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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
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 . . .
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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?
The UNIX clock uses a 32 bit unsigned integer to count the number of seconds starting at, I believe, Jan 1, 1970, 00:00. In 2038, I believe, that 32 bit integer will run out of seconds, and roll over.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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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).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
[A bug] happened at the turnover of feburary rather than the turnover of the year
Heh. The "year 2000 IS a leapyear" bug. I know one fellow who found it "broken" and "fixed" it to be really broken - because he knew about the "centuries aren't leapyears" exception but not the "every fourth century IS a leapyear" exception to the exception.
I wonder if you were using his code. (Unix on a mainframe?)
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 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!
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!
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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
(Aside: looks like only the trolls and the sysadmins are online during New Year 2001. We should all get a life).
Quick story: there were some DNS problems related to Y2K. Or, more accurately, related to faulty Y2K fixes. Something indeterminate happened to a domain that I purchase Web hosting for, evidently due to someone making some DNS changes a day or so before the end of the year.
The story isn't that this was really a problem (it was a minor screw-up), but that NetworkSolutions evidently turned off their DNS updates for at least a day or two, perhaps longer. Normally, NSI does host table updates twice per day.
Nobody ever fessed up to any of this, but I was tracerouting and whois'ing etc. for days after the new year waiting for the changes to take effect. The "last update" from NSI's DNS stayed in 1999 for several days.
Bottom line, which I think is a common story, is that the problem (no DNS updates by NetworkSolutions) was caused by paranoia that there might be Y2K problems...
- 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.
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.
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"Insert witty quote here."
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.
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
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?
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.
Is this just a localized network problem on my connection, or can anyone else hit it?
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
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
See the story at cnn.
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.
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
Seems like those christian goths see the hypocracy at work, but don't mind. By their own account, churches are uneasy at their presence.
Anyways,
And, umm, how could you overlook the little distinction of Jesus being the Son of God and Koresh not?
...
my display of "arrogance"
You obviously are aware of it when you do it. What about Ba'hai (sp?) for instance? And about Waco being some kind of punishment raining down from the Lord? That's original. Of course, it was Reno's fsckup but you knew that.
But if we're going to indulge in fundamentalism, I have to wonder why don't we use the Jewish calendar, which purports to count from the 7 day creation? Isn't it much more logical to count from the beginning of time? (you probably believe that the universe is about 4000 years old and that the Jewish calendar does indeed start at the beginning of time)
My point is that there is nothing logical about the calendar system we use. We just use it because it is so entrenched, just like we still haven't gone metric.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Some ftp sites were also taken down over the period. I believe one of the machines that resolves to ftp.uk.kenel.org was one such machine.