup: "We're sorry for leeching your all money and time over the past decade; all personnel at Redmond, Washington will now jump off the nearest cliff after wiring the compound with C-4."
3) CNN mysteriously switches spots with the Spice Channel.
4) F'n Energizer Bunny dies.
5) Arquette Compound explodes.
6) France's showers become operational.
7) Massive glitch leads to MTV only being able to play music that people over the age of 12 can enjoy.
8) Living La Vida Loca and the Macarena simultaneously erased from human history, along with the Nixon Administration and New Kids on the Block.
-
Further, I spoke with somebody at a gas station who had run out of the high-octane fuel. Prices here went up *alittle* as a result, but not much.
No, people panic'd over this. They did so at the last minute, and now they're going to sheepishly be drinking all that bottled water they stored up and all that hamburger helper they bought. And, for the next 3 months, nobody will be buying any toilet paper.
Let's face it, people panic'd. They saw the hype, they acted. Now, will the media report their own failure and bias, or quickly "invent" another national story and by next week we will have "forgotten" about y2k?
I see no reason why I should've hidden under a mattress or really prepared for the worst. If the end of the world was really coming, I would've wanted to go down with my head up, celebrating. I might have been disappointed, though, since I might not have had time to drink the expensive bottle of champagne I had bought just for the occasion.. On the other hand, I wouldn't have had to pay my VISA bill.
As for the Millennium bug, some of us were hit by it. Shouldn't have drunk the cider we had; it was labeled "Y2K"... :)
...for the smooth Y2K transition.
If it weren't for Microsoft's efforts to train millions of computer users to fiddle and futz around with systems that have stopped working for no apparent reason, many workers would be completely helpless in dealing with the inevitable Y2K snafus... but thanks to Microsoft, they won't panic -- they'll just do as they've always done -- reboot, re-install, and carry on with their crippled systems...
S
Businesses in the United States spent an esimated $600 million on Y2K preperations. Not sure how much the government ended up spending, but probably close to half of that.
That is an absolute field day for the consultants!
So in one year you have close to a trillion dollars spent on a one-time problem... unbelievable!
Thank god this happened at a time when the economy was absolutely booming... if we were experiencing a recession at the moment, the results could have kept us from pulling out for a few years longer.
1) Made us aware of how dependent we are on technology. This is a very important point. Techno-terrorism can quickly bring about some of the gloom-and-doom from the Y2K prophets.
2) Gave IT a blank check (and time) to update systems. Hey, stuff gets old. Robert Cringley's "Y2K: The Winter of our Disconent" told the tale of a report that winds on a Wall Street desk every day, but the recipient does not know why he's getting it. Stuff like this lets MIS look at systems, upgrade as necessary for perfromance reasons, and update software. MIS typically doesn't get the funding they need to do the job. A nice scare of "hey, if the systems crash, we better have a better backup solution now" can quickly get that new tape drive approved.
3) Made the public aware of how important programmers and administrators really are. Many organizations consider at least administrators necessary evils. Now they're more necessary and less evil.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
This reminds me of the people who put their faith in charts, graphs and models to predict gloom and doom pictures of vastly complex sociological, economic and weather phenomenon and its repercussions 30 or 40 years into the future.
For instance, there are the hordes of people that come along every 10 years and say we are going to run out of natural resources even though commodity prices keep falling.
That we were going to experience a global cooling epidemic (a popular theory in the 1970s).
That the world would run out of food by 1850 (Malthus's prediction in 1750 that kicked off the whole secular doom tradition).
Luckily most people are not eggheaded-policy-wonks who think they can predict the future. These people put there faith in technology and the ability of the human potential and everything usually turns out fine.
2000 isn't the new millenium! Just wait until 2001 , then we'll get to see Armageddon! Just think, the AntiChrist in your own backyard!
I suspect we'll get to go through all this hysteria again in about 2034 when time_t wraps. By then in theory I'll be "safely" retired, so looks like my kids will get to clean up after that mess. ;-)
Still I suspect we in the Open Source world should probably be starting to take some action to fix it.
Modern media are in (to a distressingly large degree) in love with fear mongering. It produces ratings.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
I work for a very large (7 billion/yr) manufacturing company, and against the advice of those of us in the IT department, we were scammed by a consulting company telling tales of widespread system outages, downtime, and lost business if we didn't hire them to fix our machines.
What they did was send a few non technical people around to PCs, and had a floppy which just changed the date format in Win9x from mm/dd/yy to mm/dd/yyyy.
They charged $50 per machine checked for this "service", and took two months to do something a well written memo could have had our users do for free.
In the meantime, they managed to unplug a Cisco 7500 looking for the floppy drive, turned the key off on a production HP K470 machine, had their floppys in three Ultra 10 Workstations before calling IT and asking how to reboot, and other small, but costly disasters.
Basically due to the hype, our management gave them full run of our datacenter, and they caused more harm than a reasonable Y2K crash.
As the icing on the cake, even though that all of our machines were "certified" Y2K compliant by this small scam outfit, they insisted that everything be turned off for the rollover, causing even more downtime.
It just boggles the mind that executives could be scammed like this, I'm finding a new job...
This part is sort of redundant.. but it was just hype.. plain and simple. When you encounter problems with a system? What do you do.. You invest money to fix them. Sure it was a global thing and thus mmore important. But most of my Y2K fixes were somewhat easy.. I know some of them were not. Mine just involed formatting the date properly and a few of my string parsing functions had to be modified a little. Its just bug fixing as usual. Not like some global killer people made it out to be. Life moves on..
From what I can see, the Y2K issues were all too real, and I believe we should celebrate the success of those individuals who worked to fix them all.
For instance, a friend of mine in financial services told me yesterday about all the problems his company had, and fixed. It is clear that power stations had problems. Apparently nearly all of these problems got fixed, which isn't too surprising, since the problem was easy to anticipate, and easy to test, for the most part.
The list of engineering failures from Wired is interesting and helps to illustrate a point. Serious problems are always caused by the stuff
you didn't think about, the stuff you ignored.
So, those engineers and programmers with the responsibility for dealing with Y2K related issues, knowing that, were fairly cautious in their pronouncements, on the nature of, "we've solved all the problems we know about, but we don't have the hubris to say we've got it all, don't worry."
Given that, a simple cost-benefit analysis shows the wisdom of stocking up on a a few things, since, after all, if there isn't a problem, you can just spend the cash. If the water doesn't get contaminated, you can still drink the bottled water you bought.
Unfortunately, this is a complex message, probably too complex for the media at large to convey to the general populous. So, we get a predictable cycle of hype "Better watch out for Y2K", then
backlash "What was all the fuss about?" in the media, often from the same sources.
In my book the job done was done about as well as it could have been.
"I see great things in baseball" - Walt Whitman
My 486 thought it was 1993 and my 8086 thought it was 1984. I had to spent fifteen seconds of my life setting their clocks.
Is a bunch of mild inconveniences.
If you took everything, from thousands of people without power (last August, NY), to 5% of the British credit card swipers rejecting cards (Dec 27-31), to the 911 system in LA mis-prioritizing calls for about 10 minutes, and all the other little things that will go wrong within the next year or three, and even the ones that failed years ago (first credit cards expiring in '00), and you had *ALL* of this on one day, it would have been the global catastrophe we talk about.
Catastrophes are fast. If they aren't fast, we deal with them as they're happening, instead of trying to react to aftermath. Imagine how dangerous a mudslide would be if it were just one ton of mud per day for a long time. It would be a *joke*.
Same thing.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The core of this is the growing gap between the have's and have-not's in terms of technical understanding. Are we approaching the medical and legal professions for perceived disassociation from "average" citizens?
I think we already have gotten to the point of dissassociation from 'average' citizens. Whenever I tell people what I do (I have a student job supporting computers), they always end up saying "Oh, you just do stuff with computers," or "Wow, you must be a genius or something."
Even people in our own department are clueless. It's not even very hard, what I do. "What, you can't connect to the network? Try rebooting."... "Wow! That was great, you guys are miracal workers!"
People don't know what we do, and they don't really care.
"Please don't sigh like that, maam"
I have issues with this crap that Katz wrote (and I mean that in the most repectful tone possible). First, isn't it a bit far-fetched to call a large percentage of the world getting drunk/high/unconscious (whatever) heroism? I think that if there are any heroes out there, they should be utterly offended by that particular remark.
Next issue: Just tens of millions? Aren't there BILLIONS of people on earth? I caught a glimpse of CNN's coverage of India's New Year's, and I distincly remember them siting a number more like a quarter Billion people celebrating the new years.
JUST in India!
I am going into RANT mode now. All moderators skip this section.
Katz, occasionally I like your work. It is well-written (relatively so; you're no shakespeare, buddy), and even informative on rare occasions. But, for freakin' sakes, do your homework! The people of Slashdot are most likely some of the smartest and quickest minds on the planet, the least that you could do is check a few figures.
Ok, I'm feeling somewhat better now.
---
rJames.org - illustration
So does this mean we have to let them out of the MTV bunker?
...what am I supposed to do with the 500 cans of baked beans and corned beef I bought to last me while food supply lines were down and to trade for firearms?
Then there's the 100 gallons of spring water and the 25 ten-packs of batteries and the all that alcohol and... *sigh*
Realtime Y2K was fine. And that should have been expected, since most realtime systems aren't very date-dependant. Furthermore, many are layered with fall-through defaults.
But the real worry about Y2K has always been those legacy COBOL batch processing systems. There may still be some erronious statements sent out in the mail over the next months that will take wrangling with customer service to straighten out. Nothing life threatening, but a pain nonetheless, and perhaps aggravated by "we didn't have any Y2K problems."
-- Robert
All I know, Y2K wasn't a hoax in terms of computers shutting down. I've seen some personal systems just shut down during all the test I've performed while working in a repair shop. Still, they are only tests, you have to wonder what will happen when it's real, right? Well, my friend's little brother's system we kept non-Y2K-compliant to see what would happen - it kept running. All those tests the big companies published for vendors and techies to use were designed to hype the whole bug even more, and down to the consumer level, not just power plants, and banks.
"a retarded monkey could do a better job..."
Quite frankly, Y2K panic was the media's fault. We had predictions of doom from people who had no idea what they were talking about. We had NBC's nice little movie in which objects that don't rely on the year still malfunctioned ("His pulse rate isn't 240...It must be Y2K"). Then when it was all over, the media decided that the blame for the panic had to be redirected quickly. (And they seemed pretty disappointed that nothing happened.) I think there could have been problems and we did need to prepare, but scaring the public is not preparation. Most of the predicted problems could have just as easily been caused by the panic itself. A food or gas shortage could be caused by stockpiling. Loss of telephone service could be caused by everyone checking for a dial tone at midnight. You get the idea. If you want a case study, look at Italy. They started preparing about four months ago, and got mocked for being so late. BUT NOTHING HAPPENED! And I still say the big party is 2048 (100000000000 in binary).
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
A curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it?s ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration.
Maybe you should watch more tv, there was a wholy lot more going on then just a ball dropping. maybe you missed the whole Washington Monument? Or all of the celebration on the West Coast. Good Lord, man, there is more to this country than New York and Time Square! But maybe you couldn't pick up the other channels from your shelter.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Katz is wrong when he says that the celebration here in America (U.S.) was one without vision. He cites, of course, the dropping of the ball in Times Square. He should be reminded that Dick Clark does not have a monopoly on how we American's celebrated the transition to the year 2000.
There was another celebration, which took place in Washington DC. This celebration was continuously full of vision. There was much to be said about our nations past and the future that awaits us if we are willing to acheive it.
Come on, Jon, just because you were watching Dick Clark on New Year's, that doesn't mean that the rest of the nation didn't celebrate more appropriatly.
Remember, just because the celebration in Paris looked regal and full of splendor, that doesn't mean that the celebration in every city in France celebrated with equal dignity. I'm sure, somewhere, they did little else then get drunk and stand in the streets.
Sometimes it seems that Mr. Katz is not willing to cut America any slack at all in many of his writings. But life in these United States is not at all black and white. There are High Schools out there where poor little geeks don't feel like outsiders (I went to one.) And despite the failures of Disney, America does have a vision for it's technological future (albeit it is a vision based on Star Trek.) And, yes, Americans can celebrate the year 2000 in ways other then just dropping a glowing ball (although we do seem very good at dropping the ball from a historical context.)
Happy New Year. And that's all I have to say about that.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
The "hoax" was the result of combined ignorance, fear, cynicism, and venality.
Ignorance - The reporters cannot distinguish between an annoying computer failure and a catastrophic computer failure.
Fear - Most fear computers. They are a genuine job threat to many in the news business and to many people that they know. Most of their friends and colleagues are in the older, dying industries that are threatened by computers.
Cynicism - They know that they cannot trust the government or corporate spokesmen to tell the truth. So they did not believe the initial warnings. Then once they learned enough to understand that there was a real problem, they did not believe all the reports as the real problems were fixed. Early Y2K tests found genuine problems, this was reported in the technical channels, and the later tests found the problems to be fixed and this was reported in the technical channels. The media did not understand and did not trust the government and corporate reports.
Venality - The news media, especially the electronic media, sell a product. Emotion sells much more easily than reason. Whether on CNN or slashdot, the emotional response is the easy response and the universal response. The easy Y2K emotion is fear. Fear sells. Fear maintains ratings. Fear is universal. Reason requires lots of boring detail and lacks punch. So the reports all emphasized fear.
The best example of what really happened is from school. We all know people who don't start studying until the night before finals. They cram and pass. They don't start the term paper until the day before it is due. They pull an all-nighter and pass. This may even be the most efficient use of their resources (given their priorities). And a lot of people from the top to the bottom of corporations and government have not changed. They let Y2K slide until the last minute, then they crammed, pulled all-nighters, and passed.
Software Publishers to be held accountable
:> )
In the future, Y2K will be looked on as the 1st wide-spread demand for systems that WORK the way the CUSTOMER wants.
Lets be honest with ourselves, as an industry, software has been a very much 'take it or leave it' kind of thing.
As long as the majority of functionality is there, a large number of people will buy it. Correct date processing was simply a 'feature' that was not demanded by anyone until just recently(last couple of years), and I am sure that the specs for future software purchaes will reflect this type of 'interoperability' in Software.
Many of us know what 'features' we are missing, but the vast majority of the economy isn't clueful enough to relize it is missing!!!
The Media
The general public's ability to resist the general mass media's attempt to turn this into a disaster story of epic portions serves to underline a very sad fact. These 'defenders of free speech' have been abusing our trust.
Would it really have been that hard to simply say 'check your technology to make sure it processes dates correctly' instead of 'widespread failures of technology MAY occur IF said technology can't cope with the date change?' I know the latter sounds better to an increasingly cynical public, but once again, we see some good trends from all this. The Media is going to be held accountable. Should intent be a factor in a media story? The INTENT of those two headlines are pretty obvious to anyone with a nickle of common sense, the previous warns of a possible technological issue, the latter serves to strike fear into the hearts of men. (and women
At least the 'New Media' can affect this. Now that the Internet connected person can do their own research for storys with relativily little effort, it is becoming plain to see that many 'journalists' A) Barely have a nodding aquaitence with thier subject matter AND B) Are too damn lazy to do any research to understad it!
This, in my Not So Humble Opinion, is the root of the problem. Ignorance Begets Ignorance, and Ignorance leads to fear.
Consumer Rights
So, how do I get a better quality of news out of the mass media? Heck if I know. letter writing doesn't seem to work.
about the only thing you could do is become an acknologed 'expert' on something, and let the media interview you.
actually it was reporting 19100... the classic bug whereby you prepend '19' to a localtime() generated year instead of adding 1900. oops. This one is gonna pop up a lot in web-based applications.
I discovered a serious Y2K related flaw in the human body......
Like many people did that night, I spent the last few hours of 1999 preparing myself with special Y2K compliant, non date specific "Tanqueray" and "Absolut" system patches. As the end of the last hour of the last year of the century drew nearer, I poured one last "Y2K assurance" directive and knocked it back for good luck. The horror that followed should make it all too clear to you that there WERE serious Y2K problems.
After the clock ticked past 12:00, I quietly sighed in relief as my friends and I realized the apocalypse had not come this night. All my systems were up and running and I was confident the date change had happened smoothly and was now behind me. Oh how I was wrong!
About an hour and one half after "Y2K", I detected some anomalies that were traced back to the "Tanqueray" and "Abolut" system enhancements. Within five minutes, my system had slowed to all but a crawl and very unexpectedly, my stomach core dumped! The debug was an uninterpretable mess, so it revealed little more than the other bits of code that had been applied with my "Y2K enhancements". Although I experienced said core dump, I was confident that it was an isolated experience and moved my debilitated system to bed for nightly system maintenence.
Through the night, my stomach core dumped 5 more times: only after a days worth of emergency "Pepto Bismol updates" was my stomach brought back under control. Even then, it took yet another day to return my system to normal operating perameters.
The moral of the story is: Yes Virginia, some of us (the stupid ones at least) DID experience serious Y2K related problems.
"I wanted to meet stimulating and interesting people of an ancient culture, and kill them." --Full Metal Jacket
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Has anyone actually stopped to think why Y2K was even a problem? It wasn't that computers were suddenly going to develop a mind of their own and blow things up and cause things to stop working. You can blame that mindless bull on the media.
Many people never even understood the real problem. The real issue is that computers would become "confused" at the turn of the century because programs would be accessing data that is newer than the current date (that is programs would probably have negative dates in their system somewhere) causing information to go haywire.
The truth is no one knew what was going to happen, and programmers and experts (and laypersons) did their best to not confuse their computers on the elusive 01-01-00. Some may say those persons succeeded in their mission, and now some say there was never a problem to begin with. The truth is, everyone who actually thought about this knew that there were potential problems. Ole Mr. Media decided that it would be fun to freak everyone out and *gasp* maybe even cause the end of the world from mass panic. Wouldn't that be swell!
It is obvious that we have prevented blackouts, which yes, were possible, and we even kept those stoplights working! So no, this was not just a big hype, but it wasn't a big miracle either. In fact let me tell you a little secret--a stoplight doesn't really care what year it is ...
I did not expect there to be horrendous Y2K technology collapse, so no surprise there.
What I did expect (but thankfully did not get) was some sparse but very significant terrorism within the USA. Knowing that US officials had made arrests in the weeks prior to 1/1/00 of people crossing the border into the USA with explosives and/or explosive components, I felt that there ought to be some number of like-minded individuals NOT caught. The Centennial Olympic Park and Ok City bombings also weighed on my mind.
That there was not mass mayhem at the big flipover led me to recast my perceptions. Is it known that the people that the Feds arrested were actually planning for something on 1/1/00 as opposed to some other time? It could be that bombers are entering the country routinely and that heightened security got them caught leading up to 1/1/00.
The alternatives would appear to be:
1) The small number of people reported by the media as being arrested by the authorities were all the people setting out to cause big trouble
2) Many more were arrested that we don't know about
3) 1/1/00 was simply not a terrorism target in the first place (leaving open the possibility that there are plenty of others)
I can't speak to the relative or absolute likelihood of any of these alternatives.
So I guess we shouldn't start yelling about Y2.037 K any time soon? :)
:) will find themselves unable to function. The end of the world will be upon us. Only those running a true 64bit OS _may_ be saved from the carnage!.... :)
Why... just a few short years after dealing with Y2K the globe will suddenly find itself thrust into chaos as all those lovely *nix machines crash , elevators will die, homes and automobiles (now running Linux of course
....
....
.... Then again... maybe it will all go by and be one more non-event thanks to the infrastructure that has reved up to handle Y2K, needing to do something to justify thier existence.
Expect all those companies that were offering Y2K services to start offering Y2.037 services REAL soon
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Stuff didn't break because it was mostly fixed.
I would like to thank all who worked on Y2k stuff. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't fun. It was important.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Submitted. Rejected. We obviously don't have a common idea of amusing.
I slipped on a banana peel that was planted by terrorists.
The good thing that the y2k scare did for us,
other than helping us get the funding to fix
the very real problems, is that people stopped
to look at the world around them and saw that
the engineers and computer people have affected
their daily lives in a very dramatic way.
It isn't everyday that the world stops to notice the work of one segment of industry and look at the impact that it has on everyone else.
Y2K is turning out as many of us suspected: A year of annoying little computer problems.
Personally I think that Y2K was an averted tradgedy, although like many I reserve judgment until at least the end of March (end 1Q 2000) for all reports and financial information to be run. Then we'll know for sure the extent of the damage. I do think certain companies will be looking red in the face about their predicted "damage estimates".
However mostly I'm just glad it's over. Finally IT departments can again devote thier IT budgets to truly interesting projects, not these dumb patch and fix projects. I've been personally affected by this phenomenon - having spent 2 months out of work in 1999.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Let's carry on and forget about analyzing this Y2K crap. It's over and done with. Why do people feel the need to analyze every little thing?
... Soon we'll probably be given an analysis of the analysis ... bah. When will it all end?!?! Stop the insanity!!
We've dealt with this Y2K issue for years, and now it's come and gone. How long is it going to take for this post-Y2K analysis phase to go away?
I can just see it now
-Computer programmers are generally a
professional, educated bunch that take pride
in doing their job (solving problems with
computers) well.
-The y2k problem has been well known for a VERY
long time (in the world of software, anyway).
I'd say the rollover's lack of calamity is
testament to the above two statements' validity.
Cheers!
IMHO conspiracy theories and hysteria always need soemthing to attach themselves to, and Y2K actually was very useful in distracting people from religious forms of hysteria in to a technological apocalypse - one that has a distinct end-line and doesn't require anyone to blow up mosques to imminatize the eschaton, or what have you.
:)
So I'm Y2Glad.
Go outside !
Have fun !
This whole Y2K thing proves that geeks are smarter than the average person (and thus much smarter than politicians.
Any other industry would collapse if it turned out that they had a major screw-up... IT industry made extra fortune on it.
We all know that not only the Y2K thing is a stupid "bug". We all know that it is very easy to find as it clearly appears in the source code. Compare, for example, with race-conditions which are _very_ hard to find or analyze.
The good sides:
- Hardcore geeks got paid extra for partying the new-year in front of a monitor (would do it anyway)
- People around the world could give a name to the eternal fear-the-future, which is a basic human need.
- IT industry got richer.
The bad sides:But the real problems were with the wetware. The reason this thirty-year-old code is still being used is a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. Enough noise needed to be made for the money (and programmer time) to be spent fixing the problem.
Unfortunately, the level of noise needed to make the CEOs and CIOs put the bug on their priority lists were enough to trigger the doomsayers and (even worse) those who figured they could make money on the problem. Technical necessity brought the problem to light, greed blew it out of proportion. Consider for the moment the fact that there is now a stock index for companies based around Y2K.
In a strange sort of way, I do kind of wish some planes fell from the sky, and some people died. Already a Y2K-backlash is begining. Obviously, since the bug was fixed in time, it was all a hoax from the begining. The next time there is a fundamental problem in our technological infrastructure, the response is more likely to be "Y2K was a hoax- this new problem is as well. In addition to not panicing about it, I'm also not going to fix it." Cold as it may sound, some deaths this time around might have saved more lives next time around. Unless, of course, you beleive that there are no more fundamental bugs in our technological infrastructure...
One final comment on Y2K: Don't assume people "suddenly got smart" ten years ago. I've heard a number of people complain about the dumb programmers of yesteryear saving "a measly two bytes". After all, memory is cheap today- obviously, it was cheap back then as well. Go ask someone who was around back then about "a buck a bit"- yes, Virginia, there was a time when memory was $8 a byte, and this was considered _cheap_. Hint: it was about the time a lot of this code was being written. So the "measly two bytes" they saved paid for a decent dinner out.
A lot of people went and withdrew enormous amounts of money, stockpiled ammo, bought lots of extra gas, loaded up on canned goods, etc. What a waste!
Granted, I could see how ATMs or those nifty pay-at-pump gas things could be downed for a few hours, but really, what's going to cause Kroger to quit selling food and toilet paper?
People forget, we are on a planet driven by MONEY, and those of us in the US are in the most money-driven economy in the world! Let's face it, everybody REALLY wants one thing: Your Money.
And what do you think will happen if suddenly Chevron can't take my VISA card? If Kroger sees that they (through some apocolyptic something-or-another) can't sell me any Corn Flakes? Or if I Amazon sees I can't purchase books?
THEY FIX IT. WITH MIND-BOGGLING SPEED. So what if the laser scanners at Wal-Mart won't ring up my goods? They want my money, and they want it badly, so they'll make some poor schlep ring it up on a 1960's vintage cash register! That's what they'll do!
Never underestimate the power of greed and the drive of profit-making. If everything else in the world failed, you'd STILL be able to get what you need because there'd STILL be people out there possessing it wanting to sell it to you.
If there is a demand, there will emerge a supply. It's just one of those semi-natural laws we aren't anywhere near escaping.
now think of this: $12.5 billions where spent on the "Marshall Plan", which are some $100 billions in todays dollars. I don't know what todays estimates about the y2k-expenditures wordwide are, but I saw them around $500 - $3000 billions. so we just have the tenfold economical booster here, I guess Keynes would kinda think that's pretty cool. just my 2 cents on those 100'000'000'000'000 cents spent for y2k..
I don't disagree with you at all. The war did wonders for our economy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the strategists were just ITCHING for Pearl Harbour to happen so we could leap on both fronts like a starved dog. I agree that the many people who agreed with what Hitler preached were just as guilty as he.
;-). If we didn't leap on the Y2K issue when it was realized, then one person would have been singled out for the masses. The geek martyr, and it would have been his/her fault.
But my point, and the reason I used him as an example, is that we need a central figure to hate. It's so much easier to focus on Bill Gates rather than Microsoft itself, or even certain parts of Microsoft (I think notepad is a pretty okay editor
Just like Hitler. In our history books, it's his fault. Too much Sluggy lately; I hear the voice of Kiki ringing in my head ("stay good, Adolph, stay good!!!")
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
They don't? Hey, that's great! So, you'll be off then, Jon? Good luck with your new career.
By the way, it's "don't", not "don?t".
I'm going to take issue with the assertation that the gatherings in large cities were displays of hope, faith in technology, defiance, or optimism.
I'll go with 'Apathy'. I wonder how many people in Times Square (or people who did not stock up at all) were betting on 'someone else' taking care of the problem(s)?
-nme!
PS-- a good point I heard mentioned on NPR was that the Y2K meme showed us that
1) We still don't trust technology
2) The world is extremely connected by that technology. (Sure, maybe you and I knew that, but after tracking midnight as it made it's way across the world, everyone else knows it too.)
Most readers here already know this, but I ask you to make the point clear to those coworkers, friends and faily who do not...
The only reason that Y2K was such a huge non-event was because $500,000,000 and hundreds of thousands of man-years of effort were invested into making it exactly that. A non-event. We won, it was a successful non-failure. We averted the potential (POTENTIAL since we'll never truly know the alternative outcome) disaster of the rollover.
We'll never know what the consequences of inaction might have been, or wether or not we over-zealously attacked the problem. Maybe we overspent and overworked it. Maybe we nailed it just right. Perhaps it was overkill. We'll never know. And a good thing too. The planes stayed up, the lights stayed on, and no one was hurt.
We did our job.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I installed slackware 3.0 back in about '95, on a 386. Kernel is now up to 2.0.36 (+- 1 minor version) Still running whatever 4.x version of sendmail is came with, amoung other secrutiy nightmares. The machine keeps running though, and it does everything I need. (Most of my work is on a different machine, this is just a firewall)
Date on the BIOS is augest of '91. Now why were all comptuers supposed to just crash suddenly? I don't get it, I intentially didn't upgrade this just to see what would happen. (Granted I've not rebooted yet)
What I broke: After finding out that IE was returning 2000 instead of 100 on some date calls I just got ticked and changed everything to 2000 + date%100 (now making everything Y3K noncompliant).
What surprised me: I have yet to hear of an incident of embedded chip failure. Yeah, our code had problems, worldtimeclock and microsoft.com both had minor date problems, and I had to fix a bunch of Visa/MC software at work, but with everyone screaming about possible embedded code in microchips potentially having problems I haven't heard a peep yet. I wonder if it will come out that some cars have a problem with their fuel mixture or checkup reminders? Hmmm. Odd.
All that aside, my stove died, but that didn't appear to be y2k related. Just lousy manufacturing.
No Zen is good zen
Well, lesse.
... (2400 years) such a claendar is 3*4:53:20 = 12:159:60 = 14:40:00 fast. Adding 24:00:00 makes it 9:20:00 slow.
... (4800 years) such a calendar is 2*9:20:00 = 18:40:00 slow. Not adding 24:00:00 makes it 5:20:00 fast.
Every year divisible by four is a leap year...
EXCEPT every year divisible by one hundred which isn't...
EXCEPT every year divisible by four hundred which IS.
Some software gets the first exception wrong (which, ironically, will work out O.K. in 2000), but there is the fear that some software doesn't pick up on the second exception. And yes, there are more exceptions...
[WARNING: math subject to error follows]
Consider: a solar year is 365 (24-hour) days, 5 fours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds: 365:5:48:46.
Every four years, a 365 day calender is thus 4*0:5:48:46 = 0:20:192:184 = 0:23:15:04 fast. Adding 24:00:00 makes it 0:00:44:56 slow.
After 25 cycles of four years (100 years), such a calendar is 25*0:00:48:56 = 0:00:1200:1400 = 0:20:23:20 slow. Not adding 24:00:00 makes it 3:36:40 fast.
After four cycles of 25 cycles of four years (400 years), such a calendar is 4*0:03:36:40 = 0:12:144:160 = 14:26:40 fast. Adding 24:00:00 makes it 9:33:20 slow.
After two cycles of four cycles of 25 cycles of four years (800 years), such a calendar is 2*0:09:33:20 = 0:18:66:40 = 0:19:06:40 slow. Not adding 24:00:00 makes it 4:53:20 fast.
After three cycles of
After two cycles of
And so on.
If I did the math correctly, this means that every year divisible by four is a leap year, except years divisible by 100, except years divisible by 400, except years divisible by 800, except years divisible by 2400, except years divisible by 4800, and so on.
-RSH
The new century starts NEXT YEAR. Are we not geeks?
Don't people realize that our genes are important and should be passed on to the next gen... ooops.
That was "celebrate", not "celibate"?
Never mind!
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
Well, if no mod is going to score you up, I'm going to reply so you'll know that someone appreciated your thoughts.
You make a good point, a lot of non-y2k bugs got fixed by the y2k cleanup efforts and now, no one will notice them either!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
...to improve your shooting skills of course.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Most Y2K problems wern't covered by the medis because they hapened before the media hyped it. Most banks were compliant years ago before issuing credit and ATM cards with expiration dates in 2000. If any part of the system would have seen 00 as 1900, your newly issued cards a few years back would have been rejected. So banks either fixed the problem then, or never had a problem with it. They just wern't "compliant" as no person went into the systems to mark their Y2K approval.
My ISP that I worked for in 97 had their one Y2K glitch then when client had those CC's that expired in 2000. Every time it happened, we had to e-mail someone in the billing department to manually enter it for two weeks while it was fixed.
The media blew this whole thing out of proportion, feeding on the fears of an uninformed public. And now they're doing the exact opposite, telling us that it was nothing to get worked up over, and questioning whether the money needed to be spent at all. I haven't heard anyone say "thanks for spending the time and money to fix it" yet.
Damn media. Still not taking the time to understand what they're reporting, and reporting it to a populace that refuses to learn about what they're hearing about and taking whatever they're told by the media as the gospel truth.
Computers are still relatively new to some people. I think some people have a small fear in the back of their minds: we rely on them so much, what happens if they stop working? Maybe people just need a bit more time to get used to them. This reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode where Roby the robot took over a factory and forced everyone out of work. I bet there are people who still fear that happening.
My router, an old 486/33, is now showing the wrong date due to the bios wrapping back to 1900.
My checks have the date listed as _____, 19__ so I will be writting checkes that are supposedly 100 years old.
BTW I saw Fantasia 2000 on openning night in Louisville and it royally rocks.
guru42101
Many posts on this story seem to relate one thing: Those that "prepared" for a possible Y2K "disaster" were "out of their minds" (or something similar, but maybe more nicely worded).
I am one of those seemingly few people who "stocked up" (though not to the extent that some did - I prepared for a week living, for two people, with the idea that if things were more dire than that, all hell would break loose). I bought food, prepared water, and had other supplies. I also updated all my machines to handle any Y2K issues, and I had alternate sources of power.
Then nothing happened.
Believe me - I realized that this was a very likely outcome when I started to plan my remediation efforts (about a year and a half ago). I decided to wait and see how things went as we approached the end of the year, to see if people were hoarding food, as well as the general "feelings" of the populace (what they thought, etc). In the end, I didn't buy food until the beginning of December, and only an extra weeks worth at that.
How this makes me "crazy" is anybody's guess. It is exactly like Windows users calling Linux users crazy, because the Linux users are in the minority.
I looked at the situation, weighed my options, and decided that the best course of action was to have a few supplies and such - prepare for the worst, and hope for the best. If things turned out ugly, I would have been OK (for a little while). If things didn't, then I have a little extra food to eat - stuff I would eat anyhow. How is this crazy?
What if instead of Y2K, it had been a snowstorm, or an earthquake, or a tornado - would I have been crazy to prepare against that possibility? It wasn't any of these things, but rather something that was man-made. However, how does this make it a less-likely "disaster"?
I am not an embedded system expert - those systems were my greatest worry. I couldn't care less if my billing statement was wrong, or my credit card didn't work. But systems which incorporate time sensitive chips made me worry - and I felt that I should invest against the possibility of these systems failing (I read multiple reports, on and offline, that those "in charge" of the systems didn't know for sure if there would be problems or not - I chose to be pessimistic in light of these claims!).
In the end - nothing happened. I haven't lost sleep over this, only a little money, on food and supplies I am going to use anyhow. The little money I withdrew from the bank I will spend (or redeposit), so that doesn't matter, either. I feel real sorry that there are A LOT of people out there who choose to IGNORE issues, rather than prepare for problems (sorta like those who live in Oklahoma in trailer parks and don't stock up on food and water, then complain when a tornado hits)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
People thinking that some ten-dollar bills only have nine hundred ninety-nine pennies in them. :-)
People thinking that millennium doesn't have two pairs of doubled letters in it. :-(
I'm not certain whether your error is in your initial estimates, in nomenclature (the British call 1 followed by 12 zeroes a billion, while Americans give that name to 1 followed by 9 zeroes, for example), or in calculation. But... $600M + $300M = $900M which is ~1000x less than your sum of $1 trillion.
(had a better title, but that's all that would fit :)
This whole scenareo is hilarious -- it was a reporters wet dream. To them, y2k meant that computers would cease to function when the date rolled over; computers turned on the next day would delete data. The computer would "think" it was 1900, so banks would not have money for anyone . The engines in airplanes would go in reverse or something equally rediculous because a computer on the plane would fail.
Of course, now I'm hearing news stories about the "y2k bust" -- yeah, as if having a huge disaster was actually a good thing...
Seriously, how many people here believed that there would be any problems? How many people routinely made jokes like "ok, see you after the end of the world"? I mean, come ON. My freeking Windows95 box "rolled over" to the correct date!
In reality, the only crisis 90% of the people in this country will go through is the realization that their 10 year old VCR didn't record their "must see tv".
Why is the press ignoring all of these stories. Is it only worth reporting on explosions ?
I was really surprised to read that you have bought into the media hype that proclaims 2000 as the first year of the 21st century and the new millennium. I suppose when you count sheep in your sleep you start by numbering the first one as ZERO?
Honestly, I made myself promise not to get flustered by all the media hype about the millennium and the century and all that stuff but i can't help but say something when someone who should know better buys into it and then repackages it for mass consumption.
Of course I live in the delusion that most other geeks feel similarly about the issue. You're fairly harshing my mello, duder.
As for Y2K at work, I made sure that all the system which fall under my charge were compliant so there was no surprise when everything failed to fail.
While I don't watch the news tat much, I really haven't heard the media blame geeks for the total letdown. As for the people who've spent in the $K's on MREs and ammo and Road Warrior attire in planning for the post apocalyptic party... I wouldn't be surprised if they try to take out their frustration on their local geeks. After all, they were really looking forward to anarchy. All dressed up with no "Thunderdome."
I suppose professional wrestling will be more popular than ever.
-chaosgrrl
When you can't find your jello don't come screaming at me to remove the weasle from your headgear.
Most current Unixes store time as the number of seconds since 1970 in a signed 32-bit integer. The maximum value that a signed 32-bit integer can store is 2147483647 which corresponds to Tuesday, January 19, 2038 at 3:14:07 GMT. The next second after that one will be Friday, December 13, 1901 at 20:45:52 GMT according to the most recent Linux kernels.
Also year end, fiscal year end, and leap day (which Microsoft got wrong).
it's not the most impressive...
It seems the media is now out for blood. After a squillions dollars have been spent to prevent a disaster they now want some sort of proof that a catastrophic disasters would've occurred if all the money was not spent...
Here lies one of the keys to why so many things are pretty screwed up in our world. Although people often say they want to avoid disaster completely and prevent it completely rather than wit for it to happen and then clean up the mess, the reality is usually often not the same. If people never see the ill effects of something right in front of them, they seem to assume that it's not worth spending time and effort fixing. I guess the fact that the industry spent so much fixing up Y2K before it happened would seem to point to an industry that is thorough and cautious. Yet, the public doesn't seem to quite agree saying that since nothing happened, nothing was going to happen anyway. The fact is that it's clear that during the extensive Y2K testing that was done, plenty of things did go wrong. From payrolls screwing up to shutdowns of big mainframes and whatever else. This is something that seems be ignored now. It's not like major companies just took the Y2K upgrade advice blindly, they actually did their own tests on their own systems and saw that there was a problem there to be fixed. And fixed it they did.
The danger now is that the IT is going to suffer from the Boy who cried wolf syndrome... As been mentioned already, this could mean that some technological disaster may not be treated with such respect in the future. Undoubtedly, the cost of such ignorance will be much higher than the cost of preventing it... Undoubtedly though, it will be a test of foresight for the media and the public to determine whether the cost of prevention outweighs the risk of a calamatic event or not.
In defense of the mainframers, you need to get a perspective. There weren't many people with coding skills, and development standards had yet to be refined. I doubt there were any "software engineers" in the 60's, but plenty of people doing stuff with the big iron that was unheard of. I would also suggest that the people who coded using 2 digit years assumed that their code would be obsolete and rewritten before the century turnover. I've seen a lot of code that was originally written to be a quick and dirty fix still in production 5-10 years later.
Not to sound like a grumpy old man (actually I'm 26), but there was a time when disk space/memory/cpu time were critical resources. You had to know exactly how big your data files were and often had to pre-allocate space for them. You put your program and data on a cardboard punchcard and hoped to hell you didn't have to recompile anything! Run times were more like hours than seconds! If you think windows takes forever to boot, try waiting 45 minutes for the system to IPL.
So Mr. Katz, nothing major happened on this New Years day, but not with out a hell of an effort. I'd like to see how many people got stuck with Y2K conversions, upgrades, and overtime. I'd like to see how many IT managers were freaking out because the code they wrote in their younger days was going to fail in 2000. If you're wondering if the money spent on this fiasco was worth it, you'll know it when your bank statement shows up this month or your health insurance pays for your last doctor's visit.
-------
Hecubas
With all the Monday-morning quarterbacking going on, this might turn out to be the real story: Not did we need to spend the money, but did we need to spend this much money?
I know of a few decidedly non-Y2K items that got slipped onto our budget (like a pair of Rio MP3 players), and that's only because I saw the shipment come in. I'm sure there's plenty more where that came from, and we haven't even touched on genuine over-inflated expenditures like buying dozens of printers for dozens of command-center staff. When the ratio of printers to people approaches 1.0, someone's spending too much money.
-Sharv
Or what?
Have a look here: RFC2550: Y10K and beyond. Would not it be cool to say that my fave' os is Y10K compliant. (sp?)
This RFC is mostly humour oriented, but the solution it gives is worth thinking about. (197x Cobolhead would take the y2k bug also with humour...)
BTW: I do not know the visions of BSDers, but I recall that for Linus it is ok, that Linux is replaced by 'something better' in ~30 years... How much have I heard sayings like this?
(serious tone not intended)
Plenty of countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America & the former Eastern block did bugger all preperation for Y2K, yet things went smoothly over there too. Which proves your just as much of a scam artist as those people who convince old ladies they need their roof restored, actually more so, you profited even more.
Well, as a former christian who eventually clued in, i have to say that i'm glad that the "prophets" and religious fanatics were, once again, incorrect. And the Y2K bug did not signal the second coming of jesus christ.
:)). I look forward to reading what they make out of this one.
They always manage to take a defeat and put a spin on it that makes it out to be a victory (Didn't someone make a reference to Orwell and 1984 in this thread?
Or maybe i should just worship Kurt.
DQ
os.system("perl -e 'print \"My first Python Script.\"'")
Why does everyone on Slashdot feel the need -- nearly every day -- feel the urge to use Hitler in order to make comparisons?
..."
It's a bizarre urge, IMHO -- one that perpetually verges on the tasteless and one that, more often than not, reveals the utter banality and lack of critical insight of the poster who makes the (by now) routine incantation of "Hitler."
"Well, ya know, what would the world have been like if
Anyway, my point is this:
The assertion that culture thrives on villians and not heroes is, I'm sorry to say, utter rubbish.
Our culture does thrive on heroes -- as any visit to your local movie theater will prove. There's a reason that stories (films, novels, plays) are constructed the way that they are. And that reason is this: that as texts of our collective consciousness (and shared unconscious), the plays and novels and films that we crave need the villians in order to worhip the heroes.
We don't worship the villians; we never have. Our culture admires the fact that goodness can triumph over evil -- but our culture knows, too, that without the careful presence of "evil" we wouldn't know goodness. (An old argument -- vauguely religious -- but very true).
Besides, the definition of "culture" in my post and the post previous is tricky and unstudied. I'm not sure what someone (myself included) means when we refer to "our culture". We're all parts of cultures that are so varied that it's impossible to unweave each association from the tapestry of the whole.
That aside, I felt compelled to point this out.
Don't be fooled into thinking we worship the so-called "villians". It's an interesting assertion, but it's not quite true.
(Of course we *do* worship Katz -- more of a college freshman than most college freshman -- for his perceptive scrutiny of media and media trends. Who is this Katz guy anyway? He makes bizarre ex cathedra pronouncements as if he has the truck of a perceptive media critic. How can a college student like Katz be so uninformed?)
Before we declare it a non-event I suggest we wait a few weeks. It will take a little while to see fall out among smaller suppliers having trouble keeping their books and commitments straight and the ripples up the economy from that. If it happens at all of course.
This is the first day back to work in the millenium for most of us. It isn't time to celebrate its non-seriousness just yet.
England lost credit card swipers for 9 hours straight. Someone got charged $91,000 in late fee's. Airlines had a last minute fix for a Y2K bug they found that could have been major. A military satellite lost power, and it's backup worked fine. Hundreds of minor glitches around the world did rear their ugly heads, but nothing MAJOR. SO yes, this was a big deal. But we got to it in time.
Talk about the cure worse than the disease...were you aware that if Armageddon had really occurred, then the only people left to repopulate the planet would have been 6 MTV viewers? Now that's scary.
I disagree that "a curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it?s ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration." Nope, Jon, that was New Yorkers. Here in the Bay Area, people stayed home, or went to private parties (turnout on the Embarcadero was low). I normally avoid TV, but found myself staying near it all through the day, enjoying the sense of global celebration while I cooked for a bunch of my 16-yr-old's friends. From a very informal poll of friends, I gather I wasn't the only one who was tracking the celebration via TV and/or PC, feeling a part of the whole world, not just my little slice of it. We didn't celebrate technology so much as we just used it to inhance our sense of connection to the whole human race. Seems to me that that's what these boxes are FOR, not to celebrate in and of themselves, but to use as we progress to become more fully human.
OK, now what?
This argument is "the fallacy of the broken window". By this reasoning, a street punk who thinks it's kewl to break windows should be hailed as a public benefactor, since he creates jobs for glaziers.
Obviously, this reasoning must be fundamentally flawed, since it leads inescapably to an absurd conclusion. The flaw was pointed out by economist Frederick Bastiat in the essay "That Which is Seen, and that Which is Not Seen". Yes, destruction creates jobs for those who are hired to repair it, but this drains money that otherwise would have been spent on new goods and services. The fact that the former is seen while the latter is unseen leads to the fallacy.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The media has missed the point (surprise surprise). But what's worse, is that everyone has followed them...
There IS no single point of failure for every software system. Don't we wish that were the case.
"I know, we'll fix Mozilla by changing all date fields..."
The sad truth is that software can fail ANY time, for a miriad of reasons (none of which have cute acronyms).
That's the first problem with this supposed "Y2K Crisis". The second, is that it's stupid to think the world is going to end because of a date field.
Does the world end everytime someone seg-faults? Of course not.
We're all totally comfortable with the idea of computers crashing. It happens ALL THE TIME (more for some, less for others. Yes I run linux...)
But no-one writing missile control software is going to have a "if (dateYear78) BlowUp();".
But I'm preaching to the converted, no doubt.
Alexander Stevenson
alexander.stevenson@telus.net
I've been greatly pleased that, for once, media hype has worked in favour of the ordinary sysadmin. Avoiding Y2K problems, for people maintaining typical business systems (i.e. anything that isn't an embedded controller) is no different from avoiding viruses or device dirver bugs - it amounts to "apply the latest patches/updates, and reboot if necessary."
Can you imagine a company paying someone a bonus to come in on a Thursday 12th and stay past midnight to ensure a 'Friday the 13th' virus doesn't damage systems?
But the scary problem is the bisexual one. I think you have confused Pope Gregory's missive. The translation from the Latin isn't into bisexual.
Gary North is a christian reconstructionist who WANTS society to fall so that he and his scarry buddies can setup a fascist theocrary based on biblical law. He has been prophesying doom and gloom for a couple of decades. And of course, consistantly wrong. Here are some fun quotes from him: "At 12 midnight on January 1, 2000 (a Saturday morning), most of the world's mainframe computers will either shut down or begin spewing out bad data. Most of the world's desktop computers will also start spewing out bad data. Tens of millions -- possibly hundreds of millions -- of pre-programmed computer chips will begin to shut down the systems they automatically control. This will create a nightmare for every area of life, in every region of the industrialized world." "The y2k crisis is systemic. It cannot possibly be fixed. I think it will wipe out every national government in the West. Not just modify them- destroy them. I honestly think the Federal government will go under. I think the U.S.A. will break up the way the U.S.S.R. did. Call me a dreamer. Call me an optimist. That?s what I think." "So, of course I want to see y2k bring down the system , all over the world. I have hoped for this all of my adult life." Break the law! - "In Texas, for example, the gun shows can involve up to 1,500 tables, where weapons and paraphernalia of all kinds can be purchased. Only Texas residents are supposed to be able to buy. That?s what the law says. However.... [ellipsis in original] It is my opinion that it is worth a trip to Texas to participate in either the Dallas or the Houston gun show. Drive in, bring cash, and drive out." GN 1980 - "The Soviet Union, the most consistent humanist regime in history, has escalated its pressures on the West, and by 1982 will probably be in a position to launch a successful first strike against America?s undefended missiles." GN 1980 - "I am increasingly of the opinion that nuclear war is imminent, and that it is the ultimate problem the Christian and the Christian community are going to have to deal with. When that war begins (as I think it will, probably within 48 months), you?re going to have to rethink the whole of Western civilization. . ."
I have been up to my neck in Y2K cruft for 2 or 3 years now. I had hoped it was over but as usual the general public didn't get the point.
This wasn't some amazing evil problem, identify the issue and fix it. This is what IT people (should) do. Nobody listened at first, I don't know how many people I talked to that have been voicing concerns about this for 5 years but were blown off by management types. Then CNN started mentioning it on the hour every hour for the last year. (I am not by any means singling out CNN, all the media outlets were equally annoying) All of a sudden everybody was pitching a fit.
What followed was at best disgusting. Consultants selling themselves at ridiculous rates while preaching inevitable destruction. Y2K projects in every corporation staffed by people the main IT groups had no use for. I actually had to threaten the life of some little cretin to get him away from one of my HP/UX boxes that he was going to install the Win95 "update" on. He kept telling me he was an MCSE so he knew what he was doing, it was scary. I don't even like to think what would have happened if I hadn't been there when he stumbled in the door, high on his own ignorance.
For a year I couldn't go for a pint with my friends without some jackass asking me if he should stock up on water and what to do about his VCR. I couldn't watch TV because I was starting to get physically sick when the local news started pestering some poor guy at Ford to find out if everyone's cars were going to suddenly melt.
The sad part of it is this, I am glad the media got a hold of this and made a stink. I am glad that a bunch of slimy consultants are now sitting on their private beaches in the Bahamas. If the hype mobile hadn't hit full swing NOTHING would have been done and all sorts of silly things would have happened.
I can't believe it takes this kind of mass hysteria just to accomplish what all of us geek types new was going to happen and knew how to fix. This is the real question you should look at Mr. Katz. Why does it takes this kind of revolting mess to get everyone to listen to us?
It was just the media creating it's own story out of something to continue the need for news, even if there isn't any worth reporting. I remember they always manage to find one or two doomsayers to keep everyone worried. You can always find people who think the worst is going to happen and it's going to happen *NOW*. Why do you think there's suicide cults?
The big problem with the media is it's double standards. When there's a minority that calls out doom and destruction, they get newspaper articles and special reports. When there's a minority about anything else, they're lucky if they get a two sentence article on some news roundup page. How much news have you seen on any of the important (to us) court cases? The DVD stuff, the etoys stuff. And out of the ones you've seen, how many report the news fairly or correctly?
The media doesn't report the news, it tries to create it. And it will only create the stories that will get it the most circulation. It's like a soap opera.
"And it wasn't a *hard* problem either. Not technically. Finding a fix for Y2K-imperiled code tended to be easy; scheduding and managing the upgrade of live systems with no disruption of service was in many cases hard. Coming up with the resources was hard for some companies. But the fixes themselves tended to be pretty obvious"
Comeon now - my former employer's customer service software (accounts, billings, credit, cash collection) consisted of 12 million lines of IBM 1401 assembly language vintage 1965 (bet you didn't think that would run on an ES/9000, did you?). No source code, no documentation, 99% of the original designers and programmers retired or dead. It _worked_ fine, because it had been debugged for 30 years. But it **wouldn't** have worked as of Saturday 2000/01/01.
_Easy_ to go in and fix that? Would you like to take on the job? A good million manhours over 30 years, in the always-easier forward direction, to create it, and it could have been fixed _easily_? No way, no how.
Without a certain amount of scaremongering, that company (a critical, 'head for the bunkers' industry) would have been dying in mid-January ("I'm sorry sir, our computers are down for the next 4 years") and dead in mid-February ("no cash? Sorry, no more coal for you").
The geeks did a very very good job on this one. No ifs ands or buts.
sPh
Ok, so basically, we fixed up the old jeep to go down the 2000 road, threw on our seatbelts, and went for a ride..
Now we're UPSET that the jeep didn't FLIP, CRASH, and BURN?!?!?!
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
What kills me is all the people who thought that Y2K would cause computers all over the world to grind to a halt as the clock struck midnight. Especially the ones who thought that it was THEIR time zone that was pivotal.
Any techno-geek can tell you that GMT was the real measuring stick. But any techno-geek with half a brain will also tell you that Jan 1, 2000 was just another day on a long list of days that could have seen things go wrong.
If there had been major Y2K problems, they would have surfaced long before Jan 1, 2000. When your bank went to calculate your mortgage payments, when you got your telephone bill, 9/9/99... So few people understand that the 98-99 rollover was at least as critical to financial institutions (and just about any other IT-centric organization) as the actual 2000 rollover.
Of course, no one was about to risk his/her neck and say there would be NO problems - yours truly included. Murphy's Law has held way too often for any intelligent person to make an absolute statement so broad-ranging.
I suspect the media frenzy we saw was just another example of the poor journalism we see all across America. "Grab your viewer's attention, any way you can." Don't worry too much about any substance, you won't fit it into that 60 second spot anyways. Just crease your brow, throw out some techno-babble and make everyone worry - a little. Not too much. Make them feel safe and secure, knowing that Action News is looking out for their interests.
Coming up: Candles Could Be Fatal, Action News at 11 tells you how to protect your family from the newest threat to your safety - Fire.
I was travelling USAir (now US Airways, I think) from Memphis to Boston, with a layover in Charlotte. When I attempted to find my connecting gate, I discovered that the airport's systems didn't know there were any flights headed to Boston that evening. It seems that USAir's flight schedule was changing on March 1, and somebody's system (I never found out whether it was USAir or the Charlotte Airport, but since Logan knew to expect us I presume it was Charlotte's problem) wasn't programmed to recognize leap years.
So while any competently coded system will not have problems based on 02/29/2000, you should not discount the possibility of incompetent coding (and testing, for that matter).
I refuse, on principle, to have a
Huge countries that did nothing to prepare compared to the usa had no problems either.
The money we spent because of the right wing fear mongers like worldnetdaily.com was a scam.
I'm not getting all this 'minor problem' crap I keep hearing in the media. i.e.: 'A few (9!) nuclear power plants experience minor problems.' Excuse me?? I don't know about you, but to me, ANY problem at a nuke plant is a MAJOR problem.
No problems at hospitals? Just a few failed heart monitors? Again, that would seem pretty damn serious to me, especially if you were a patient hooked to the monitor!!
Imagine what would have happened if y2k had been ignored.
8 months ago, we did some testing on our legacy system. None rolled over to 1900. Half rolled over to Jan 4, 1980, the other half shut off. We fixed them. Just because a problem was solved doesn't mean the problem never existed.
I'm just really pissed off today. Our department has been busting our ass days/nights/weekends to get everything ready and working. 2000 comes and our work pays off, systems run and its business as usual... not a single burp in our building. Do we get a pat on the back or a 'good job'? Hell, no... we get laughed at and told it was all hype. I've got two people in the back room who are steaming and ready to walk and I've got others who are talking about rolling all the changes back out over a weekend so the building can see what might have happened.
Not a happy day here in the IT department.
I had thought that until this morning. Now, I've got 40+ Dell's that think it's January 6, 1980, and I can't set them to the year to 2000 in the BIOS. Dell claimed the machines were Y2K compliant, and I believed them. A local "consultant" stopped by about a month ago claiming to be able to fix all of the Y2K problems with Win98SE and with the newer Dells. I ignored him, and now I can't get through to Dell support. I guess I'm going to get a major "I told you so" from him along with an even bigger bill.
Also, about 1,500 BGP routes disappeared between Thursday night and Saturday morning. Don't tell me things weren't really screwed-up when ~3% of the routes on the Internet disappear.
I'm wondering if the Merlin phone switch that Lucent told us we had to replace (at a huge cost) was really non-compliant. Imagine the class-action suit if I could prove that the good ole' merlin would have worked.
Too bad they took it with them when they finished the new install
I heard a rumor that the entire country of Gambia essentially went tits-up on y2k - but i haven't seen this anywhere documented...anyone?
It's not a big problem.... the thing still works... it just gives incorrect time/dates for people calling my home...
---
Sam"Criswel"Hart
The Officious Strenua Inertia Web Site
Sam"Criswell"Hart
The Officious Strenua Inertia Web Site
Um, Foxpro stores dates with 4 digits for the 'years' field. Always has done.
It can display with 2 or 4 digits for the year, by using the "Set Century ON|OFF" command, but it's always stored with 4 digits.
It's 100% Y2K compliant.
My Journal
We spent about 100 times too much on Y2K.
First of all, the USA spent far more on Y2K than other countries. Europe spent less, Asia and Latin America spent even less. But there where no Y2K disasters even in the countires that spent little. Hence, we wasted a lot of money.
Secondly, as we all know, software testing is imperfect, and it is only reasonable to expect at least 1% of the bugs to slip through. The almost total absence of bugs indicates that the real number of bugs was actually very modest.
There is an explanation for Y2K spending that fits the data better: it was a field day for bureaucrats, lawyers, and hypesters. The US being in the leadership of all of these areas, we spent the most.
there are species of penguin who live in the tropics. the galapagos islands have several penguin species.
I meant billion, not million.
I am an idiot.
Otherwise, in an act of spectacular defiance, even heroism, tens of millions of people all over the earth gathered in urban centers to celebrate the new century. They did not stockpile food and water ..
I think its more like a I-can't-be-bothered attitude. I mean, I had a pretty significant exposure to y2k issues and hearing about what may happen from friends I respected made me uneasy.
However by the 31st, I hadn't had time to make extra grocery shopping or some such. And the only y2k preperation I made was to drop by a store near my place and buy a box of donuts and a jug of water.
I have a feeling whether its a y2k scare, a meteor heading for earth or an annoucement of an impending Alien invasion, the majority of humanity would just go on with their life.
Just that in this case, humans won the bet.
This whole lie about "we had no problems because we spent so much preparing" is a scam by the fear mongers to escape from their sins. Huge countries like russia, china, india did nothing compared to the usa to prepare and they have no problems either.
He makes a good point.
"A curious exception to the global celebration was the United States, content to watch it's ball drop in Times Square, a crowded and exuberant but comparatively visionless and primitive national celebration."
Pretty much everyone I have talked to across the US has listed this as a strong net positive of the Y2K "thing". By not scheduling huge parties, by not having a massive "national vision", by not dumping huge amounts of money into the hands of greedy "entertainers", by simply not traveling over the long weekend, many people had time for friendly, personal celebrations with family, friends, and neighbors.
We had three neighborhood parties within walking distance, then sat up with our little guys to count down the seconds and bang pots and pans at midnight. Which do you think they will better remember in 80 years - that, or some "national vision" televised from Washington?
sPh
At my company there are two teams. Both receive a project of approximate equal complexity.
Team A: Develops a realistic plan and conscientiously follows it. All team members put in small amounts of overtime when needed to meet intermediate goals. There are no suprises and a stable program is delivered several days ahead of schedule with concise, well-documented code.
Team B: Maintains a moto of "We've got time!". All intermediate deadlines are missed by a mile. Everyone nearly always goes home early, the exception being days when the intermediate deadlines are due. On these days, everyone pulls an all-nighter so that the deliverables can be presented the next morning. The final deliverable, due on Friday, is delivered Monday morning. To anyone who's taken Comp101, the code is obviously a poorly architected, cut-n-pasted, undocumented peice of a bad knock-off of a poor hack.
Now, who gets the credit for "putting in the effort to go the extra mile"? Who is the "real team players"? Who gets the rewards and their pictures in the company newsletter?
Clue to people new to the industry. NEVER deliver on time. The pressed tee shirts don't know what your job entails, and if you deliver early they think your job was too easy. Complain about tight deadlines and lack of man power. Go home, login, and run a script to keep data moving. Next morning, tell your boss that you pulled an all-nighter. The weekend after the final due date, get your team together for a weekend party, have everyone log in and then pass the bottle. Monday morning (red-eyed and dreary looking) make up grand and heroic tales of how much effort was put forth to pull off your amazing feat to get the project finished by Monday morning. This is the time for the team leader to recommend raises to honor the valiant efforts of all the 'team players'.
Of course, this is all unnecessary if your companies management has a clue.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
the katz-head said:
In fact, as of Monday no human being was known to have died or been injured - or truthfully, even significantly
inconvenienced - as the result of any computer-related problem at the end of the century.
completely untrue. for instance, the pittsburg runway lights failed, and stayed down throughout the first. this severely inconvenienced many, including my mother, who had to be rerouted (because the plane she was to fly on had a stop in pittsburg sometime in the previous 24 hours)
In the year 2038 all 32 bit time counters will overflow. But i guess then we will have 327489327 bit computers.
I got a forwarded email from a PHB earlier today that said Wall Street was having problems with the Perl localtime() function returning 100 for the year. It went on to ask if we are using this function anywhere, and can we replace it. I replied and informed him that yes, we were using it, and yes, it was returning 100 for the year, but that's what it is supposed to return (localtime() returns the number of years since 1900). I also informed him that we are using it correctly by adding 1900 to what it returns. I told him that whoever sent him the email wasn't using it correctly.
It seems there will be many of these today. This is almost as annoying as those email chain letters (If they suggest sending it out to 10 people, send it back to whoever sent it 10 times).
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
Virtually all the work done has been behind the scenes, so of course people aren't going to see anything if all is well.
What people forget, and we must explain, is that the problem is not just the rollover from 1999 to 2000, but the whole usage of dates.
What we must do is patiently explain what we have done and what would have happenned if we hadn't done anything. I'm sure some corking examples are going to appear.
qts
The Eiffel Tower's countdown did not seem to be Y2K-Ready :)
http://fr.news.yahoo.com/000101/4/7vak.html
... and IE5's JScript implementation of the getYear method is not compliant to MS's documentation. According to the doc on MSDN and the result given by IE5, we are in 1900.
Of course we were saved. Maybe its more obvious to me because I work at a datacenter for a bank on an ancient mainframe, but if people had not paid to fix this thing, it never would have gotten done. We waited awhile for an Open Source programmer to show up at our door and offer to fix it for free, but Open Source let us down. And we couldn't find a port of Linux to replace VRX/E on the mainframe. I'm telling you, if I didn't have this Tux tattoo on my forehead, I might wake up and realize that paid programmers are the only ones who advance and improve this industry - and save our asses in the face of a potential catastrophe.
Faith in technology or faith in the people behind that technology? I don't think the people who were partying would have left it up to technology alone. I know I wouldn't. We wouldn'tve been out partying if we hadn't known that there were so many people working to make sure we didn't have to worry. If the world blindly trusted technology by itself, it would be a sad day indeed. I know that the world doesn't because there's at least one of us out here who lives trusting people to work well to make the technology work (and I plan to be one of those people soon).
CmdrChalupa (who hasn't changed his sig)
CmdrChalupa, who finally changed his sig (drop -FlogSpammersNow- for my real address)
Ya goddamned idjit. Yer just another sheep like the rest of em.
I grew up in Florida, a prime target for hurricanes. Residents of the cities that were in the most danger were told to evacuate. If the previous hurricane had blown off course and hadn't done as much damage as had been expected, more people who were told to evacuate wouldn't evacuate and said something like "the last hurricane missed us, I'm not evacuating again." The news media still told people that they should evacuate and stressed that the previous hurricane blowing off course does not in any way imply that the current one will, but people ignored this. The problem wasn't the media, it was the people watching it. The media loves disasters, they will sensationalize them as long as it gets them ratings. The next major computer disaster will be reported by the media, it will be the average John Doe who will ignore it. Fortunately, the average John Doe wouldn't be able to do anything to prevent the disaster even if he wanted to.
I was in working during Y2K, and the company I work for had several Y2K bugs which were significant enough to our operations that we had to fix them that night. These were problems that slipped through the cracks during testing. The thing is, these bugs didn't affect anyone but us, and there was a) no way to get the news out, and b) no desire to do so, or else our stock prices would have been hurt. The only failures we would have seen on TV would ahve been catastrophic ones. Nobody cares about all the little things that go wrong in various IS departments around the world...
I think what this illustrates, most of all, is how far out of touch the pundits and the arbiters of "conventional wisdom" really are. If the media was overhyping this problem (a debatable point -- most of the serious coverage I saw on TV asserted that the nation was prepared, and there was no cause for overreaction), then the fact that hardly anybody actually panicked is probably a sign that there's still a healthy vein of skepticism running through the populace.
Either that, or it just means that most people are complacent sheep who'll happily amble up to the slaughterhouse door without a thought for self-preservation.
It's also worth repeating that the idea of the techno-industrial infrastructure turning into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight was an oversimplified scenario presented only in cheesy TV ads and animated Fox sitcoms. We may yet see "real" Y2K outages cropping up as we roll into the first business week of the 2000s -- and remember, there's still February 29th to look forward to.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
the atm philosophy was half right, my atm card expires in "02/00" and the atm machine (on jan 1) said my card was expired, and two tries later it ate my card. same thing happened to my dad. check expiration dates on your cards..
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
Actually, those countries were doing quite a bit to prepare, all soundbites and hysterical news reporting aside. But the reality is that less developed countries had less code to wade through, and therefor less to do, not to mention less exposure to Y2K issues if something had been overlooked, than countries like the US, France, Germany, and Japan, where you can't even sneeze without a computer, much less spend a quarter on a pack of chewing gum.
If the world had done nothing, and some 20% of the infrastructure had had glitches (or whatever the prediction was), it wouldn't have mattered much to someone trekking in the Annapurnas or on safari in Africa. On the other hand, in London, Paris, Tokyo, or New York the impact would probably have been quite significant. This is not to say less developed countries would have been immune, merely much more resistent.
Yes, there were fearmongers and fools, both probably still cowering in their bunkers waiting for the Last Days. You are right, the true fearmongers (particularly those hyping the Y2K issue in the last couple of months when it served absolutely no constructive purpose) deserve to be smacked up side the head, financially as well as literally. But that didn't make the warning being given one, two, or five years ago any less timely or apropos. The irony is, we heeded those warnings, fixed our code, and prevented allot of difficulties as a result. Those with the foresight to warn us will get little if any credit, those of us who lost weekend after weekend getting things in shape in time for the new year will hardly be remembered either, but, luckilly for all of us, Y2K itself will go down in history as a non-event and be forgotten as well, which sure beats the alternatives.
One thing Y2K does demonstrate is than an ounce of prevention was worth many pounds of cure. As one of the ones who spent most of the weekend in the office making sure our trading systems were up to the task, I can tell you there were problems (not just with our stuff, but with data from the clearing firms, exchanges, etc.). Those problems were resolved and business was normal Monday morning, but had we treated this year like we have every other new year's weekend the story would have been very different.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Comeon now - my former employer's customer service software (accounts, billings, credit, cash collection) consisted of 12 million lines of IBM 1401 assembly language vintage 1965 (bet you didn't think that would run on an ES/9000, did you?). No source code, no documentation...
Please tell me you did NOT leave the "fixed" application written like this. For Heaven's sake it may seem like a big jump in the short term but recode the application something that will be around for a while. No I don't content that C, C++, Perl or Java will be here forever... but IBM 1401 assembly? At least go through and document the thing properly so it's possible to understand it.
Back when the shortcut way of representing the year was introduced, memory cost a lot more, AND the dollar was worth a lot more. Many programmers realised they were creating a problem that would have to be fixed later. They decided that the cost of fixing it later would be less than the cost of doing it right then. At least for financial records, they were saving a lot of bytes in a time when every byte counted.
Were they right or wrong?
Y2K Briefs
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
I predicted no problems from Y2K. Oh sure its not as if there weren't things that would have gone wrong, but every single apocolypse scenario was utterly absurd. Its not that the problem didn't exist its just that the majority of problems it could cause would not be system failures but rather simple annoyances. I did hear about problems with a heating system at a apartment complex in Seoul, Korea but other than that, my prediction was basically true.
No, my big worry isn't about small businesses, most of whom genuinely want to serve their customers. My worry would be about big businesses, most of whom have "customer service" reps who believe that service is what a stallion does to a mare. When you reach "customer service", you reach an ill-trained know-nothing who is being paid $17,000 per year to answer phone calls about things she knows nothing about. Unlike a small businessman, she doesn't know you personally, and really doesn't give a damn. She makes the same amount of money whether you go away happy or sad, after all -- unlike a small business owner, who sees your happiness in his bottom line.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
this was one of the biggest problem. there was no vendor to call, and all developers used in creating the software were either gone or working on something management deemed "more important".
not to mention the complete lack of docs on all software... =/
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
If you actually read any of the Y2K stuff written by knowledgeable people and not just blind journalists, you'd say that most of them agreed that January 1, 2000 wouldn't make most Y2K problems come to light. For example, the United States imports a *huge* amount of stuff from countries like China, Mexico, and Colombia. At least 50% of the contents of any Wal-Mart comes from China. Most coffee and much fruit comes from South America. Now if a junk appliance factory in China or Korea bought some old computer system in the seventies to keep track of shipping and inventory, and they were bitten by a Y2K bug, how long before anyone realized it? No lights would go out, nothing would explode, but shipments of merchandise slated for a month or more down the road might be delayed. That's the kind of bug that was expected by everyone except crazed media types.
As I told the non-computing member of my family.
"Everything really important has been fixed, the only thing I would worry about is TV stations because they are very timing dependant, and noones life depends on them."
Shortly after midnight KIRO 7 in Seattle dropped off the air for a while.
The flip side is that my blizzard kit meant that all I had to do was get some extra water. I couldn't count on getting water by melting snow!
Seriously, I agreed with the Red Cross entirely on preparations - we didn't need more than prudent for usual local conditions, yet few people in California have earthquake kits, few people in metro Colorado have blizzard kits, few people on the eastern and gulf seaboard have hurricane kits, etc.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
First we had to scare the beejeesus out of our CEOs and CIOs to get money in the budget to fix the design flaw that most of us expected to be redesigned long before 2K. Scott'll tell you - be wary of scared CEOs - they talk to the press. If the billions had been spread out over the last 15 years as it should have been instead of put off year after year until it became a crisis, we wouldn't be discussing it now.
Chalkhillian
The large corporates in those countries did do Y2K remediation, if only to have manual backups when needed.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Neither!
The people who were the most frightened of the Y2K problem were those who are least likely to trust their fellow human being.
Most of us, when trapped in a stuck elevator, will wait for a rescue, because we know that some people out there are knowlegable about elevators, and whatever problem exists can be fixed by an expert. But, there's always one guy who doesn't trust anyone unscrewing ceiling panels and climbing out the elevator to fix the problem himself.
This is a big problem in our society. Jon Katz, why don't you write about this one! Some home school their kids because they don't trust their fellow citizens who specialize in education. Some people maintain entire arsenals in their home because they don't trust the faith that all their neighbors have in the rule of law and the Constitution. So why are we surprised that a few people didn't trust the geeks to fix the Y2K problem?
This is plain old human nature. Look out for number one. The conflict started thousands of years ago when people specialized their jobs, and no single person could perform all the tasks required to maintain a modern lifestyle. Trusting your neighbor to do his job is still difficult for some of us to do. Not too much new about that.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
In other words, 2037 is going to be a LOT easier than the Y2K bug was...
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Is that the Rochester that's in the same state as Springfield?
It's absurd to blame the mainstream media. We reported claims of disaster, but we also reported the many assurances that nothing much would happen. We gave both sides. Deal with it.
Hiawatha Bray
Tech Reporter
Boston Globe
Tell everyone you know that the real problem isn't over yet!
February 29th, 2000 is going to be a leap year! This strange coincidence of events hasn't happened in 400 years, and it will cause mass chaos and panic as food supplies are mis-routed. For weeks after it will be every man for himself. If you don't have a gun to protect your food, you'll be shot and someone else will eat your food. You'd better buy gold too, because paper money will be worthless after the LY2K (Leap Year 2000) problem.
As you know, every 4 years is a leap year, unless the year is divisible by 100. But, because of space limitations, the final rule was omitted from every system out there. That rule is that if the year is divisible by 400, then it *is* a leap year. Your car won't start, the power will fail, your furby will turn into a gremlin, and your Windows 98 computer will cause the transformer on the pole in front of your house to explode, throwing PCB's all over. It's going to be hell, ladies and gentlemen, and you heard it hear first. By the way, Jesus will pick that exact time to return to Earth, so you'd better get a few bibles for the bomb shelter too.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Is that the Rochester that's in the same state as Springfield?
Probably, I think there's a Springfield in every state of the union (Simpson;s trivia, I believe).
But the poster is talking about Rochester, NY, there was a quake in Canada that was felt here.
George
The depressing thing about Y2K is that there was no ending to the stoiry which would actually please people.
If everything had broken, it would have been our fault for not working hard enough to fix it, or for having used two digit dates in the first place.
Now that it appears that nothing has gone wrong, its somehow our fault for overblowing the whole situation and for wasting everyone's time and money. The fact that people are even contemplating that the world would have been an OK place without all of the effort invested into the Y2K problem shows that people take technology for granted when it works well and blame technology for all the evils of the world whenever it doesn't live up to their unrealistic expectations.
I moderate a couple of onelist.com lists, and was looking at the list of pending members. Those submited after dec 31 are listed as year "100," instead of year "00" or year "2000." That is to say, one person had been waiting since "12/26/99," and the next had been waiting since "1/3/100."
Something else. I do not think we are out of the woods. I've always thought the whole thing was overhyped, but I guarantee that problems are going to start popping up. Your medical records at your doctor's office, etc etc. There have already been billing problems. It's not over yet.
Faith in technology? Erm, no, not really. Try faith in humanity.
When you get right down to it, Y2K wasn't a technology issue. Granted, technology provided us the tools to create the situation. As a recent commentator on NPR pointed out, though, it was a human issue. Plain and simple. (Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of the commentator or his credentials, but he struck me as a person in a position to know well that of which he spoke. This is doubly unfortunate, as many of the points in the first list below are paraphrases of his editorial.)
Consider:
Of course, many of us worked our butts off to fix the mistakes.
See? People. People caused the problem, and people fixed the problem.
My point? Well, it's a little nebulous, but I guess it's this: technology is great. It is not, however, a panacea. It is a tool, rather like the simple lever: it magnifies a little effort into large results. Of course, human error gets magnified as well. This is not sufficient to forswear technology and return to the Renaissance, or even the late Stone Age. (Don't you DARE take my Linux box away from me! ) However, I think we should be wary of those who do place faith in technology, rather than the humans who use it.
I have been hearing a lot of flack from the media (no, I am not the only one ;) about how we techies blew the whole Y2K thing out of proportion... I will not add to a defense of either side other than to give those end-users who put their faith in the techies every time the load Windows a little insight... Y2K could have been a huge problem... luckily we who could do something about it did... do not patronize us for warning you that everything we did may not be enough... we were just being cautious... would you sooner have us tell you that we were right? That we did not do all that we could to ensure you can still send email or use Excel? And that now you would actually have to spend time with your family instead of being glued to your tube and browsing the web? ENOUGH is ENOUGH... we have all done what we had to do... let's move on...
... is a newfound disrespect for modern media sources.
I mean, for the last year or so we've been bombarded with stories and articles about the end of the world at the hands of the Y2K bug. Modern media has been making a *killing* off of scaring people into thinking that there were going to be catastrophes and chaos come January 1, 2000.
Now that it's over, and it was all a big hoax, I for one hope that there's a backlash - that people start to realize that not everything they see on CNN or read in Time magazine is worth even thinking about, and that there is more to the world than being victims of hype, consumers of bad news.
So all I really have to say about Y2K is that its gone, and lets see if anyone has learned a lesson.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I would agree the complexity of finding the problem cases was high, but the fixes themselves are note difficult.
Or, to put it another way, this was a problem that was hard only in the sense that massive amounts of resources were required. NOT hard because the solutions required creativity and "Eureka!" insight. So the problems were made much more solvable being throwing much more resources at them. In essence, this was more of a management challenge than a engineering challenge.
I absolutely agree that the geeks did an excellent job on this. But for a geek problem, this one was not very difficult. Only the scale made it hard. I would bet that most developers would not characterize the Y2K bug as the most chalenging techinical problem of their career, except in terms of how many hours they *had* to put in on it.
12 million lines of 1401 assembler? Ouch. But that is the result of successive bad decisions made for decades before Y2K was even an issue.
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
I mentioned this is the poll and thought it would be good to post it here too. Second Harvest is a non-profit company that runs food banks throughout the United States, supplying local food shelves, shelters, missions and others with food. For several months we've had plans in the work to capitalize on the excess food hoarded for y2k. Check out http://www.secondharvest.org for more details and to find a local Food Bank in your area.
I have done no actual Y2K work.
However about a decade ago I had a (very civil) discussion with a then colleague about whether a 2 digit date field was enough or 4 digits were necessary. We did mention Y2K in passing at least.
I said 4 were needed because in many and various data fields of various sizes we used all 7s for something, all 8s for something else, all 9s for (forget what, but we did use it).
The counter argument was basically that writing and keying 19xx every time, when there might be 5 to 10 dates per form, and you'd want to get through 10 or 20 forms or more in an hour, was a major nuisance and might be unnecessary.
The point of this is that IMHO the Y2K bug was at least half about people saying "I don't want to key 4 figure dates, 2 digits are enough", and the people writing the original version of the software being told "Keying the extra digits will cost too much in wages, and annoy the staff" and "Putting all those checks and conversions in will delay the project, our deadline is last week, forget it".
Memory costs were marginal in more recent years, but the pressure for 2 digit dates didn't go away. That pressure will be back more strongly now.
First time I've needed to be AC, as opposed to objecting to cookies!
I've been saying all along that Y2K was overhyped (mostly because people don't understand how a computer actually works.) Nobody listened to me. I'm actually surprised at how many problems actually occurred (I expected even less). People wasted money on it in many cases (though there was some money well spent). In some cases, it would have been faster, cheaper and safer to wait until the bugs made themselves apparent and then fix them.
I'm really irritated by these alarmist groups that are just randy for the end of the world. I love how people are still holding out hope that we still might have trouble later down the road. Yeah, I'm sure more minor annoyances will pop up. Big friggin' deal. You're no better than the various religous cults that keep trying to put a date to armageddon. I was very dissapointed in total absence of mass suicides. If you are so anxious for the world to end, why don't you do us all a favor and whack yourself?
... "Give me a woman who loves beer and I will conquer the w
"Please tell me you did NOT leave the "fixed" application written like this"
;-). The whole thing was replaced with a C++ based client/server app. That project had its own set of, um, interesting points, but at least it provided a modern foundation for the business system.
Yes, that would have been a potential future problem
sPh
It isn't over yet. Lots of offices are still on vacation until Tuesday. There may be a lot of bugs that haven't yet been discovered - let alone reported.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This Y2K thing isn't over yet. We still have to get thru leap year.
The concern was that the banks' records would be so fouled up that they would have know way to know whether/how much they owed you.
If that had happened the FDIC would be no help - because THEY would have no idea whether / how much you were owed, either.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
During all these millennial celebrations, every person on the street became one big litter bug as all the people threw tons of garbage and made the lives of the street sweepers miserable.
A well-known author of fine Perl books has nothing more insightful to offer than his eternal rant about a stupid spelling issue.
To hide the real problem: Y5G! In 5 billion years, THE SUN IS GOING TO GO OUT! What are you doing about that?
Now what am I going to do with the 20 cases of creamed corn and 200 kilos of spam?
I don't know if this is Y2K related or not. I'm a tech support rep. at an ISP in Maryland, USA. Today is our first day back in the office since Jan 1. We've been getting a lot of calls where our customers with M$ products have complained of their setting for dial-up and mail getting spontaneously getting reset. It's really bizarre. I just hope that this doesn't continue. ITS DRIVING ME CRAZY!!!!
I know one guy who had his copy of that norton AV/firewall porgram stop working. On second thought, that seems to be a case of the y2k bug removing an inconnvenience.
Date-sensitive stuff (which Quicken on my computer is the only critical/date-sensitive program) is the stuff that is a concern. There was probably some stuff really 'saved' and some people yoked out of their money in preps for Y2K. Dangit! Knew I should have taught myself COBOL!!! ;-)
But to the important point now...All the emergency supplies that stores stocked up on now are big overhead for them...watch for dropping prices on propane, tents, heaters, stoves and outdoors/emergency supplies in general. Now's the time to get that gear...if you'd like some...or if you want to get ready for Y2.001K, the patched upgrade to Y2K and the 'true' start of the new millenium. At least acccording to some sources and about which I honestly don't have a clue.
Happy New /Year|Millenium|Century|Week|Month/
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
A man is standing on a roof, waving his hands. People come and say "Lunatic, get off the roof. What are you doing?" The reply is: "I'm chasing away the elephants".
"But there are no elephants here."
"See? It's working"
Has anyone heard anything about the alleged "missile events"? I watched ABC's coverage most of the day (being down with the flu, happy frickin' new year,) and at one point they cut to some place in Colorado where someone in uniform stated that there had been 3 'unreportable events.' The gentleman in question would not disclose what country these events occurred in, only that they were not being reported to Russia.
Did anyone else see that who wasn't doped out on Robitussin, and has anyone heard/seen anything further on it?
p.s. Thank you to all who worked on Y2K projects around the world. It would have been the disaster people feared without you.
Actually, terrorists such as those who blew up Olympic Park and the Murrah Building would not have been caught at the border unless they were leaving the country; that is, they are (or are suspected of being) American citizens.
Granted, the threat of non-Americans committing terrorist acts exists, such as Rahman et. al. with the World Trade Center bombing, but in America, it's dwarfed by the threat of terrorism from Americans themselves.
In fact, Eric Rudolph, the person suspected of the Olympic Park bombing and several clinic bombings, is still at large. Ted Kaczynski went years without being caught. McVeigh and his accomplice were Americans.
Even here in Oregon, someone blew up an 80-foot power tower near Bend over the new year. AFAIK, that person hasn't been caught.
My point is, rounding up every suspicious-looking, olive-skinned person at the border may remove part of the threat (if there was to be one), but it doesn't come close to removing ALL of it.
_____
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
I think the message that the "Geek Community" has been preaching has been one of reasonable preparedness. We didn't know what was going to happen, therefore we didn't want to take any chances. And yes, the fact that there weren't any more problems is definitely a testament to the "Geek Community". I personally upgraded many customers from old Xenix systems on 386's to more modern PII SCO and Linux boxes. Without my help they would all have been dead in the water.
It wasn't just the stupid general population freaking out either. I had several fairly intelligent friends stockpile water and toilet paper as well. They just saw everyone else doing it on TV and thought they were missing out on something. The media needed a story, and they exaggerated our warnings. Plain and simple.
~Nate
Comment removed based on user account deletion
oh shut up.
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
bozo the clown reminds me of john katz. a convicted serial rapist.
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
Try telling the impoverished people of Gambia that there were no Y2K problems. The capital of Gambia suffered major power failures and the inevitable follow on problems. The light certainly did go out in one part of the world, I'm sure there were others we didn't hear about.
There's a theory going around the office here that in fact half the world is in ashes, but the media are keeping it quiet.
time's up : September 9th at 7:46:40 a.m. UTC.
.oO0Oo.
Click here for other problem days.
2072, Exact Date TBD: Overflow of Milstar Operating System
If you're not dead by then put you're tin hat on!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Biggest impact of Y2K was that some people became rich off of the hype, and a lot of programmers got employed fixing Y2K stuff. It also pushed sales of water, generators, and canned food, which made a lot of money for some stores. and soon you'll be able to buy some of that stuff like generators really cheap.
The only danger from Y2K was if too many people believed the hype and there was a run on the banks. Nothing like that happened, so it was a big yawn.
I agree totally. Geeks are seen as outcasts by a lot of people, when really, most of us are normal, or even better than them. Just because we know computers, that shouldn't outcast us. If the power had gone out, we would have been blamed for NOT fixing the problem. If it doesn't, we are blamed for causing a giant hype. We are the scapegoats whether we help or not. What I think would be funny is if every geek, for one day, stood back and said "no, sorry, your turn now." and did nothing. It'd be a nice holiday, and they would realize how important we are in everyday life after half the world's economy and power crashed. Only problem would be, OUR lights and money would be gone...
"As many of you know, I was very instrumental in the founding of the Internet" --Al Gore to Katie Couric 3/99
Why can we not be satisfied by any outcome of Y2K. Businesses spent billions to fix the problem. The problem was fixed and everything is going on perfectly.
Now that there are no major problems many complain of the Y2K problem being over-hyped, a waste of money, etc. If there was a Y2K catastrophe, people would complain you could have done more, spent more, etc. Give me a break your damned if you do, and your damned if you don't.
There is no point in complaining about this trivial issue, since there are more important issues to complain about.
Boy...This guy was willing the world to come to a halt.
From the C++ Annotated Reference Manual (the ANSI Base Document defining the language), pp 22-23,
Plain integers have the natural size suggested by the machine architecture; the other sizes are provided to meet special needs.
So, from that logic, when you build a 64bit architecture machine and OS, then C/C++'s int type should be 8 bytes, or even more pedantically, 64 bits. (Can't assume even 8bit bytes :) ).
Invalid assumptions:Short and Long are just keywords; they do not necessarily mean that the compiler will allocate less storage for one or the other.
Pointers should use the natural size of the address bus, not the natural size of the data bus.
Structures and typedefs can change their internal representation; always use sizeof() with the appropriate type.
Or am I out of date (so to speak) with current C++ ANSI standards?
[
Yabbut if you're inputting a date as mm/dd/yy (with CENTURY OFF), what gets stored in the table defaults to 19yy, unless you've written a routine to do it otherwise. (FWIW, this also happens on BROWSE screens.)
As in _Atlas Shrugged_ by Ayn Rand?
(It's a good book, BTW, but interminably long.)
To quote from the Bastard Operator From Hell:
:-)
THE PHONE RINGS AGAIN!
"The screen on my PC is really dim" The woman at the other end says "Should I wind the brightness knob up?"
"NO!" I scream "Don't touch that knob! Have you any idea of the radiation that comes out of that thing when the knob gets wound up?!!!!"
"Well I..." she says, all uncertain
"TAKE MY ADVICE!" I say "There's only ONE way to fix a dim display, and that's by power surging the drivers"
The words "power surging" and "drivers" have got her. People hear words like that and go into Dummy Mode and do ANYTHING you say. I could tell her to run naked across campus with a powercord rammed up her backside and she'd probably do it... Hmmm...
"Have you got a spare power cord?"
"No.."
"Oh well, never mind, we'll have to do the power surge idea... "
Emphasis mine
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I spent half of this year, updating software and flashing hardware.
*Note - Some of our (big name vendors) where releasing bug fixes as Y2K fixes. I spent more time in the Lab testing to make sure the fixes wouldn't effect my production equipment than sitting at my desk!
After this was done, we only had one Y2K problem. A date setting on an email app. THATS IT!
Was the time put to good use? YES. Things are patched, running hard, and this monday has been slow and, ahh taking a nap. ;)
-Brook Harty
ps... Thank god I'm not in IT, damn windows apps need patched! Oh well, no nap...
Do any of you remember the Michaelangelo Virus? I don't remember it that much for I was a wee one, but remember how the media dealt with it in a negative way? At the deadline when it was suppose to "unleash", nothing happened, and a the media pretended to forget all about the incident. (ahem, their incident)
The reason everything worked is that I and people like me have spent years going over hardware and software - REPLACING EVERYTHING WHICH WOULD HAVE FAILED!!!!!
I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars replacing systems which I HAVE TESTED AND KNOW WOULD FAIL WITH SYSTEMS WHICH IHAVE TESTED AND KNOW WOULD PASS!! BOTH HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE!
Excuse me for shouting, but some people are so STUPID!
Deleted
That it was all hype by those who stood to profit from spreading doom and gloom scenarios. My fondest dream of what may turn out now is that companies like Anderson Consulting and EDS (just to name two I saw apparently profiteering) and others who, in my opinion, obtained millions of dollars in unecessary work from clients by suggesting their businesses would come to a crashing halt, will have the pants sued off of them. Those companies by their high profile have given all IT consultants a black eye and they should be held accountable. andrew mossberg inicom, inc.
-a.e.mossberg
I recon that if 90% of the so called Y2K companies were forced to pay back there ill gotten gains we might just about be at the true level of the so called Y2K problem and even then theres plenty of room for more pruning ..
Read the Crypt Newsletter article regarding the Electronic Pearl Harbor scare. Nothing new.
http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/
Guess who gets the blame most -- the media! I smell backlash, or at least a well deserved one.
It was like we were supposed to cheer or something when NBC reported, "...no major airlines disasters due to Y2K."
These people can not even tell you when the new millennium starts!
There are many dates that could have Y2K potential. Here's just a sample.
4-Jan-2000: First business day in many countries. When people come back from the long weekend and start their computers on the Tuesday, will they work?
31-Jan-2000: The end of the month rolls around. Does all the processing that happens at the end of the month work correctly?
29-Feb-2000: This is the biggest Y2K date apart from 1-Jan-2000. Does your computer know that this date is valid?
End of fiscal year: This date varies in many countries.
31-Dec-2000: Just when you thought Y2K had passed us by, software that assumes all years have 365 days and cannot cope with a 366th day will fail. This actually caused problems on 31-Dec-1996 when software controlling aluminium smelters in New Zealand and Tasmania choked on an unexpected 366th day of the year and shut the smelters down. You don't shut down metal smelters without a very good reason, because they're meant to run continuously.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I did my first post-Y2K service call today; a place that had not upgraded from an old DOS version of Quicken that a secretary was using for accounting for a petty cash/reimbusement account. The DOS version just wasn't able to print checks in year 2000.
The problem was easily fixed with a copy of Quicken 2000 and an import of the data from the old version. 3 hours billable time, most of spent getting their old form feed checks to align properly with the new software.
This is exactly the sort of Y2K stuff I expected to see from small shops and small businesses. Most small shops only installed Microsoft Y2K updates, if they did anything at all.
They will just keep running what they have until it gives them problems, then they will fix it.
End of the month will be interesting....
Nothing happened. I chock that up to paranoia MAKING people prepare and shake out bugs before they appeared. Had everyone said, "Nutin'll go wrong, skip all that Y2K testing!" then we WOULD have seen liks of Y2K chaos. For myself I have enough food to skip shopping for a month and enough cash on hand to not have to stop at the ATM for a while. Oh well. No harm done there.
Writing like yours?
Damn, we need a happy medium; skilled communicators who know something about what they're writing about. But, I believe we're down to under 50 media companies, and dwindling. Fewer and fewer opportunities to get anyone with skills into a field that desperately needs them.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Having scanned many of the posts, I think there is one facit of the Y2K issue that people are ignoring.
...
... this is the piece everyone is missing ...
... if some problem occurs with my customer's equipment, even if it has nothing to do with Y2K, he would be looking at litigation from his customers (or shareholders) if he had not done due diligence with the supposed Y2K problem. I.e., the money he threw at our consulting company bought a very nice Y2K lawsuit insurance policy!
Background: I am a consultant and my consulting company tried to avoid Y2K remediation work. Why build business that is going to evaporate in a year? I personally did take on one Y2K project because an important customer wanted help.
General Comments: Before describing the outcome of this project, and the conclusions to be drawn from it, a few general thoughts
Why were so many people hopping on the "end of the world" bandwagon? The "Chicken Little" syndrom is human nature.
Why were media reports so pessamistic? Headlines about disasters sell newspapers and money talks.
Why was Y2K a big fizzle? With all the attention, we really did find some stuff and fix it.
Why did we have to spend so much money fixing it (at least in the USA)? Ahhh
The Missing Piece: The customer who I mentioned above brought me in to review a variety of equipment and make sure there would be no Y2K problems. I spent some time (and the customer, therefore, spent some money) only to find that there were NO problems to be found. And you know what? Our customer was happy. Not because because he had averted a technological disaster (which didn't exist anyway), but because he had averted a LITIGATION disaster.
And this is the (long winded) point
And this, boys and girls, is why Y2K remediation costs were astronomical in this country (the USA, the most litagous society in history). Companies felt they HAD to spend money in order to give the appearance of having done everything possible to avoid problems, just in case some problem did occur that resulted in a lawsuit.
Hah. Those fools who thought that Y2K was the problem have been successfully duped. Good work team. Now they'll never be prepared for 03:14:08 GMT, January 19th, 2038 when time_t on 32-bit machines overflows and returns to -2147483648 (thus representing approximately -68 years past since Jan 1st 1970, having only 31 bits to store the integer).
Seriously though, regardless of what the media dipshits wanted everyone to believe, the double zero in the year field on machines that lacked "Y2K compliance" would not have caused computer systems to break down. However, for programs written in 32-bit ANSI C that use time_t for date calculations could crash whenever they see a negative number in a field that should always be positive.
I guess it looks like some C programmers will get paid US$300,000/year to add "unsigned" to the variable declaration in the libraries and recompile the apps in 38 years? Yes/no?
It was an engineering problem with potentially very disruptive and costly repercussions, quite capable of unravelling western civilization for years if widespread failures had caused loss of confidence and triggered a major stock market crash (even if no nukes were launched accidentally).
But that didn't happen, and only an idiot could dismiss the Y2K-related efforts of hundreds of thousands of techies over 2-5 years as having had nothing to do with avoiding any serious problems.
We have ensured through our work that the world did not come to harm. Why are we so slow to sing our own praises and so quick to suggest that maybe there was nothing to fear in the first place? After years of effort in this area, I find this response to the lack of trouble most odd, almost an attempt to rewrite the pre-Y2K history.
We did a good job folks, and we should be proud of our achievement.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
One great thing about Y2K was the ease with which we dorks could talk the less informed managers and (stupid?) upper execs into upgrading systems that should have been upgraded eons ago. I distictly remember 12 non-Y2K significant systems that we were able to get funded. Hmmmm.. I guess budgets are always looked at as, "Spend as little as possible as long as everything works most of the time, unless it's 12-31-99".
Phish NYE 2000 was magical. I enjoyed this show from start to end. It made for a very special millenium and birthday celebration. Happy New Years!!!
I think that this happened for the following reasons:
-Y2K is a problem. But it is a problem much like thousand of other problems when programmers miss a few bytes in their "for - to"'s "while"'s and alikes. We have a certain degree of immunity to this because the computer world has already demonstrated how unreliable it is. In fact I think that the only main feature of y2k was the potential widespreading of the bug.
-Y2k was a very good target to make a marketing campaign on "upgrading" the whole computer world. But sincerly I think that everyone understood this point and there was a general conivence on pushing everything to this solution.
-It seems that our society looks divided on three echelons. Those who know almost nothing about computers, those who know something about computers and a strange group of those who think they can fool the first group to declare the second a bunch of jerks. And curiously this group is made mainly of journalists and some other mass-media scum. This is my feeling after several face-to-face or near contact with journalists. They were not worried to hear anything. They were worried to catch the word "trouble" and run all over by claiming I said "catastrophe". And that I and my colleagues were stupid to be so optimist, because in fact we were waiting "Armageddon"...
-The y2k is also a religious and political game. Somehow and by several reasons I suspect many state institutions and consulting firms decided to create an hype. This helped the "mystical" meaning of 2000. It was an attempt to test how people can be mass controlled. It was an attempt to provoke whole nations to follow a pattern of behaviour. It was a very opprtune moment to collect a mass of information on the computer systems all over the world. It was also a very opportune moment to collect the results of a mass experiment
Real Problems:
I did a short consulting job fixing some payroll and inventory tracking database queries and data entry code on an AS/400 for a United Van Lines local office. The fixes weren't that hard (40 hours including the learning curve on AS/400) but there would have been problems in the first few weeks of 2000, nothing catastophic, but expensive to workaround and fix quickly.
Possibly Real Problem:
I Called Long's Drugs (a fairly large pharmacy chain in California) and they could not fill any prescription because their computers had been down for 3 days. They didn't confirm it was Y2K related, but the coincidence is obvious. Probably a real Y2K problem or a problem caused by Y2K preventative measures gone wrong.
I suspect that companies that have real Y2K problems will do anything possible to cover up that fact, after all, what was the last time a major company that voluntarily told the world about internal computer foul ups.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
sweet jesu have mercy on us all! the end of the world is comin and yous molestin the chirrun!
chide molesta! sweet jesu have mercy on us all!
sweet jesu have mercy on us all!
To what extent are the costs we're hearing about exagerated? What I'm asking is, how many neccesary upgrades, and general upgrades were stories like this... A customer of mine got a new office desktop, because they were tired of their 486, the new one was "certified" to be compliant, so at least in their mind part, or all of the cost of this machine ($2,000) was a Y2K "Upgrade" while in fact the old machine could have continued functionally. (Word processing, fax&answering machine functions, nothing date senstive.)
sweet jesu have mercy on us all, chide molestas love to hide in dark places!
oh, sweet jesu have mercy on us all!
no helmet will protect you from a chide molesta's wrath! sweet jesu have mercy on us all!
please, sweet jesu have mercy on us all!
If we were using a base twelve numerical system, there would have been a substantial fervor surrounding the arrival of the year 1728.
Sure there are those blowing off the work done to prepare for y2k as the paraniod ramblings of the socially maladjusted. Perhaps in some cases the scoffs are justified (enjoying that new bunker smell?). But in the vast majority of cases, the problems were identified and delt with well before they surfaced; thus it seems we did nothing at all. Kinda reminds me of the old taoist parable about the three doctors.
However, for anyone who doubts the efforts were required, look towards those who forgot the responsibilities of technology. Those who ignored everything as hype now contend with failing systems, corrupt databases and the like. Critical systems were controlled by people who understand the requirments of their systems. Pity the small business owner who ignored the warnings, especially after the next reboot.
Personally, I want to know what company you work for so I can pull the stock if necessary. What sort of stupid did you have to be to have your PCs hit by Y2k?
If you go to http://go.to/y2kmistakes you will see a list of Web Sites that failed Y2K compliancy - which simply means that they did't display the year properly! Web Sites that were affected included Auckland Airport, US Naval Observatory, Apple and Microsoft New Zealand. (Microsoft New Zealand's website was timestamped with the year 192000!).
ok, here goes:
Sometime in the late 80's, the government discovered a unique way to perform mind control on a subject through a computer display. This was specialized software that needed to be installed on as many computers throughout the world as possible, in order to a achieve global reach.
what better way to do this then by saying "Oh, early programmers made some mistakes and so we have to go deep inside everybody's systems to fix these problems."
Of course, everyone says, "Yikes! Yes, please save us from this evil anomaly!" Then, millions of programmers are unleased to basically slip all these computers a mickey.
So, you see, you just *think* everything is ok. You've already been brainwashed.
I'm not even going to express my opinion on Y2K being a hoax or not. But for those who are saying so, I can only say that it is pretty easy to classify Y2K as hoax and people who worked on it as people that blew it all up to generate work NOW that you have seen that no disasters happened. But where were you all a year ago ? Why didn't you stop the world from spending (unnecessary) money ? If some are guilty of blowing up, others are equally guilty for not stopping them if they knew it was a blow up. It's Y2K now, the money is spent, time to move on ... ad
So the anticlimax is the result of the bug being fixed correctly by computer professional.Then how come nothing happened in 2nd and 3rd world countries, where they were not supposed to have made any preperations?
They got through Y2K without a hitch, and without spending $$$.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
The old system was seriously outdated (16 bit freaking MS-DOS) but until this Y2K hype, it was not possible to fund a project for a new system.
The irony is: now the managers complain, cause the new system
a) "does not work like the old one"
b) does not come with all features in their "wish-list", only with the functions ordered.
c) actually requires some training.
*sigh* sometimes you just can't win.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Everybody, just about everybody is complaining that nothing happened. What the hell is wrong with that? Had we rather seen that systems failed worldwide? After spending all this money? The logical consequence of solving a problem is that a problem isn't there anymore. And besides, there are still problems here and there, but they are minor and concern single computers to maybe an old forgotten mainframe that was left in the corner. But noooooooo...we would have rather seen freak nuke exchanges and blowing nuclear power plants.
> cal 9 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1nbsp;2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Then I looked at the man-page:
The Gregorian Reformation is assumed to have occurred in 1752 on the 3rd of September....
Then I checked some bibliography:
Ten days were omitted from the calendar, and it was decreed that the day following (Thursday) October 4, 1582 (which is October 5, 1582, in the old calendar) would thenceforth be known as (Friday) October 15, 1582
So who is right now? Surely not our beloved cal.
ms
> cal 9 1752
September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Then I looked at the man-page:
The Gregorian Reformation is assumed to have occurred in 1752 on the 3rd of September....
Then I checked some bibliography:
Ten days were omitted from the calendar, and it was decreed that the day following (Thursday) October 4, 1582 (which is October 5, 1582, in the old calendar) would thenceforth be known as (Friday) October 15, 1582
So who is right now? Surely not our beloved cal.
ms
The switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar was made at different dates in different countries. The British/US made the switch a bit late. You know, Brits are always lazy in adopting standards made in Continental Europe due to ancient rivalries between Brits and French (see inches/gallons/... instead of meter/kilogram/...).
The official switch from Julian to Gregorian was made in most industrialized countries (at that time) in October 1582, not in September 1752.
Sorry, You dumb English-people, but you should switch ASAP to the metric system too, or you'll be burned over and over again.
ms
The was-it-worth-it debate just starting
is amusing and, yes, there may be
problems to come, and, yes, I'm sure
many contractors and vendors hyped the
Y2K bug to their benefit. Nevertheless,
that we needed to do this
last-minute-fixup-panic itself tells
legions about the misreable state of
software technology. To provide proper
service, the compliance of any software
with end-of-century dating should have
been totally transparent. Indeed, the
"opaqueness" of software to customers is
a launchpad for a major diatribe: It is,
indeed, part of the argument of the
Free
Software Foundation, that to really use
software, customers of necessity need
much more than binaries.
But, also, the Y2K phenomenon shows that
Americans -- claiming to embrace
technology in all forms -- actually
worship it rather than use it.
Technology appears to be an
ultra-talisman, making one rich if one
invests in it or can take a new fad
public, and ultimately solving all one's
problems, even if one doesn't understand
how. There may have been hype in the IT
industry about Y2K, but if that were
deliberate it may have been so simply
because those concerned knew Americans
do not respond to sense or logical
arguments, that they need emotion to
move them, whether to support a sports
team, a military campaign, to change
their own habits, or to take reasonable
precautions. Hence, Sputnik is a
challenge to freedom, the Evil Empire
must be beaten, and the world will melt
down if we don't fix our ubiquitous
computers.
Note that the per capita density of
computers, understanding of technology,
and preparedness for Y2K varied by
orders of magnitude across countries on
the planet. Yet we haven't yet heard of
any documented Y2K problems. Right now,
the winners seem to be those
governments, laughed at heartily by all
of us when they first made their
apology, who decided to take action when
they saw Y2K problems appear in other
countries, realizing that they would
have at least 12 hours notice.
We have a long way to go to make
software technology as reliable as a
television. But demanding that software
vendors toe the line typically demanded
of others, whether the vendors name has
"Microsoft", "Sun", "IBM", or "Red Hat"
in it, can only hasten that arrival.
Jan Theodore Galkowski, (Oo) http://www.smalltalkidiom.net/ MySQL,PHP,ETL,SQL,MinGW C, and plucking the Web
One of the best Y2K Summaries I've yet seen is over at COTSE. In case it's changed by the time you get there, the text is included below.
:)
All up, I think it really touches on exactly why Y2K was a "non-event." I'm going to send it to the head of the Small Business Association of Australia who proclaimed the other day that Y2K was all bullshit (condensed version of his words
Text Reads:
---
As y2k passes by uneventfully I'd like to give thanks to the unsung heroes. The people that sacrificed so much to ensure it passed uneventfully. These people worked sixteen hour days for weeks on end. They missed family functions during the holidays. They missed weekends and vacation. They missed the celebration. All to make this an uneventful and quiet y2k.
While the press ran around in circles proclaiming the end of civilization and the world, they were toiling to fix it. While fanatics warned to "Stock up for y2k", they worked at backing it up, just in case. While politicians all tried to out statistic each other, they were testing it. While everyone was out celebrating a once in a lifetime event, they were baby-sitting it.
COTSE wishes to thank the unsung heroes of the millennium: the administrators, the programmers, the test teams, and the operators. You are the people that kept it all together! You are the reason nothing happened!
Great Job!!!
---
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
No.
I'm an old xBase programmer from way back, so trust me: the date format is fine. It doesn't store the year at all. Dates are integers, the number of days since a start date (that I can't remember off the top of my head.)
Never mind, what you said didn't penetrate my brain before I hit submit.
You're right, some systems will need to have CENTURY put ON to make the data entry work properly.
Ok, I expected this kind of crap in the mainstream media, but on Slashdot? Of course nothing happened on Y2K. I've been telling people nothing was going to happen for the past year -- Not because of some misplaced "faith in technology," but because I know a handfull of people who work(ed) in the Y2K preparation business. I've heard people claim that the "experts were split," but everyone I've ever talked to who actually knew anything about the issue themselves said it was going to be no big deal, because while there was potential problems, everything important was going to be prepared in time. At worst, people might be minorly inconvenienced. But planes falling out of the sky, all the "Y2K command center" hype -- It was just that. Hype. In other words, bullshit. And as geeks, I thought the people who run Slashdot would know that.