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Y2K Bugs: The Year In Review?
xipho asks: "Its been almost a year since the Y2K fiasco. Is there a summary of the 'devastation' caused somewhere? Was there really any effect? What about 2001, weren't more problems predicted? Why no hype? Was this all just a good example of the potential mass hysteria that the media can seed?" It would be nice to know who was really bit by the Y2K Bug and how much impact uncorrected systems would have had on our lives if the mad rush for corrections had not been made. Would things have actually been as bad as the media predicted?
actually it seems that only decendants of CP/m were affected, especially the microsoft wing (most others had sense enough to update long ago). If I'm wrong please correct me (i.e. if im a moron please do inform me :)
Well, my rent bill for January, 2001 showed "January, 2000" and had the rent I was paying last year on it.
Naturally, I paid last year's (lower) amount. I can't wait to see their explanation.
--RJ
If it had not been for the mass hysteria, the world wouldnt have sat up and noticed that they had to spend billions of dollars on hiring us to do the necessary work. Y2k was not just about one year or a couple of digits, it along with the explosion of Internet, created all this Dot com hype, created all these jobs, and put the economy on the forward gear. Now that we are on a slowdown, with possible recession looming, we need another miracle to turn all this around. I am thankful that the dotcom bubble is finally burst though. Cant imagine anyone buying stupid pets on the internet though, what a friggin biz model..
:)
www.fuckedcompany.com - Watch this space, you might end up there
Rapid Nirvana
...but the year is 191000!
Err..
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Check out my blackbox styles
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
(1) When I made a donation to the EFF, my on-line "receipt" showed that it happened in 1900 -- rather too long ago for me to take a tax deduction.
(2) Some guy returned a video and was charged for it being 100 years overdue. That, and a few other "catastrophes" are summed up in this article.
Other than that, well . . .
--
Remember January 1-7, 2000 when all of a sudden the very same pundits who were predicting doom, gloom and armageddon decided that US "COMPUTER PEOPLE" had gotten them all excited over nothing.
That almost made me seek out someone selling nice armaments to "fix" some of the broadcasting towers for the big media outlets...
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Nope, no y200k issues here, but then again, we did a code audit and made fixes. Most other people did too. I think the devestation would have come in the form of economic chaos .. note the guy above who got to pay his previous years rent. Imagine what would have happened if 80% of the invoices/bills sent in Jan 2001 were actually y2000 values.
.. we'll really never know for sure, will we? Reminds me of that scarecrow joke:
/are/ no elephants around here!"
And its a moot argument
"I build this scarecrow to scare off elephants."
"Elephants? There
"Exactly. See, its working."
Neither party can proove anything.
If something has never been said/seen/heard before, best stop to think about why that is.
"Old man yells at systemd"
The reason that there is no hype this year is that the hype last year was for nothing. The turning of the so called millennium (as opposed to the real one) was anticlimatic. The y2k bug had effects to a small scale, but no major ones. The celebrations were exaggerated. Thus, tonight, when the real millennium is coming, the general attitude is "been there, done that."
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Still, nothing has broken more software than the dreaded W2K... Windows2000. And it's getting harder to order systems with only Win98 preinstalled.
I think that all the preparation IT pros put in paid off. The problem with that is that maybe we did our jobs so well that the general public (and management) thinks it was all hype. I know for a fact some of our older (and mission critical) software systems would have failed, and we did have one external system fail. Fortunately we had contingency plans for nearly everything. There is really no way to know how things would have turned out, but speaking as an IT pro, I am positive we would not have liked the results of a non-Y2K compliant world.
The media could give programmers credit for averting a disaster, but instead it's much easier for them to be cynical and claim that the whole Y2K thing was hype. Makes you really want to step in and help solve a problem before it truly manifests the next time too, huh?
/. latch onto the same media bandwagon position that we've seen in other less technically savvy venues.
Having personally been responsible for fixing Y2K bugs that would have cost businesses real money, it's disappointing to see
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
well, i was watching the nightly news, or something, could have been a tv news show or something to that effect, i don't remember... anyways, they had a report on the y2k thing, and they said that it hadn't really done anything drastic. in addition to this, they had to bring up something stupid. they said that another potential problem could come up in 2038, and this was ALL based on the fact that systems were based on UNIX. this is basically a quote how can the media be sooo unreasonably biased? i was kinda pissed that they could do such a piss poor job of reporting, but i guess thats just the way it goes. just something i had to get off my chest and into the world
I started working for a rather well known international megacorp this year in their unix dept in march. When I got there they had just experienced a rather significant problem with the database software they were using for a number of customers, one of which I would regard as "rather important". This happened at the turnover of feburary rather than the turnover of the year. Luckily I was not the person who had to fix this mess, however this person soon afterwards quit. I recently just quit myself, but have heard that the problems where not correctly fixed and have started to resurface causing alot of problems. I would say that there is more cases around than just this but most people would prefer not to let them be known.
<gump>And that's all I have to say about that.</gump>
Web sites using rfc850 dates like 31-12-99 switched :)) Dec 2000.
...
to weird format 01-01-2000 (telnet www.google.com 80 to try) which isn't at all standard
and many programs still don't know about it.
Patch for wget was sent (by me
Wondering how many programs still don't recognize such dates
-
First of all, it was a marketing fiasco. The Win95 family, known by a year in its version number, became WinME while the NT family, known by two letters, became 2000. On top of that, MS was very disappointed in sales.
- Second, it moved to account based security like Unix/Posix/etc, making it a poor choice for the average consumer. The only ones benefitting from this are IT managers and server vendors... Average customers suffer a loss of time and effort in the learning curve and extra steps for installation.
- Hardware designed for Win98 broke big time under W2K. Of course, even an upgrade from 95 to 98 made some Diamond cards like the EDGE3D break, but W2K was a whole new paradigm most engineers were not willing to keep up with.
An interesting litmus test for W2K are the criticisms Microsoft leveled against LINUX on its Truth-dot website. 'It suffers extraordinary delays as the OS checks the disk for errors in the event of a blackout, costing valuable minutes of downtime.' Believe it or not, they were talking about Linux, which I've rearely rebooted, when it's even more applicable to W2K, which can take a half hour on a SMP Netfinity 5000 just running scandisk (and that is done upon reboot, unlike Win9x which does it online)."I build this scarecrow to scare off elephants." /are/ no elephants around here!"
"Elephants? There
"Exactly. See, its working."
I want to buy your scarecrow.
Now, what how did the conversation between Lisa and Homer go?
Lisa: (picks up a rock from the ground) Dad, by that logic this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: How does it work?
Lisa: Do you see any tigers around here?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
Lisa: But dad...
Homer: I'll give you twenty dollars.
Lisa: (sigh) Okay.
Well, something like that... it's been a while since I've seen that episode.
IT guy: "Our Y2K inititive is rolling right along, and...."
Layman: "Y2K?" IT guy: "Yeah, it's short for 'Year 2000.'"
Layman: "Isn't it that exact sort of short form-ing that started this whole mess in the first place?"
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The media could give programmers credit for averting a disaster, but instead it's much easier for them to be cynical and claim that the whole Y2K thing was hype. Makes you really want to step in and help solve a problem before it truly manifests the next time too, huh?
Just wait a few more decades, though. The Unix clock will roll over and I bet that WON'T be all fixed in advance...
(Interestingly, Amdahl fixed it in their unix a decade or so ahead of time, though there may be some legacy code out there that didn't recompile with the revised data structures...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I used to help at the Lindsey Wildlife Museum. At the checking desk we tallied up visitors with an old Apple II (adults, childern, memembers, elderly, ect). One of my many little jobs was to keep a organized record of the printouts. 3 days after Newyears, just when I thought I wasn't affected by the Y2K bug, the printouts had the year as year 0. Now I had to cross that out and mark it as 2000 on every printout. It got very annoying very quickly.
I bet that the Y2K bug has an "off-by-one" error.
Tune in tonight to find out if I'm right...
I was at a Christmas party in rural Ontario this past week and a few, assumedly, blue-collar workers were talking about the "Y2K bug". They both agreed that it was all hype because nothing came of the impending disaster. Neither had any concerns about the coming year nor towards any scares which they might have heard.
Although I resisted the urge to let these people know that the Y2K hype was never realised simply because dedicated people worked around the clock to fix it, I should have been a bit more vocal in defense of the computer and electronics industry. Please, do us all a favor whenever you hear this kind of talk and explain why there never was a problem when the clocks ticked towards January 1, 2000. Unless we put the Y2K fix in perspective, we will be accused of crying wolf next time a similar bug needs fixing.
ian.
ian
If the "hype" was too much, then it's not the media's fault. The fault would lie with the companies spreading fear to sell their products, such as code fixes or survival gear. And the capable but (hypothetically) wrong experts who told the media about the problem and the possible consequences. Even the experts didn't really know what would happen, so its unfair the expect the media to know.
Before you start thinking "nothing happened, so the media went overboard", try this:
If the sh*t had hit the fan, and the media had done any less hype-spreading, would you congratulate them for restraining themselves so well?
My mom is not a Karma whore!
I love the one about the "conspiracy to overheat the Earth." Wow. I guess if you're a suicidal evil genius, a single 45 Magnum in the mouth doesn't cut it, you have to destroy all human life on Earth along with you.
Derek
Well, how does anyone know this year is the "real" millenium? The current calendar hasn't been used for even close to two thousand years, and in fact the Gregorian calendar was based upon when the priests *thought* Jesus was born...turns out they were off by about three or four years...so the "milennium"...if there is one to celebrate...happened in 1998, because of these errors... And of course, the millenium is only good for those who celebrate Christianity...it's 5761 on the Jewish calendar, and the new year in Jewish society is celebrated in September. And it's 1421 on the Muslim Calendar which started in 622 A.D. on the Gregorian calendar and the Muslim goes faster than the Gregorian year. So all this talk about the "real milennium" is not only flawed, but matters only to devout Christians of all faiths and the media.
Most people seem to be assuming that there was no or almost no damage done by the Y2K bug. It should be noted that most places that had problems probably put a lot of effort into covering them up, just like most places do with security issues. No company would want to admit to not having fixed their problems, and so we'll never really know the extent of the damage.
Lyndsey Nagle: Do I detect a note of sarcasm?
Professor Frink: (looks at sarcasm detector) Are you kidding? This baby is off the charts!
Comic Store Guy: A sarcasm detector, that's a real useful invention.
(sarcasm detector explodes on desk)
...predictions of missiles launching and all critical systems crashing across the globe. They almost had me frightened that my toaster wouldn't work! I think that had people not worked to fix a few Y2k issues, there would have been more incidents than there were. However, I also believe that almost NONE of what the media predicted would happen was even a possibility. I mean, what does a missile control system think to itself? "Ahhhh....its 1900! Missiles havn't even been invented yet! Must do something....must....launch randomly and take out a major city....must reach beyond the limitations of my programming..."
Ibag
Procrastination is like masturbation: Its great at first, but then you realize that you are only fucking yourself.
The company I worked for over the Y2k issue was probably the worst company one could work for; a telephone surveying company. The owner (John Stepleton) was too cheap to put money into upgrading all our non-compliant systems, so we ended up rigging a timeserver together for all the stations to retrieve their times from. That effectively solved the problem, until.... They were too cheap to buy an additional drive for their main server, at which time one of the new guys (since I'd left) decided to clear some space off the drive by removing the timeserver. Boom. No calls could be made until the timeserver was rebuilt. Quite a shame, eh? Here's to you, John Stepleton... may your life be as fruitless as last year's was!
** http://www.stinkingloser.com **
Having personally been responsible for fixing Y2K bugs that would have cost businesses real money, it's disappointing to see /. latch onto the same media bandwagon position that we've seen in other less technically savvy venues.
/. you mean the editorial staff, you should note that Cliff emphasized that we probably would never know what could have happened without the work that was put to fix the Y2K bugs.
;-).
If by
If you mean the comments, then you should know better
Happy New Year!
> What about 2001, weren't more problems predicted?
I see one problem: it's that people are going to try to express the 1st of January as 01-01-01. The day after that will be 01-01-02. Or will it be 02-01-01? Or is it 01-02-01? For the next 12 years, people who like those silly date formats will confuse the heck out of the rest of the world. It's best we all start using the international standard, 2000-01-02.
I spent about 100 hours auditing our software for potential problems. Then I spent about 10 hours fixing the problems that were identified, along with any other non-Y2K problems that were identified during the audit. Finito!
:-/
But the bean-counters demanded that I attend about 1,000 hours worth of meetings where I had to explain again and again and again and again how the entire problem manifested itself. To people who didn't understand the difference between a digit and a number for goodness sake.
Meanwhile, the pointy-hairs spent about a $1,000,000 to upgrade hardware that should have been changed four or five years prior anyway but they did it now since they could blame the expenditure on Y2K.....
And occasionally consultants were flown in from overseas, paid my annual sallary for a single day, just so they could tell me that I need to make sure that the 9th of September, 1999 doesn't cause a problem. I point-blank refused until they could explain how that date was significant, and the couldn't so they went away again, but they took their fee with them....
And there are fooooooools out there that still believe that the hoop-la was justified!
I thought the results of certain corrections were interesting. On some cgi scripts, the year became 19100 or 20100 for some odd reason. I can only assume that this is the result of shoddy corrections. This prompts the question: which would be worse? A 16900/17900 discrepancy or a 100 year one? The fact that we saw some 19100 errors among the crowd of supposedly fixed scripts seems to suggest that there would have been an error of the archetypal form if corrections hadn't been made, but what if, in the process of fixing bugs, we disrupted things even worse?
I still wish something big had happened. Post-Industrial apocalypse is an incredibly romantic idea. Doesn't every nerd dream of becoming a cavalier or a highway man?
Pax Digitalia
Much to the disapointment of my coworkers (mainframe developers), the vast majority of Y2K bugs were fixed, though I did see one: CompQWK, my QWK mail reader (remember the grand old days of FIDONET?), can't handle a year 2000 date, so I gave up on FIDONET. Not a serious problem, though I do miss some of the people I'd met there. The reason it doesn't work is that COMPQWK is no longer being developed. I suspect there are a number of other old freeware/shareware products with similar problems.
Silly signature limit . . .
"If we did our jobs right, they will never know."
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
Normally I hate the media. But this particular hype earned me $50/hr installing Microsoft "y2k" patches for rich companies!
PS: Have any of you installed software in the past 12 months that has a seperate "y2k" patch (e.g. win98, coreldraw)? Did the program not work until you installed the path? That's what I thought.
That fellow deserves a thoughrough spanking, I do say.
I work for a small credit union where the we worked our tails off to get everything compliant. While we didn't run into any major failures to speak of, our Meridian phone system has mis-labeled the dates of our voicemails ever since. Additionally, the few application specific problems encountered were swept under the rug and attributed to other causes... regardless of how obviously Y2K related they were. Perhaps this behavior is common and is the reason we never heard anything.
According to the Washington State Attorney General's Office homepage, it is the year '100.
I wonder what it'll say come Y19.101K?
I noticed a news article this morning on Australia's road toll. It refers to the period 0001 December 22 to 2359 January 7. I can only assume that those dates were computer generated.
Anyone who thinks Y2K was fake and we were all tricked should read this article.
It talks about Peter de Jager, the foremost expert on the Y2K problem. In late 1998, after the industry had finally started to move on the problem, Mr. de Jager was convinced that the disaster would be averted. However, the media continued to proclaim doom and gloom, and anti-computer Luddites everywhere continued to stock up on supplies.
When the lights stayed on at the stroke of midnight, Mr. de Jager was suddenly considered a snake-oil seller and even received death-threats.
Y2K was beaten, well before Jan. 1, 2000, but the media had us believing otherwise.
Um . . . wouldn't Y2K be 2048, instead of 2000?
I used to work for a major bank, and was part of the Y2K test team (a small part, but a part nonetheless).
Because of the fears of noncompliance, some anti-trust laws were lifted and banks were actually *ordered* to accept mergers with other banks that were farther ahead in compliance. I saw this coming, and that was part of why I quit the bank job. I knew I wasn't going to want to be around for it.
I don't know if this happened in other industries or not (at least for this reason), but the banking oligopoly is NOT a good thing for the end consumer (at least not unless the end consumer has lots of money). I've noticed an increase in stupid service fees and a decrease in meaningful customer service as banks got larger and automated. (I'm currently having an argument with mine because I accidentally pressed the key for the stop-payment menu when I used a touchtone phone to check my balance, and the idiots hit me with a $15 stop-payment fee even though it's not related to ANY check I wrote! And I seem to be having problems getting a human being to discuss this with me.)
Y2K and its (non-)aftermath have also done yet more to polarize people on the issue of technology. Those of us who knew both that the problem needed to be fixed and that it *could* be fixed by a reasonable, concerted effort were (and probably still are) in a SMALL minority. Most everyone else is playing conspiracy theorist one way or another (either they think there were problems that we just weren't told about, or they think that there never was an issue).
On a more positive note, the potential of a Y2K disaster got people thinking about disaster prep, which is just a damn good idea in any case. I live in an area that has frequent and severe snowstorms in the winter and occasional power-killing thunderstorms in the summer; other regions have their own weather-related problems to cope with. Having basic survival-related gear is ALWAYS a good idea, and if it took the possibility of a nationwide power failure followed by rioting in the streets to bring this to people's attention, so be it.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
The predicted Y2K bugs could have been a technical catastrophe, but we would have gotten through it.
Instead, during Y2K, we watched as the DMCA gook affect, as the DeCSS ruling came down on the side of ignorance, as the number and stupidity of software patents filed continued to accelerate, as UCITA continued to make its way towards state legislatures across the country.
The real Y2K bugs were legal and sociological, and were assaults on individual freedom of expression. They were far more scary than the crashed-computer scenarios that two-digit dates could have caused.
To be sure, there were some bright points too-- e.g. the end of the RSA patent, the stay of execution on Europe's implementation of software patents. All in all, though, there were many more steps back than steps forward.
-Rob
The real question isnt what has happened in 2000, but will happen on December 12, 2012 at 11:18 Am. This is the end of the Myan Long count, and thus the start of a new cycle. On December 12 2012 the winter solstice, will see change that hasnt happened in 5000 years. This is the real date looming above that no programmers can fix, as its a nature related problem. You can find more information about it here:
The Final Illusion
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
rolled over tons of vacation time for this year, only to have the .com go tits-up....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
The only Y2K "trouble" I heard about was from a friend of mine who, about 30 seconds before midnight, quietly slipped into the basement of his house where he was hosting a party. As he heard the partiers upstairs count down, he waited with his fingers on the master circuit breakers. As soon as they hit midnight, off went the switches. Much screaming ensued. About 15 seconds later, he switched everything back on, came upstairs, and declared the "Y2K bug" to be a hoax.
I understand the desire to ship all of the existing CDs before you burn new ones, but for crying out loud - include a little note next time, will ya?!?!
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
You are extremely wierd.
So *that's* what keeps him looking so young for his age.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I personally stick by the old time favorites like: Purple Headed Warrior, Fleshy Colored Pussy Plunger, and the ever trusty Love Wand
.::[sianide]::.
I just had a server chash real bad at exactly
00:00 GMT Jan 1 2001. Could be a coincidence.
A happy new year to all of you.
Everyone have a happy new year!
I wish you a happy new year.
- The infrastrcture was never really at risk. Of the approximately 400 Billion spent on Y2K, less than 1% was spent on infrastructure. Our local Hydro utility spent a litte more than a few 100M$, mostly in the billing department.
- The biggest problem was in IT departments. It is important to note that other than embarassment, reporting incorrect dates on screens and on statements is not critical, and was never considered critical. The only critical points are where dates are used as keys (sorts, etc), compared, or used in arithmetic (subtracted, incremented, etc). This is typically less than 4% of the code, in less than 40% of the files in a typical COBOL application. But there's the rub. Which 40% of the files and which 4% of the code? If I give you a declaration of ACCTPSTD with a picture of 9(6) [a 6 digit number], would you recognize it as a account posting date?
- I know I have personally seen code that would not function correctly after Y2K. It would not have crashed, it would not have printed reports with wierd dates, it would just produce subtly incorrect results. This is the worst kind of error.
- Sandbox testing (simulated Y2K testing on an isolated machine) turned up many problems.
- One of the state goverments left an uncorrected system running, anticipating the very real posibility that they might have to account for the Y2K money. The uncorrected system failed rather spectacularly.
- Our company never pushed the fear aspect of it (we never needed to with our clientelle). We did see some of the outrageous letters written by other firms. When contacted by media, we gave a middle of the road response(I.E. there may be some problems, but in all everthing will be fine). We never seemed to get any of our quotes in anything other than the local media for some reason. I wonder why? (sarcasm intended)
- How would the media or anyone else know if a company had Y2K problems. As long as the problem is small enough that it can be solved behind the scene, (probably because enough had been done ahead of time), how would you or anyone else know? Do you expect them to call a press conference and announce to the world that they had a problem? Good-bye stock options! (Yeesh!!) For that matter, would you recognize if your paycheck was correct, what if an extra $1 was deducted on one of the line items (tax, employment insurance, etc.)? On your pension statements (for those with pensions) would you recognize a reporting error? Think about it.
All in all, I've grown rather tolerant of the idiots claiming that it was all a hoax. All of our clients were satisified with our work, and have told us so as we kept in touch with them after the big day. They knew the problem that they had, and knew what service that we gave them. In the end, that's all that really matters.Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Let me wish you a happy new year.
I wish you all a happy new year.
Let me wish everyone a happy new year.
I wish everyone a happy new year.
Have a happy new year, all of you.
I run trade shows for a living, so I got to hear a lot of the behind-the-scenes noise in a lot of industries. For example, most power plants would have shut down or had "issues." A lot of those little "service" computers would have detected a too-long elapse in their maintenance records, and shut down the offending systems.
We were lucky there was enough time to correct those issues, as well as a slew of others. There was also a problem with some of the big intertie lines, which would have killed power for a big chunk of the US not affected by the local blackouts. It *was* a big issue. Fortunately, it went away.
Anyway, why do you think so many of us have taken to trolling?
Trolling? Well, if you believe Y2K was fake, that's your opinion and you're entitled to it. I just pointed out that article to try to convince you otherwise.
I believe we have another such burst of nonesense scheduled for 2008 and 2014, right?
In 2038, 32-bit time_t variables roll over, but hopefully, everyone have recompiled their code on at least 64-bit platforms. Byte magazine had an article showing other Y2K-like incidents along the way, mostly due to clock rollovers. If I can find it, I'll post some of it...
My favorite Y2Kism was dclock showing that the year was 19:0 ... Someone was trying to be far to clever with adding ints to chars.
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
At the time I worked for a major reseller of hardware & software and man it was unreal! Phones ringing off the hooks. We are not just talking some back up zip stuff and tapes but whole back up servers and systems. I saw companies spend millions in plain fear. I say fear because frankly the newer stuff could "fail" just as fast as the old when it came right down to it.
Who gained? Media for a story they could hype for a full year prior to the mostly non-event. Resellers who had a field day. IT people who saw this as a great opportunity to get new hardware on the pretense of "safety".The whole American economy from the surge of tech buying. I wonder if the current down swing in tech stocks were, in part, due to a far more cynical viewpoint after Y2K that just kept on rolling.
Tired of being another body in the flock? Linux ! We are not sheep anymore.
Thats the whole point of having time be an abstract type like time_t rather than a specific size. The real 2038 problem is not in time_t, but rather in programs that use the "%d" specifier of printf() to write out a time_t(Of course thats also why ANSI refused to give exact sizes to char,int,and long. But then of course, we wind up with long long because some fool is worried about backwards compatibility.)
I recently received a notice asking me to report for jury duty on "January 10, 1901". I kind of doubt this is a Y2000 related problem, as they had a full year to fix it. Is there some Y2001 specific bug which could cause this?
I actually came to disbelieve in mid 1999. At the time, I was contracting to write documentation for a certain mid-sized system manufacturer. Part of my job was to document all their Y2K bugs, where "Y2K bug" was defined pretty loosely: any bug qualified if it might cause the wrong date to be entered or reported.
In the course of this job, I researched a lot of date-related bugs. I was astonished to find how many different kinds there were. Leap-year miscalculations. Inconsistent clock epoch assumptions. Complicated date formatting routines that did unpredictable things. Nasty kludges meant to patch other date-related bugs. I could go on and on.
To me, the conclusion was inescapable. Y2K bugs represented just a fraction of the date-related bugs present in computer systems. My company, and many other companies like it, had been dealing with this kind of problem for years. The problem might peak when the 00 digits overflowed. But even that was unlikely, given all the attention being paid.
__________________
I have a student loan through the US Dept of Education that I'm paying back... my bill for january 2000 was never printed and I got a statement halfway through january notifying me of the problem. It also asked me to send in my payment ASAP and that they wouldn't charge a late fee for it.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Well, amen to that! I haven't heard much about Alpha lately. Has Compaq managed to completely destroy it yet?
OK. First off, an AC made a most confounding post that simply read, "No." Is this surrealist graffiti?
Next, another AC (are we detecting a pattern?) posted the following message: "Wotan mit uns!!!" under the curious title of, "Will Of The Aryan Nations." I didn't know there were any of those hanging around here. Oh, and I'll be sure to pass your appreciation on to Wotan the next time I see him.
To this, a reply came from YAAC (Yet Another AC) which was entitled, "A new name for penis." "Good," I thought, "someone is going to let that other freak have it good and proper." No such luck. The post stated, very simply, "Hey! I think I just invented a new name for penis: a lightning rod for love. What do you think?" Let me tell you what I think...I think you missed your calling as a professional 3rd grader.
Finally, but certainly not least significant is this gem, obviously a work of literary brilliance: "i call my penis the chickenator like in Baldur's Gate yeah it really kills chickens but that's maybe because i'm jewish" Riiiight. So, there you have it folks--he calls his penis "the chickenator". After you've heard this, the rest of life seems so dull. But perhaps all is not lost. Notice his statement that he is Jewish? Perhaps this is some sort of subtle and crafty reply to our white supremacist friend a couple of posts ago. Nah, it's just another immature and thoroughly worthless post ejected from the bowels of what's left of slashdot.
And now, having spent so much of my time and effort becoming embroiled in this whole messy affair, I shall return to browsing at +1 (or higher) and return you to your regularly scheduled, mostly on-topic, and hopefully more intelligent slashdot. Huzzah.
I know that we had two minor failures on live systems where I work. No big deal.
The BIG news is/was that we kept some of the old systems (Non Y2K) up for the roll over, just to see what would happen - We would have been in BIG trouble - a lot of the systems that were replaced crashed big time
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Six months later, it was "Six months into the first year of the reign of our lord." in other words, still AD 1. 12 months after Jesus was supposedly born, it became AD 2 ("the second year of our lord"...all time when Jesus was supposedly between the age of 1 and 2 years old.). Here are the years in the first decade:
1st year: AD 1. "Jesus" is 0 full years old
2nd year: AD 2. "Jesus" is 1 full years old
3rd year: AD 3. "Jesus" is 2 full years old
4th year: AD 4. "Jesus" is 3 full years old
5th year: AD 5. "Jesus" is 4 full years old
6th year: AD 6. "Jesus" is 5 full years old
7th year: AD 7. "Jesus" is 6 full years old
8th year: AD 8. "Jesus" is 7 full years old
9th year: AD 9. "Jesus" is 8 full years old
10th year: AD 10. "Jesus" is 9 full years old
Thus, AD 10 was the last year of the first decade (decade means 10 years). AD 11 is the first year of the SECOND group of ten years. (The second decade.) "Jesus" also turns 10 in AD 11
By the same reasoning, the year 1000 was the last year of the first one thousand years of our supposed lord, therefore 1001 was the first year of the second millennium, and 2000 was the last year of the second millennium. 2001 therefore, will be the first year of the third millennium. Also, it will be the time when Jesus supposedly will be exactly 2000 years old.
(Since he was age 0 in AD 1, turned 1 when it turned AD 2...turns 2000 when it turns AD 2001.)
Happy last few decaminutes of the millennium!!
I worked as a Y2K consultant from 1998 through 1999 and saw and heard about several serious Y2K related bugs.
But, they were all found prior to Dec 31, 1999 through testing.
One very public one I remember was when the DWP in Sherman Oaks (So. Cal) tested a sewage system and found a Y2K bug the hard way.
Apparently an automated pump got confused when forward dated past Y2K and raw sewage poured out into the streets surrounding the pump station.
Just glad this got fixed before Dec 31, 1999!
How would they know? Companies with serious problems are not going to call press conferences. The PUC (local distribution) billing system was not Y2K compliant, and the new system was 4 months late. They had to make special arrangements for people to pay the wopping big bills they got in May over the rest of the year.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Norewegian much hyped 'signature' trains stopped due to a computer malfuction due to intolerance of the date 31-12-2000 (that is 12-31-2000 for you guys over on the other side of the pond)...
Poetic justice?
The problem? The trains wouldn't move an inch.
The solution? Set the onboard clocks back one month.
The manufacturer of the trains, ADtranz in Germany, say they're not sure exactly what caused the problem, but they're suspecting leap year trouble.
I guess no one saw that one coming. ;-)
Gunnar
--
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
I was working for a stock exchange in 1997, supporting some systems developers. They were working on year 2000 issues long before the nightly news was proclaiming disaster. They had both production and development systems, on the development systems they could show that the Y2K bug would cause an absolute disaster on the productions systems had the Y2K bugs not been fixed before Y2K.
The over hype helped strike fear into programmers and IT managers that helped to clear the major problems up.
There were real bugs on the day that caused a little trouble, but critical systems received critical attention well before 2000.
If I hear one more "there was no Y2K bug" arsehole...
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I feel like sending him a thank-you note.
+1, gracious. Not a bad idea at all.
His email appears to be: pdejager@year2000.com
Yeah, it seems a little superfluous and sappy,
but it sort of balances out the uncalled for
hate mail and death threats. Sheesh.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
As someone who spent the better part of 5 years fixing a boatload of Y2K code I can say that, at least on the projects I was working on, there would have been some very noticable and potentially drastic problems if the work wasn't done. Various parts of the US Army would be, well, let's just say "not in such good shape."
The real tragady of the Y2K hysteria is that many, many people busted their asses to get the code fixed and, because of the media hype, when it became a relitive non-event, instead of getting the praise they desirved they got the old, "What the hell am I paying you all this money for when there aren't any problems" crap.
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Is this just a localized network problem on my connection, or can anyone else hit it?
Nah, you've got to start it somewhere. His birthday is just as good as anyone elses.
It also had the advantage of starting with big numbers. If we started a Koresh calander now the years would only be two digits! (Until the Y1C problem anyway.) That's hardly a way to impress people with your new calander.
-Andy
Considering that the alternative might have been having satellites fall into the drink, it was probably worth the effort.
There were definitely problems in our internal company systems that would have slipped by had we not been alerted by the "hype".
In spite of our efforts, some of our systems still failed. Not because of Y2K exactly, but because of the GPS rollover problem that occurred shortly before.
And (knowing that this is redundant) no one will ever no how bad it would have been had no one sounded the alarm.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
We had a problem renewing annual subscriptions using an ecommerce system which billed credit cards. This occurred on January 1, 2000. The vendor quickly solved the problem. We had no other problems, but all of our custom software was written in the last two years.
One sentiment expressed is that the effort expended ensured that nothing bad would happen. Sure, we spent $$$ on things, and nothing happened.
But, look at the rest of the world. Countless third world countries (and the old Soviet Bloc, which might as well be 3rd world) did zilcho. Nothing happened there either. My parents work overseas in one of those 3rd world trashcans, and they can testify that nothing was done. Guess what: they survived the changeover just fine.
So, if both the first and third world came out ok, I would not attribute our success to the $$$ spent. The counterexample is just too strong to ignore.
Nathan Mates
It's the code in the programs that was largely at fault.
If your date comparison code was simply snipping the last two figures off of the system date (or whereever) it didn't matter if you were running on DOS, Windows, Unix or Macintosh.
_____
My Journal
...probably occured in Norway, on December 31, 2000. According to media here in Norway, the NSB's (Norwegian state railway) newest trains (which have had a long row of problems) all stopped on the morning of new years eve. The company who have sold the trains to NSB, AdTranz, say that the problem _might_ be that Y2K has 366 days, which the trains onboard computer hasn't been prepared for. The solution was to turn the trains clocks back one month.
Having personally been involved in managing y2k fixes I can say that the outcome would have been very serious had people not fixed what was wrong. No, the world would not have ended ... No, Life as we know it was never in jeopardy ... We all would have survived. And those who tried to make a fortune by scaring innocent people deserve whatever has befallen them.
But -- Incredible amounts of computer code was cataloged, examined, fixed, and streamlined. Embedded systems were replaced or repaired so people did not die in Intensive Care units of hospitals when critical equipment would have stopped working. To mankind's credit little was left to fail in 2000.
One could also argue that this was the first time project management was seriously applied on a large scale and now projects are managed better by experienced people.
Finally, lots of inefficient code has been or is scheduled for replacement and new systems are much more efficient. We would not have the explosive growth of Internet applications were it not for the large number of new systems in place which, by the way, replaced code that would have died in January 2000. The new systems supported interfaces and expansion that we are still implementing.
Maybe Y2K has taught people that code is valuable, that programmers are skilled and valuable, and that we need to clean up our act.
What about fixes that caused new problems, or only fixed the problem for a limited amount of time?
As an example, I just got an email from my mother, who owns a 486DX2/80 from a couple of years ago. I installed a Y2K patch for her some time ago, supplied by the motherboard manufacturer, which was supposed to fix the Y2K problem on the system clock (the clock would switch to 2094 instead of 2000!). Now, in 2001, it turns out that she has been caught in a year-2000 time loop! The computer will not work in ANY year 20xx except 2000...
This is just an example of what effects faulty quick fixes can have. These kinds of problems SHOULD be part of the Y2K aftermath I think.
We set up a test LAN with a PDC, BDC, and three workstations. After 50 days of testing, tweaking and reinstalling we decided to abandon any notions of W2K upgrades until Microsoft has some more time to work out the bugs.
If their products continue to deteriorate at the present rate, Microsoft will be removed from our business.
At the ISP I work at, the phone system went down at midnight last night. They finally managed to get a phone tech out here to get things back up and running. Not entirely sure if it's Y2K related, but interesting nonetheless.... Faulty patching for Y2K, maybe? Not the biggest deal in the world, no corporate clients call in on the holidays anyway. *grin* Greg
Perhaps somebody in the UK should go over to the London Times offices and offer to remove all the Y2K fixes they're relying on right now, starting with PC motherboards...
Lesson for the future: when you fix something, don't be quietly proud of your work - issue a press release that includes a detailed description of what would have happened if you hadn't fixed it. If you don't explain it to the non-techies, they'll just assume that it's no big deal. The average person's exposure to technical problem solving mainly consists of TV and movie characters fixing a bug in alien software with three keystrokes!
The media could give programmers credit for averting a disaster, but instead it's much easier for them to be cynical and claim that the whole Y2K thing was hype.
The problem with blaming hype is that much of it is.
The majority of the public do not know the technical reasons for the y2k problem. Equally, many press writers do not funnly appreciate the problem. Resultantly, the press people assume the worst, because 'Good News is No News', and sensational stories about power cuts, water and food shortages sell more newspapers.
Let's outline the problem for anyone who doesn't:
I am a mojor telecoms company. My billing database records every call like this:
We have to record the date of start and ending in case someone is on the phone over midnight. When it's billing time, we turn the subtract the start date from the end date to get the call length, twenty minutes, then we multiply by the call charge per time unit, which gives us the call cost.
Now, it's five minutes from new year. I decide to make an international call to, say, France, so I can wish my French buddies a happy new millenium as it happens. Here's the entry:
Then we subtract the start date from the end date. Instead of getting positive-20 minutes, we get negative-100 years. Then we multiply our negative-100 years by the international call cost and pop it on someone's bill, and direct-debit it from thier account.
Basically, instead of someone paying for a twenty min. call, they get the money for a 100-year international call. This costs my telephone company a lot of money.
As you can see, this would be a large problem for my telephone company if they didn't notice. And so they update thier databases.
And they tell people about the danger of giving customers big, negative bills. Someone from an industry magazine picks up on it, and 'Billing Database Developer Quaterly' runs an article on the problem. This allows the problem to be fixed on most systems. But it also allows the problem to be read about by people who don't understand the problem. These people tell people, and they tell people, and so on. The technical details don't get passed on, but the "OHMYGOD!! THIS COULD BE A DISASTER!!!" does. Then it gets to partially-knowledgable people, like technology correspondants for major newspapers. They look at the hype, and try to trace it back to the things that cause the problem: two-digit year records. And our journalist attempts to compose a list of things that could be affected, and produces a list of every thing that uses a two-digit date. Video Recorders, for instance.
Yes, there was a risk of date-dependent things going wrong. A telephone system, for example. And resultantly, they were repaired. What there isn't is a risk of date-independent things stopping working. Food delivery systems, for example. And resultantly, they didn't go wrong.
Paranoia, over-emphasis, ignorance and sensationalism over-expanded the problem. In conclusion, I would say that yes, there was a problem, but it was not as bad as non-knowledgable people made out.
That's my take, anyway.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I'm still getting occasional e-mail from tightwads with the year set back in their PCs. It works against them, because there is so much junk in my in box that I don't see it for a long time...
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
There is still one Y2K crisis coming that nobody talks about. What does the date "01/02" mean: Feb 2001 or Jan 2002? Up until Feb 01, 2001, it's been possible to disambiguate such things based on the numbers...
This is much worse, because it's a human factors issue and because the convention (if you can even say there is one) is region specific.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Apparantly on doing its pre-Y2K tests, one major UK bank found that financial reports ran after 01/01/2000 would attempt to display the results in pounds, shillings, and pence (i.e. the 'bizarre' monetary system used before decimalisation in 1972)
rm -rf / is the evil of all root
A belated Y2K bug hit NSB december 31. The trains just would not start - not really unusual for Norwegian trains, but now the dumb fucks at NSB claims it has to do with Y2K. Here's a link for those of you who understand Norwegian.
See the story at cnn.
This being the case I really have a hard time understanding what happened - you mean we really found all the problems and fixed them?
I saw companies doing mad panics in Nov 99 to get "fixed" code into production - this is for a company that was supposed to have all fixes done in 98 and 99 was to be a full year of testing.
Perhaps it really means that the world is (or were) not as reliant on computer systems as we (the nerds) tend to think. So what if some computers stop working, most businesses continue.
I've got two desktops in my house, and here's how both of them "rolled over" to the new year:
Desktop 1: A 4-year-old K6-233.. It set the date to January 24, 1980.
Desktop 2: A 4-month-old celeron 700.. It set the date to December 31, 2000.
Both of these date problems were easily fixed and have managed to stay sane since they were fixed, but it's not exactly something that everyone's going to check.
Look out!
I worked with one financial institution who used a lot of really old DOS software for day to day tasks, some dating back to the late 1980s. Generally no support was available, but I still had to get it working. We had problems due to network API changes, fast CPUs and other aspects of software rot. As no-one had maintained the software for years, no Y2K compliance statements could be obtained, and this software was junked.
It is unlikely that another excuse to junk software will occur until 2038 - and by then I won't care.
An obscure bug in Novell Netware 3.22 causes Backup Exec to miscalculate the day of the week after 1 March 2000 (the day after the "extra" leap day), so all scheduled weekday backups start on Sunday instead of Monday, and end on Thursday instead of Friday.
By definition, cults are faddish. 2000 years is a bit long for a "fad" don't you think? And, umm, how could you overlook the little distinction of Jesus being the Son of God and Koresh not? Koresh is like one of the false prophets that God warned us about in Jeremiah 23. If Koresh had read this scripture, he would have known that "the storm of the Lord [would] burst out in wrath" upon him as it did in Waco.
Sorry for stepping on your toes, but you do a disservice by misrepresenting Jesus.
OK, if you're not too irritated after my display of "arrogance", here's a web page that some of you heathens might find amusing. :-)
Problems Only Christian Goths Have
I'm not a goth but I wouldn't doubt that these are true.
In addition, K = kopeck, krona, krone, kaon, Kelvin, the symbol for potassium, and a few other things.
get this...
ONE of my lightbulbs burnt out
coincidence? we think so.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
Does the Y2K "effects" fall on a bell curve, or something else?
If it falls on a bell curve, then why are we not asking why nothing happened (which is just as improbable on a bell curve as "things went to hell")?
I haven't seen any discussion on this. I have only been able to surmise that it doesn't fall on a bell curve, because it was a known thing (and not a random event), or because programming and preparation was actively done to avert anything.
I mean, the SEC required companies to give Y2K preparedness statements monthly (or quarterly) in 1999 - but arcording to Yardini (or was it Yourdon? - whoever the securities specialist was - not the Y2K doomsayer), no major company was prepared! So why didn't anything happen?
Can anyone answer this for me? It has bugged me all year. I wonder if things did fall apart, and a lot of CYA was covertly done - of course, we didn't hear about that, or anything - so that is probably just paranoia...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon