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Y2K: Hoax, Or Averted Disaster?
Allnighterking writes "Y2K -- remember the fear it generated? Cartoons were written about it. The dried food industry saw a boom. Doomsayers abounded. But in the end, no planes fell, no one died and the electric grid stayed up for three more years. Was it all a hoax? Or was it the result of careful and complete planning and upgrading. American RadioWorks has a series of articles talking about the disaster that never happened called Y2K You can either Listen in or read the Transcripts of each of the 3 broadcasts and decide for yourself. The over 100 Billion pumped into the US economy alone may well have fueled the boom and predicated the bust. Could the success at Y2K prevention have made the coming problem in 2038 something people will ignore?"
Suck it down, bitches. Y2K pwn3d j00!
suckas. i mean, really, what a bunch of dirty sucks you all are!
I think it had a snowball effect : people inconsciously feared it and their fear grew while they heard even more about it. So it's not only the media, it's also people.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"the coming problem in 2038"
Phil Collins is going to release another album?
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
A scam.
I was working for a company that jumped on the Y2K bandwagon in 98/99. The official company line was "there's no risk to our OS, we've tested it, but we'll keep selling the testing-and-patching tool right up to Dec 31, 1999, 23:59:59 and get all the money we can from worried customers. The "fix" sold for $60 and was nothing more than a small program to set the clock at 23:59:58, wait 5 seconds, and determine that there was no danger, and if it was run on another, competing OS that was vulnerable, install a dumb TSR to correct the problem.
2038 is years away - we'll all have new systems by then! No need to worry!
Was it all a hoax? Or was it the result of careful and complete planning and upgrading?
How about the combination of the two? I remember seeing Y2K companies trading on the stock market with $10 billion market caps. But then I remember hearing legitimate stories about real world fixes.
It is like the Tsunami. Lots of people are going to make money unethically but, ultimately, we can't stop them unless we just cut off all help.
More
The site seems to be slashdotted already..a 81bc488a392/index.html
mirror: http://mirrordot.org/stories/c3714b90fba0ed06b444
I'm an old-time mainframe guy, started coding back in the late 70's.
Anyway, back in those days we had a problem every four years. Yep...you guessed it, some programmer had forgotten to take leap year into account.
And when that happened, programs broke. We fixed them in a few minutes and we were on our way. But companies didn't stop. Planes didn't fall out of the sky. Nothing bad happened, other than annoyed users and managers.
My point is that programmers have been screwing up dates and date routines since the computer was invented. We had instances of all the programs breaking on one days. And yet, nothing bad happened.
Hoax. Great for my career....I got a big house with a pool, and a BMW out of the whole Y2K thing, so I'm not complaining. But lets face it, it was a boondoggle.
I personally blame Yourdon. But only because the man is a complete idiot.
Lets see, I'll be 73 about then.
Providing it doesn't cause my VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) 200 mph Zimmer Frame to crash, I don't really think I'm going to care all that much.
Shouldn't they start working on the year 10,000 problem NOW?
that people don't believe in things they can't see. they can't 'see' spyware so it's an imaginary problem. same thing with viruses. they don't believe until something bad happens.
it's the same mentality the apparently caused countries in the indian ocean region to decide that a tsunami warning system was not a high priority.
there was a time in early/mid 2000 that i got so tired of people deciding that y2k was a hoax that i wished really bad things had happened.
eric
Mirror for the 2038 bug?
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
Year 10 000 bug will come also.
Well Y2K stopped our overtime system from working - we had to enter dates in from 28 years ago. It also stopped a (time-limited) graphics editor that I wrote from working - it was due to stop at 31/12/1999 but the time-bomb code didn't handle further dates properly anyway! Dang DOS API calls...
The tsunami was a relatively small scale event, affecting mainly small islands and long coastlines, but the backup effects (refugees, lack of drinkable water, damage to communication networks, the need to divert resources and the difficulty of doing so) will doubtless result in many more people dying over time. In the same way, I suspect that if we had done nothing about Y2K, the cumulative result of a lot of small disruptions would actually have resulted in major economic loss and many people dying.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
It was a legitimate concern and one that could easily be one by a bios upgrade or something else, a simple check of Windows 95/98 etc. I recall at work how many people in IT ordered these Y2K compliant kits that would magically repair all bioses and check all windows settings on the machine and make it y2k ready, in reality i dont think it did anything but set the clock ahead to year 2000 then back again and make a popup window appear saying YOURE OK!
And of course, your example uses a PCI 802.11b card with a proprietary Windows driver, that some brave guy managed to make work flawlessly under Linux with much hacking.
Yay propaganda...
Certain code would do the wrong thing on date rollovers and needed fixing - I'd seen it myself.
:-) Globally there were one or two, but nothing major.
The seriousness of the problem was exaggerated by the following misconceptions:
1. Everything that held a date in it with 2 digit years was going to have a problem.
2. Everything described in point 1 that was not fixed would fail in the most disastrous way - missiles being launched, planes falling from the sky.
In reality there could be no problem, or the problem might only be cosmetic. For example, a system I was testing would show the wrong status colour (meaning you haven't done a diagnostic in so many months) but it would not do anything wrong. Still, it had to be fixed to be Y2K ready.
Nonetheless, I was slightly under whelmed by what went wrong on the day. I knew society was not going to collapse, but I expected a few non-critical SNAFUs. I made sure I took out cash from the ATM before New Years, but I gave the water supplies and the bomb shelter a miss
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
There were a lot of people that worked a lot of hours in the months before Y2K to audit financial software where my girlfriend works. They found a lot of date related problems and fixed them before 1/1/00, or should I say 1/1/2000. These types of audits and reviews are what averted the Y2K issues.
Orsen Wells: War of The Worlds. Spice of life!
It was the perfect setup; either outcome gave full justification:
I expect Y38 will be expolited in exactly the same fashion, it's too good to pass up!
At the time, I worked for a large telco company who had about 500 systems reviewed (most of them interconnected.)
5% of the systems had Y2K issues, most of them in the part that interfaced with other systems (the reason was that inter-system interfaces was usually developed in an ad-hoc manner with ditto exceeded life times.)
5% is a big enough number to warrant the huge effort that was undertaken.
No doubt, Y2K would have been a disaster if nothing had been done proactively in 98/99.
Congress and lobbyists used Y2K for a justification for the major expansions in the guest worker programs.
(Shamelessly stolen from http://www.gsp.com/2038/ )
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
Maybe this explains why those planes mysteriously weren't intercepted on time, two days later. Or maybe this is just related to the security exercise on Sept. 11th.
I think the hype made people aware and money was "overspent" - so much so that nothing serious happened.
The Y2K problem was NOT just about a bug in the Cobal programming and handling digits.
Here are some interesting facts that I observed:
Several ATMs for Wachovia were crashed in my area -
The Charter Cable TV Channel crashed a lot more often in the next two months - there would often be a screen for Windows NT on it.
My local Toyota dealership found out that the national leasing program billed several 100 customers for loans for some reason starting in 1912. (Toyota also had problems with their database on sept 9 1999)
The power grid went out (albeit a few years late in the North) - I feel this wasn't related to Y2K BUT was just coincidental it didn't happen around the same time.
September 11 2001 happened - there was SO much security and so tight an awareness due to Y2K that I just don't think it was possible to pull off anything. I think we would be naive to think that no one was planning something - even if it wasn't coming from middle eastern or muslim extremists.
The paranoid conspiracy theory person in me says that a lot of things happened that we just were not aware of - behind the scenes.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
?gub 8302 eht rof rorriM
Well I got paid over £ 1,000 (UK) just for being on pager cover for the year 2000 for a load of applications that didn't even process dates and that ran on an operating system that internally stored all dates as 64bit words (microseconds from a base date).
;)
So I loved every second of it. Loved it.
I just wish I could still be around for the next one (I bet the year 9999 consultants bills will be in the terra billions
It was overhyped.
Lots of systems would have had peculiar behaviour. Many would have been quite subtle. Financial systems were probably most at risk, and a few other systems would have shown odd glitches.
The problem was that by the time the media got hold of this, the story had become every system with a processor in it will simultaneously stop working at the strike of midnight. Suddenly , people assumed that their home PCs, cars and microwave ovens would sbruptly stop working. Clearly this didn't happen.
There was one other lie. That the using 2 years to store the date was done to save space. If the space was that much of an issue, then the programmers wouldn't have stored the date using BCD. They would have simply had a count of days. a 16 bit value would have given 179 years, whereas a 3 digit date using BCD would take up 24 bits and only give 100 years. The only reason they used a 2 digit date was becaase programmers knew the users were lazy.
I work for an international bank and we fixed 2-300 Y2K bugs. I know; I tested the changes & found more doing the testing. Obviously, some were more critical than others. We also upgraded release levels of system software. I also know that some were missed. The thing is, they were attributed to something else when they occurred. Noone would admit that they had missed a Y2K bug after all the $$$ thrown at the problem. I'm sure my situation is not unique.
The only thing I saw that stopped working in Y2K was a compiler for embedded systems that crashed if it tried to generate output files with timestamps in Y2K. Duh!! So we had to isolate a couple of machines, wind the clock back, and use those.
(I already knew that cross compilers for embedded systems were generally crap but I really hadn't expected that particular problem.)
Y2K hasn't come yet. As any coder ought to know, 2K == 2048, not 2000.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
we're as humans not dependent to computers that much. We hardly trust computers most of times. On lots of places people take paper copies of data backups, or they have a switch guy waiting on duty to check if computer does its work alright. But it's starting to change day by day. Every passing day computers get more importance in human life. It wasn't that vital in y2k but it will be vital in 2100 or so. And then a single bug in a software will lead planes crash, electricity block out and etc. But fortunately then people will take those issues more carefully.
No money was pumped "in" to the US economy. Money was merely moved from one use to another.
While the economy gained from the new spending, it lost from the lack of the default spending.
Without any hard data, one should assume that this was either a wash or - more likely - a net productivity hit.
People make this mistake all the time: "ooh! hurricane! I bet all that spending on new windows helped the economy!". No, it didn't. It took money that would have otherwise been spent at restaurants, book stores, etc., (or left in banks and brokerage accounts, where it helps build other sectors of the economy) and moved that money into glass repair shops and plywood factories.
Don't fall for the myth.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Because it's very very hard to predict the possible outcomes of events that have already not happened we tend to over compensate for future possible events. One could make the case that because of the paltry number of nuclear power plant accidents in the US since 1945 that entire country have been oversold on the need to manage those risks. So it is with Y2K, etc.
For most program especially many of the end of the world if program fails programs. Are not that dependent on the time. Even a lot of the finanical programs. The Date was to just allow the person to get a reference and not much on how the computer did a lot of its processing. Sure there were some spots where it would go 99 to 00 but that was rather rare. Most of the y2k bugs I have seen (and I have seen a fiew after y2k) were just in silly small applications. Like I saw a 1900 in a hotel that had a terminal that displayed the date and time and what was happening today. And still on Milk bottles Ill see expires 1-4-105. For most of those Y2k bugs it was more of a display and user input issue then a rollover issue. During the late 90s I was was doing some fox pro development. And I just had to go to each program and set the year to 4 digit and then stretch the text boxes so it fixed. Fox Pro still internally held the year as 4 digit but just displayed the 2 digits. Besides why would a most people internally handle the year as 2 chars, that fills up 16 bits of storage. If they were using old computers where those bit count they would just use 1 char to store the number and still be able to get to the year 2155 as far in storage and calculations. But people were scared because it was a computer and computers are scary. So they called on all the people they made fun of in highschool to fix the problem.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How to install a network card driver in Linux:
IIRC, there was an event on Sept. 11, 2001 that all but shut down the U.S. economy for 96 hours. It wasn't software generated, of course, but many of the back up sites, redundant networking and contingency plans that kept the world's largest companies from going into an immediate air-stall owed their existence to the pre-Y2K fervor. Sometimes it takes a little fear to get the suits to pry open the pocketbook.
Of course, now that the current security obsession is terrorism maybe we shouldn't be too surprised by recent software meltdowns..
Working for a facility management company, contracted to a large client in Switzerland, three months prior to the Y2k bitflip. Checked dozens of devices, big and small: embedded controllers for climate control, UPS's, fire alarms, you name it. Found one item: a Compaq PC used for the lighting system had a non-Y2k-compliant BIOS. The result of doing nothing would have been that the weekend lighting profiles for all (several hundred) offices, meeting rooms, and so on would have been active during the week (you know - wrong offset when attempting to calculate whether "today" is a weekend).
/. is the right place for anecdotal evidence, right?)
Replaced computer, had no problems.
Moral of the story: this was a lighting system. Big deal. The client invested several tens of thousands in the project to check three large office buildings in my location, and avoided a minor pain in return. However: everything was checked, and it might have been anything. If it had been the UPS's or the fire alarms for instance, the result of not doing anything could have been a major pain. Point is - we found something, so it wasn't just a waste of time.
(
yes, we have no bananas
Up until a few days ago their site said that the last release was -350 days old...
Well, at least short term fixes (1920 is really 2020, and the like) were. The difficulties were having little time to fix the problem, and database/system downtime. It was also a good time to upgrade old systems I suppose however.
Hopefully 38 years of software creation will mean that unix timestamps will not be an issue in 2038 - of course by then *everything* will be computerised - the government has to have a way to control the population and enforce anti-terrorist-curfew and everything. So it is extremely urgent that things are done right now so that you don't find yourself in a cold, locked-up, powerless house one day in 2038 with no means of escape.
Also, of course, a lot of things don't rely on the date, and wouldn't care if it was 1975 or 2025. It is only software that uses dates in its control process that is in real danger. How many nuclear power stations have (if (date 70) { meltdown(NO_ALARMS); } anyway?
Of course, the human race will end up enslaved to computers, and when something kills of the computers we'll be helpless.
I would have thought that 2048 would also be a bad year
The Y2K problem was largely just delayed by clever use of a 100-year window to account for which 2-digit year you're talking about. Once data is required on some system where we need a resolution of 101 or more years, bad stuff will happen. Of course, that's totally separate from a binary representation of "today" being equal to the binary representation of "end of file", but I guess it's easy to lump computer problems all under the same umbrella... and yes, I think the 2038/2029/etc. bugs are going to be a thousand times worse than Y2K, but again, we will come up with a kludge at the last minute that will keep it going for a while longer.
stuff |
The world's infrastructure wasn't, and isn't all hooked up to the internet yet. Fifty or a hundred years down the road, catastrophic failures may happen which we are powerless to stop, because some dickheads thought it was a good idea to have everything interconnected and running the same OS.
Also, the Y2K "crisis" only occurred because humanity as a whole can't seem to plan very far ahead. Or remember its lessons, it seems. The SARS
scare was something that happened a short while ago, and people are already lapsing back to bad habits like coughing with their mouths open in public, in my country.
It seems like most people are too goddamned lazy or apathetic to do the right thing, even if it's for their own good, unless there's threat of immediate pain.
Lastly, look at the tsunami situation. Everybody's going on about tsunami watch this and tsunami watch that, but I can assure you, in five years time, no one will give a shit.
Nobody remembers anything unless the fucking tv tells them to...
I was involved in fixes for a group of software for Y2K, up to the night before. The company I worked for at the time developed software for handling when medications are given to patients in hospitals, and charging the right amount to insurance. We covered very large facilities all over the US. Had we not updated the software, it would have never allowed patients to get their medication, and billing would have been screwed up out the ying yang.
If you were in the hospital right after Y2K, be glad that a group of us worked overtime and literally up to the last minute to get all the corrections done and all the sites remotely updated.
It was a hoax! I didn't upgrade my tinfoil and it still works just fine or maybe thats just what they want me to think. *PANIC*
I'm sure anyone who helps support small businesses and their use of IT to run them knows this WAS an averted disaster. Most small companies, in 1999, were using accounting systems (and running them on platforms) that absolutely, positively, would have failed. There were untold thousands of businesses handling shipping, payroll, payables - core stay-in-business stuff - on older versions of FoxPro, or creaky older copies of Unix-based accounting software running on prehistoric Altos machines, and so on.
These would all, everyone of them, puked big time without serious remediation. In many cases it was line-by-line code work, or the building of elaborate insulating layers between modules. In many cases, the cleanest and most rational fix really was a system upgrade. But I can tell you (from having simulated calendar rollovers on such systems), that on 1/1/2000, a lot of my customers (minus the serious work), would have been unable to buy, sell, pay their people, etc., for weeks into 2000 - at which point many would have been mortally wounded. This was no hoax, and the most important work I did at that time was educating the business owners who kept hearing the words "hoax" or "exagerated" on the news.
I wasn't worrying myself about planes falling out of the sky, but I was worried about calamitous damage to a huge chunk of the economy: the $2-15M/year business. Of course, I like to hunt, so no harm buying a little extra freeze-dried food anyway, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Damn! and here I installed my wireless card by typing
:|
# emerge ipw2100
Guess i'm not enough of a nerd
Wait, is your name Peter Gibbons from Office Space?
2038? If we live through 2029I'll totally just pay a tech to come over to my cave and fix my counting stones with the skins I earned cornering the market on wooly mammoth hides.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I dunno. Last time I tried installing a network card in Windows it said "data not valid" or something like that. A google search said I had to fiddle with the registry to get it to work.
With Linux I just has to tinker with the module configuration utility that debian comes with. But I guess you can do it your way.
I think it was mostly hype by the media and by businesses that had an financial incentives to make companies worry.
The media because hype and emotions garner eyeballs, which lead to more advertising revenue.
Businesses because many of them were involved in Y2K solutions and services.
This reminds me of the "shark attack" news tidbits that used to come out during the summer when there was nothing new to report. Studies later had found that shark attacks didn't in fact increase suddenly. It had always been the same. It was all due to the media bastards hyping it up.
eTrade SUCKS
It was a problem, but not as big as it was made out to be. Once the media got a hold of the story, it was just blown completely out of proportion. The year 2038 will also be the same.
Ever been to the mirrordot.org homepage. Ouch.
At the time I was a mainframe operator with Penn State (I'm still with them, just in a much less annoying job), and I remember we had a ton of things that needed fixing. Even so, there were some fairly significant problems that popped up on new year's day that had not been caught. If I remember correctly, the program that validated rsa secureIDs failed amoung some other less serious snafus.
:) I know that was a great time for search and rescue teams to pick up cheap gear.
I imagine most places when through something similar, a few years of hunting and fixing and then dealing with some small problems that they missed after the fact.
However, I notice that civilization did not collapse. There was no "fight club" style destruction of everyone's credit rating or a total collapse of the money system, planes did not fall out of the sky, nukes did not sporatically go off, etc. Maybe that COULD have happened but remember people began seriously talking about this problem around 1996 (at least the media began picking it up then) so there was plenty of time to fix stuff.
Many people found great deals on generators and survival gear (food, etc) the following year on ebay
Finkployd
I worked as sys admin for a stock exchange in the mid 90's. Rolling the clock forward on the dev trading systems... crashed them hard.
Big iron hardware / OS vendors and our in house trading system developers fixed and tested and fixed and tested for 4 years to make sure 2000 would not be a problem for us.
It was most certainly very real. Imagine if your country suddenly just stopped electronic trading and it would take at least months of frantic auditing and coding to fix and any amount of money.
Systems that mattered, systems which would have lots of nervous heads on the chopping block, got fixed well before 2000.
People who say Y2K was a "hoax", were NOT there in the thick of it and did not see real, top priority nation or life critical systems fail under test or the process to have them fixed.
Now, if you said Y2K was over hyped, then I could not argue. Especially when the news is saying things like "planes will fall out of the sky" and "there will be no electricity".
I saw a video being played in a prominent retailer's shop window (Dixons, owners of PC World) about the 'Y2K Threat'. In it, a guy gets up on 01/01/2000 and tries to make coffee. Oh no! His kettle won't boil! So he goes to work. Except his car won't start! He tries to cross the road, but the crossing is going crazy, so he can't get across! It never explains why the traffic was busy, especially as it was just demonstrated that cars wouldn't start...
:)
The whole thing was just ridiculous, and it was all to sell some crappy CD with a TSR style 'clock set right thing' for Windows. The retailers of the world were rubbing their hands.
Of course, my analogue watch ne'er skipped a beat in the turmoil
and
it wasn't a bug!
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
Look at what happened after Y1K - a few hundred years of Dark Ages.
Not in the sense that there was an overarching will to deceive. Global warming is a good current example. In both cases, ignorant masses are led to believe there is some castrophe on the horizon and fear creates a big money machine. There is deception in that as the machine becomes morte powerful it is exploited by some for financial or political gain.
Michael Crichton's new novel, State of Fear, explores this theme in the context of global warming.
Fear leading to funding is not all bad. Chemistry of the upper atmosphere eventually provided good evidence that CFC's disrupted ozone production. Whther such scenario's as an end to life on the planet, cockroaches excluded, would have played out...we'll never know.
It did generate a big atmospheric research beauracracy that lives on through 'global warming'. (IRC MC did not touch on this n his novel).
My point is that while Y2K was not a hoax (the recent Bhopal-Dow settlement announcement that got global press is a good example of a hoax) it was not a problem worthy of all the frenzy either.
From what my ex colleague at IBM said, the pc's and servers weren't so much of a problem as they all ran more recent software and hardware architectures, however the big old mainframes needed a lot of work to get them all compliant. Seeming as most of the worst financial deadlings reside on mainframes it was indeed a very MAJOR problem. He was involved in making sure they were all compliant and there was a big sigh of relief when everything worked out OK. I think the non-mainframe scare was indeed hyped up but on the mainframe side you couldn't get any more serious
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
I read an article (in The Economist???) in the late 90's that suggested that a bust might happen anyway based on historical evidence/patterns. IIRC, it stated that the British and Dutch stock markets (the only significant markets for a long time) showed downward trends at the turn of every century for the last 3 or 4 hundred years.
A railroad I know of had to manually route trains for about two to three weeks because of a couple of missed Y2K parameters. Had it not been for a few old-timers who were still around from when that was done a couple of decades ago, all of the predictions about crashes and whatever would have come true for this particular company.
The company covered up the problems in order to protect their stock price. I imagine a few other companies had similar results.
I heard on the radio that in the city where I live, a couple of prison inmates were mistakenly released due to the Y2K bug. At first I thought that was a bogus cover story, but then I remembered that I had worked with the contractor who was supposed to be in charge of the Y2K clean-up at the prison system. He was working multiple projects at that time. Appearently, he could not handle the pressure and he had a nervous breakdown in late 1999. If he did not finish (and I always assumed he did not because he was really falling behind when I was working with him, which of course increased his stress level), I could easily see this story being true.
Funny. Here's my version (I actually recently went through all this:)
how to install network adapter under Windows
1. Install card.
2. Boot, wizard doesn't pop up. No idea why. No logs to check.
3. Insert floppy with drivers, add manually. Warning about unsigned driver pops up. Yeah, great.
4. Reboot.
5. The IRQ conflicted with onboard soundcard, reconfigure.
6. Reboot again.
7. Took an hour of clicking through menus, several windows, cussing and kicking the box, but it's finally online.
How to install network adapter under Linux
1. Install card
2. Boot, watch kudzu do the work
3. Continue the booting, surf and enjoy.
And that's a true story, unlike yours.
While you're at it, read the whole Wikipedia article, and the transcript of the radio series. Specifically, read the bit about Keynesian economics, and how stimulating aggregate demand can encourage more productive use of capacity where it is underutilized. This arguably happened with the development of low-cost Indian outsourcing services. Second, the radio feature suggests that the trigger of the Y2K issue caused businesses to think about their IT infrastructure and how to improve it in ways that made them more efficient in the long term, more so than they would have done without that pressure.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Look at the mess a computer glitch cost the airlines this holiday. While dire 'world collapse' predictions were a crock, the Y2K problem would have caused much more severe disruption.
I worked for the government on small piece - systems supporting data transfer to the FAA. We went in to extensive 'dry-run' testing confidant there would no problems with our newer systems. We found two which would have locked up our computers. Which shook me and convinced me legacy systems in all sectors had many more problems fixed in advance. Business and government all over the world essentially paid for testing and preventative maintenance the prevented a co-ordinated failure of computing world wide.
Like IT security it was one of those costly items that doesn't show ROI very well.
is still on schedule for Y2k, it is only that the monks lost some years in counting.
Something tells me Tony Hoyle has never worked with real time systems. I have. A number of designers did not apparently know that 2000 was divisible by 400 and so was a Leap Year.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Situation: Early 90s most businesses and people started to have computers. Knowing in 10 years there may be a Y2k Problem most larger companies started to hire some more programmers to fix the problem. After seeing the quote to fix the problem they decided to just upgrade their infrastructure. So they were tossing out their Mainframes (or at least having on special duty) and replacing them with brand new Pentium Computers which were y2k complient. After this upgraded they needed more software so programmers were hired to write programs for there PC. So the tech boom started. In the process of dealing with these techs they started to show people about the internet and new protocol HTTP combined with the features of the formating language of HTML. With everyones computer powerful enough to support these features they started asking for it themselves. and some started to hire the Programers to write these HTML pages which they did for a fee. With more sites on the web more people started using it and businesses in the late 90s began to see the web less as simple Hey we are tech trendy catalog and here are the basic specs, to a way to run business, so they hired more programmers to write html pages (At full programmers pay) seeing these programmers getting away with murder for writting in the simple HTML spawned a new bread of developer the Web Developer at about the same price these people were "Specialized" in web development. Thus increasing the echonomy more as the programmers while many still doing HTML the other are back to the final rechecking for any other y2k bugs, and seeing if they weren't any Y2k bugs in the new computers that everyone got. But seeing the fast growth in the web, stock investors began to rush and push money into this new medium of selling product, and they got rich so more people put money there. Then around 2000 Y2k was no longer an issue everything is fine all the issues were minor. Everyone has new computers and new software. All their web pages are developed. And stock investors see the completed infrastructure and start putting there stocks in different areas or selling them to retire. Thus the economy dropped. Seeing the pinch in stock prices companies fire a lot of there IT staff (Being a public traded company they were not smart about it so they may have left MR. Kid Web Developer and try to make him administer the hole company, and laid off experienced system administrator with 20 years of experience.). Which brings us to today. With all skilled people unemployed and many are angry and desporate for jobs a lot of them try to make money by Spamming. Or some just want to stick it to the Man and make a virus, which spreads. Or just go around hacking sites. and this has became easy because Mr. Kid Web Developer is in charge of the companies IT and only has a basic understanding on what is going on. Thus viruses spread across the company. They allow spam to get across. Every system is infected with spy ware. And this poor kid is afraid to ask for help because he saw the rest of the IT staff get canned.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
On Dec 31, 1999 my wife and I threw a New Year's Eve party at our house. As we closed in on midnight we handed out the bubbly and had everybody downstairs in the basement watching the ball drop in Times Square on TV. My wife then causually picked up the TV remote while I drifted over to the light switch. At the stroke of midnight she turned off the TV while I turned off the lights. A collective gasp rose up from our guests - we turned everything back on after about 10 seconds. So all in all the Y2K expense wasn't a waste at all for us since it allowed us to successfully pull off a good practical joke.
One could make the case that because of the paltry number of nuclear power plant accidents in the US since 1945
You lie! I've seen The Simpsons.
Seriously, I wonder if that show adversely affected the perception of the risks of nuclear power in the minds of the general public. I'll bet it did.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Y2k was interesting. I led a team of over a hundred technical types to diagnose and develop solutions for a major telco. Customers with problems included power companies and manufacturing companies. On the proof their were issues side the Chicago Board of Trade fiasco was the result of improper distributed Y2K fix code (some will dispute this). The fact is the lab I was responsible for found time sync modules in everything from Hyundai PBX systems to Wellfleet routers would drop traffic because of date issues. In some cases the equipment was so old that power cycling it for testing purposes caused it to fail on the spot. In several cases the audit revealed equipment or telco systems that were being under utilized (hot but unconnected) or over utilized (hot but not billed). If I learned anything it was that a team of several hundred people within a year can do amazing things but costs buckets of money. I was definitely amazed that companies with huge IT budgets would buy Herman Miller chairs but wouldn't replace twenty year old routers.
--- Location Unknown
NT4.0 pre-SP4 couldn't make it past 49.7 days, never mind until 2038...
2038 (UNIX) & 2042 (IBM "Mainframes") are date counter hardware overflows that can easily be solved by creation of a new reference date (ala Pope Gregory). I saw a new 364 day calendar just the other day that kept the day of the year on the same weekday every year. Why not? Or perhaps it's finally time for a metric calendar? Or, better yet, continuously variable clocks rather than these arbitrary 24 time zones?
I also worked for a bank in the UK doing admin work on their Y2K project and there was *huge* amounts of planning went into it and a surprising amount of non-compliant systems and software.
A well known issue for many years that was not truly a looming disaster until the media hyped the story, Congress created commissions, and "Hollywood" made movies. A whole lot of money was spent averting a disaster that never was. The real disaster is that the movies were not very good.
We mainly identified that nothing we had would be affected, including the 1994 486PCs that we had at 200 desks.
We got our core application vendor to review their product (it was a fairly obscure vertical app) and so on. Basically, we took pretty reasonable steps and decided we knew where we stood.....until 18 months later when the hysteria hit. All of a sudden we had 3 full time analysts from Unisys (of all people), a project manager and other 'by the hour' consusltants as Unisys deemed necessary.
The analysts were really just backpackers in suits and carried out various tasks: Printing rubbish to file, reading pornography (really!) and keeping upto date on the UK soccer scene.
No expense was wasted. We bought multiple $30k servers to test on so that they were similar to what we had in production. Flights anywhere and anytime to LOOK at another site (which were all identical to HO). Hell, I chucked in the 'need' for replacing every single PC + 10 or so new ProLiants once I saw the new form.
We were a company that took 9 months to approve a $15k core server upgrade only 18 month prior. I have no idea the eventual cost but it was 50k here, 50k there + the ongoing 5 or 6k a day in consultants.
After 20-odd years in business, the company went into administration in 2001. Sadly, It didn't recover.
By the way, the Y2K teams final conclusion? "All clear". We didn't have a single genuine action point which didn't involve putting stickers on items and writing to busniess partners to say we take the thing seriously.
I still have my Y2K folder from 97. It said the same thing without the stickers and was a hell of a lot cheaper.
Only big ligs use sigs.
./2038test
Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
w00t!
LAMENESS FILTER SUCKS...
# Please try to keep posts on topic.
# Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
# Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
# Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Office Space would have had a slightly different story...
They even had planned a four-day shutdown around January 1st in order to handle any issues that cropped up, even after all the testing and certification that had been done. This was a good thing because I spent 1/1/2000 at work putting in some last-minute fixes that didn't crop up during our testing, as well as identifying some non-compliant hardware.
I believe the Year 2000 issue could have been much worse than it was, but it wasn't because people recognized how bad things could have been and had plans in place to deal with potential issues.
Just another good reason to get a 64 bit processor. And heck, we've been using 32 bit systems for over 30 years, lets hope it's not another 30.
ooh, guess i should have looked at the seconds before i posted that...d'oh! eh well, at least it gets the year right.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Can we all please stop mentioning gratuitously the tsunami? (and if possible stop making comparisions betwen the tsunami and 9/11).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There is a great scene in Galaxy Quest where Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver have to stop the ship from blowing up. They stop it with plenty of time to spare, but the timer keeps ticking. It ticks all the way down until there is only 1 second left, then it stops all by itself.
That's what veiwers expect. It's simply not exciting to solve a problem with plenty of time to spare.
It's my opinion that the Y2K problem was real, was mostly fixed, but was utterly over-hyped.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
...everyone knows that the robots are going to fix all the problems in 2035.
See my Home Theater
Apart from the usual hangovers, I managed to take a break over the xmas/new-year period. On returning to work, the usual number of things had quit, crashed and burned, or otherwise died and were quickly righted (if 'righted' is a word that can be used in the context of a Win32 system that doesn't involve dipping the hard discs in acid or a several MegaTesla field).
;-)
My main problem was that a new machine, prepared for a new user, left in a perfectly working condition before the holidays had mysteriously stopped working. It had mysteriously also grown a different CD drive, and of course nobody was willing to admit that they messed with it.
After the visions of barbarian hordes trampling the user base had subsided, it took most of yesterday and today to resurrect this machine into some sort of sensible order.
Of course, you don't need to know this. You already know that trying to administrate a network full of users with windows boxes is similar in terms of it's futility level as trying to herd cats.
As for the real problem, which is 2038, I intend to be happily retired by then, and then come back and charge quite stunningly outrageous fees for fixing all the broken 32-bit code out there.
For the record, a 32-bit signed number of seconds based on 1st January 1970 expires on Tuesday, January 19th, 2038 at 3:14:08 UTC. This is the format used by 'Unix Time', and appears in code all over the place. (Pretty much anything written in C)
Back in the days of VMS, which measured time in clunks (a clunk was 100 clicks (1 click = 1ns), 864,000,000,000 clunks in a day) and stored it in a 64-bit quadword, with a base time of 17th November 1858 (Modified julian calendar base). 64 bits worth of clunks is enough to go to the year 60312.
Ansi COBOL's base time is the first of January 1601. (As if you needed reminding how old and crufty COBOL is...
Current (Win32) versions of windows use a counter representing periods of 100ns from 1st January 1601, however that applies only to code using the win32 API, and not the functions.
Because time_t is declared as a signed long, it should be 64-bits on 64-bit platforms, as 'long' is supposed to grow with the architecture, however most C compiler writers seem to have chickened out of that and 'long' seems to have become a de-facto 32-bit quantity.
The 2038 problem isn't a problem at all. According to recent program I watched on The Discovery Channel about hidden code contained in the Koran(?) or was it the Bible. The world will end in 2012. Which is great cause that's when my drivers license expires.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
My large, well-known company has a few mainframes still stuck in the past. They were set back to 1994 in (real world) 1998 in preparation for Y2K. About 16 months ago we got a memo that said they were being set back to 1995 in (real world) December 2003 since they were nearing 2000 in their skewed world-view. I think they were doing production planning on some products near the end of their marketable life. I would guess in about 10 years we'll still be getting memos about flipping clocks back on those mainframes.
Y2K is a great example of engineering working right. Engineers and their occaisionally competent management recognized a problem that was going to happen, worked to correct it, and things worked mostly smoothly. Too bad politicians (and society at large) can't learn this one thing from the Slashdot crowd.
(Posting anonymously since all-in-all I work for a great, and occaisionally quirky, company.)
I got my first monthly frequent flyer statment of 2002 with all my kilometers expired (kilometers earned were kept only for 5 years on thie program).
:-)
/.er
The problem? The machine reverted to the year 1900, thus making all my kilometers more than 90 years old
As an aside, I saw problems at the OS level in several UNIX OSes that would have caused havoc to things like backup software. Now just imagine, 1st of January 2000 and all of the sudden you are in 1900 (or is that 0? you see). What mess would the backup sofware could have done is an exercise for the
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It just became 1905, so still 95 years until Y2K.
.... clicking ahead of myself....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The funny thing was, this guy was a "Shotgun and Canned Goods" nut who was "ready" for the end of civilization. The fault lies with the broadcaster who took him seriously. Because, as we all know, everyone who listens to the radio listens to every single word.....yeah right. Someone tunes in and hears their favorite talk show host interviewing someone about the end of the world, and since they haven't heard everything, they assume that if Joe Talkshow thinks this guy is important, then he must be speaking the truth.
Sad, just plain sad.
WTF? Over?
well written and IMHO true description of what happened back than.
;)
;)
Talking about "nothing at all" is wrong, but there *also* was a lot of stupid fuzz around.
Also it should be remembered that there was a second problem in 2000, because of the 29th april (in 2000 there was no april 29th despite it's devidable by 4, because its also devidable by 100, or something alike). That's what makes my old VCR recorder fail, it has the correct year representation, but the week days are all messed up, it does not record anything anymore when using the timer.
So there *were* problems, and they were fixed. Of course not in my old recorder. Dear apple, in 2038 the iPod20 movie docking station should be flashable...
I also think that there are already movements to fix the 2038 problem, and that this will be out of the way a lot of time before the problem will really hit (I don't think many people thought that there systems would still be in use they programmed back in the 70ths, and I think many programmers take this experiences into account now). Also programming techniques have changed a bit...
anyway, keep your eyes open
It was mostly a hoax, except for the few decade+ old systems for which it was a serious issue. It was hyped up to sucker the public.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
But, thankfully, the countries with the most to lose also had the most resources to deal with the problem.
There were certainly bugs galore, although firms with older systems naturally had more of them. Some got through - I know of a severe fault at the end of February 2000 because the original programmers hadn't realised it was a Leap Year, and another in 2004, because someone had put in a Leap Year kludge for 2000 and ignored later years (probably because knew they'd be long gone by then). In fact, Leap Year bugs were more severe than anything relating to the date wraparound.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
People don't want to read about little Johnny making it to school, safely. They want to read about the overturned bus and the raging gasoline tanker fire, and the collapsed bridge, and the terrorist bombing.
Hello? This is the media. Just like Max Headroom, but with rendered animation instead of that hand drawn stuff.
systems can be very fragile, and very robust at the same time. Take for example the Comair booking system. It is suspected that a 16-bit int caused the entire booking system to fail - all due to a single field. Dates and times are fields too - as such could have likely caused as much or more trouble.
i think though, what was overestimated, were the number of systems that would truly have an impact on the world.
fortunately, we had a number of people and orginizations yelling early enough, and loudly about y2k. some would say we didn't have enough time, but clearly the world was prepared.
"So what's it been like for you this evening?"
One of them turned to observe me. She glared with that particular flavor of ultra-tough female no-monkey-business copitude we have all seen.
"It's going fine, sir. The Y2K Bug is just a myth."
Okidoke, ma'am. Have a happy.
-FL
Can you determine how many lives are lost because the FDA's approvals for drugs are too lax? Yes.
Can you determine how many lives are lost because the FDA's approvals for drugs are too stringent? No.
Without a time machine it is really impossible to answer this question.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
OS X 10.3.7 has this 2038 bug. As I found out now.
I remember being on support call for Y2K, as I was working on a financial product (and we had migrated it well in advance).
Luckily, my call ended at 8PM on 31st. We had some big ass party at home, people got drunk, puked, shat all over and all that, and 5 of them missed *their* support shift of 6AM on 1st Jan!
One of them was sent home as he was stinking (of all the things happened on the BIG night).
We averted the general Y2K disaster, he almost got fired!
I've taken on a few systems that have been riddled with hard-coded references to the current year, which invariably means a regular headache every year(alas not from the alcohol) when on New Years Day I find things aren't working the way they should.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the same thing had happened to HSBC recently, although they obviously wouldn't come out and say it.
I think much of the hype was because it was the year 2000. The year 2038, just being a fairly random year number, won't generate 1/10th of the hype because it's some obscure date in January on a random year - not all the digits rolling over from 1999-12-31 to 2000-01-01.
The date itself is far less interesting and sexy to the media, so the problem will probably go totally ignored by the non-technical press. Meanwhile it'll get quietly fixed where it needs to be fixed, and life will carry on.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
$ echo 'long q=(1UL<<30);int main(){return puts(asctime(localtime(&q)));};' > x.c && cc x.c && ./a.exe
x.c: In function `main':
x.c:1: warning: passing arg 1 of `puts' makes pointer from integer without a cast
Sat Jan 10 08:37:04 2004
The code should be this:
/* gcc -W -Wall thisfile.c */
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
int main(){
long q=(1UL<<30);
return puts(asctime(localtime(&q)));
}
After the European party I kept an eye on y2k pages reporting y2k failures in the USA. It was only Apple who claimed smilingly that one of some of their non Apple systems had indeed stopped working and needed to be restarted or fixed. Almost no other company would admit they missed a bug and were working their ass of to get systems back up. When a magazine called up companies to ask how many of their systems have had experienced y2k trouble, nobody wanted to respond, or they would give evasive answers like "production had been unaffected during the date change". They would simply not admit that even minor troubles had to be solved to keep production lines within production goals.
And it makes sense as companies would fear for their stocks and customer credibility. Any y2k problem was filed under the usual quirks that can interrupt production. Nobody missed their targets, and even if they had to put in some extra work that week then y2k was never blamed.
You do not want your company to be listed as the company that broke down under y2k problems, because:
1 you would loose face even if you did manage to fulfill your targets.
2 you would loose face, as your planning of solving the y2k bug (and save the company from not fulfilling targets) would be made an example failure.
3 Your entire company could be named a failure as the press seeks exciting story's to spice up the y2k problem.
So the public believes nothing went wrong that week as companies would say "Just regular maintenance. Nothing to see here please move along"
However, I don't think it was a serious as it was made out to be..
.. .
I saw real life issues, but none were 'crisis status'. They were just annoyances that had workarounds or easily fixed.. cant imagine that others had different issues..
Was it a scam or just people being overly paranoid.. who knows
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have my date set to 2099, and this seems to be the highest date year I can attain.
The intersting thing is that my computer is still functioning, so blah to the current 2038 doomsayers. My office is not on fire, and everyone can still print through me.
The only problem? My Slashdot cookie seems to have expired!
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
Billions of dollars were spent to fix mission critical systems... if they still failed, people would be screaming "We spent billions! Why did we still have the problem?" So instead, they are saying, "We didn't see any problems, should we really have spent the money?"
Maybe I understand Politics a little better after this - it is easier not to spend the money, wait for the disaster, then point fingers.
Why not write this off as a success? Are people just that used to not succeeding?
There WERE various y2k problems... just nothing in major industries like travel, banking, etc.
What about the recent bug mentioned here on slashdot about the airline flight booking system, failing when there were more than 32767 transactions in a given month? That is an example of the same kind of problem the y2k propbem was... I bet the head of Information Technology at that airline was making a 6 figure salary - how could he have the airline so reliant on software that didn't have a backup system, nor one he knew the performance characteristics of?
IRQ conflicts? What version of Windows were you using!? Or were you using an old ISA network card?
Think about all the web pages and applications that were displaying the odd five digit year. 11000 I think it was. So I wouldn't say it was a hoax as a whole. There were a lot of opportunistic assholes who saw it as a chance to charge people for upgrades that weren't necessary either though. Not to mention the fear mongers who relied on the natural human tendency to fear the unknown (dried food sales as an example). I will point out that I had a program written in 1993 from the Norton Desktop for Windows 3.1. It was the Norton Dayplanner. I stuck it on a floppy when I got it and carried it with me as a "PDA". I had batch files that I used to sync it with my desktops at home and work. It worked well. Just a few weeks ago I found one of my archival copies of it on CD and ran it under W.I.N.E. Still works, and the dates are correct as well as the year. Interestingly enough, when I ran it in Windows 95, it would skewer the dates past the year 2000. So the app is fine, it was the OS that had the problem. I think in many cases, this was true and it's where a lot of people got taken. They paid for upgrades to apps that relied on the OS for proper date calculation. The main problem is... how do you know this without hindsight? That is how people got taken.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It's signed so that time_t time(void) and other POSIX functions can indicate an error occured.
They reserve (time_t) -1 for this purpose.
By doing so they kind of nix the use of any negative time representation (because of the discontinuity, and that people tend to check for error returns with 0 as opposed to == -1)
Internally in an application, you can use negative offsets for your own purposes, but it is not used to represent dates before 1970.
Sounds as if the story poster would have been happy see some planes fall and some people die instead of it turning out to be a hoax. Come on - I mean there was a very valid problem which had potential for disaster and people worked hard to avoid it and this bugger thinks it was a hoax since nothing happened? Tomorrow a flight accident might be avoided by a heroic deed of a pilot and this sucker might think it was a hoax. Sheesh.
This is very strange indeed. The wireless cards I use in my home network work perfectly with linux while I had to prat about for a month with the windows installs, downloading newer and newer versions of the drivers and each time having windows mess up the install.
In relation, the linux installs were done in a hour just by following the simple plain english instructions with the third party driver provided by some nice people who had to reverse engineer the card.
Very very strange.
Silly rabbit
My Aztec forfathers have already seen to it that the world will end in 2012.
I'm shorting my Google stock...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
???
Profit!
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
It's not hard to fix and not a danger, but the problem is real.
stupid question, next.
In 1999, I was still using a relatively old-ish version of Quicken for Mac (from 1995 or so) to maintain my finances. I had upgraded my computer in that time, but never had reason to upgrade to a newer version of Quicken. Well, when I fired it up on January 1 to do a little first-of-the-month bookkeeping, lo and behold! It wouldn't accept any dates after 1999 as valid. I was horrified yet amused.
The horror became more pronounced when I discovered that my version was old enough to be considered "unsupported" by Intuit and thus wasn't eligable for a free Y2K-fix upgrade. If I were made of stronger stuff, I would have shunned Intuit from then on and gone with some other accounting software, but the thought of losing or having to struggle to access my years of carefully entered Quicken data resulted in me caving in and paying full price for the upgrade.
jf
I was working at my college newspaper at the time (www.thecrimson.com) as a "business technology manager". We had no Y2K problems, but only because we upgraded our entire building security system to be compliant. If we hadn't, no one (or perhaps everyone, we couldn't figure out) would have been able to get into the newspaper building on Jan 1, 2000.
My guess is that this experience is fairly common: careful planning averted major annoyances (if not actual disasters).
2.2.2.77 seconds since the Epoch: A value to be interpreted as the number of seconds between a specified time and the Epoch. ... If the year 1970 or the value is negative, the relationship is undefined.
Just hope whatever machine is keeping me alive is Y2K_38 compliant. In all, it's not my problem. If my life support machine fails it will most certainly no longer be my problem. Besides we will probably find a way to blow ourselves up before then. Now, if my holodeck stops working that will most certainly be a problem and heads will roll!!!
I remember my good old Amstrad 8086, which for you newsiest came out before the 286.
0 5/2135236&tid=191&tid=126/
And setting the clock to the year 2025, and it ran fine. Did the same on an old Compaq Portable II http://oldcomputers.net/compaqii.html/ Intel 80286 @ 6 or 8MHz.
Then went a little crazy when get pass 21xx mark though.
Compaq with working, cool old green green.
Lets just hope they fix before people start getting Bio-implants... http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/
hehe
"Please do not blink while upgrading firmware..., or you will DIE!!!"
"Thank you for using BEER-Tech brain implant"
----------
"Clutch my testes, bloody squirrel humpers!!" -Happy Noodle Boy
Ah! Now I get it. That's how the terminator was able to time travel from 2038 back to 1970 and why he kept saying he was an "obsolete model". It all makes sense now.
Since I am a developer and systems analyst, I would have to say that the threat is less of a burden now because of the Y2K 'bust' and we have all gone through it once.
however Y2K was not totally a bust. Many systems were fixed asap by skilled coders.
A project to correct so much old code on a global scale in such a small time frame being so successful in itself indicates how ridiculously blown out of proportion all of this was. We can't even get voting machines to work correctly. What makes us think that organizations around the planet can so flawlessly inspect and adjust minutiae in billions of lines of code across who knows how many languages, platforms, and applications? The answer is, we can't. If the proported number of systems affected is accurate, then statistically a large portion of those systems would have failed on Y2K because of the mistakes inherently involved in making such subtle changes. The outcome speaks for itself: problems were rare and heavily exaggerated. If Y2K was actually a serious issue, the effects of this "bug" would have been catastrophic despite the effort that was undertaken.
Join Tor today!
Well, in 2037, not a lot of people will remember enough Y2K, And the Computing Industry will do a lot of money. Because people need to be sure everything will continue to work after the fateful date :)
Even if we start to correct bugs now, what tell you nothing remain after testing ?
So there was definitely a problem somewhere in the credit card network.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Because we need negative values to indicate that there was an error on the time call...
click here
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Shortly after the millenium, the UK had a bit of a national debate as to whether all the money expended to ensure that Y2K consultants were able to send their children to good schools was money well spent.
The UK government was generally acknowledged to have run a comprehensive, well-planned and very expensive Y2K programme that covered every base. Result: No significant Y2K problems - Success!
Italy is similar to the UK in population & economy size. The Italian government ran a shambolic programme on a (in comparison) miniscule budget, and most of the work was unfunished before the critical date. Result: No significant Y2K problems - Success!
Uh hold on...
Yes, it was a potential disaster averted. Make no mistake, if the wrong system(s) failed in the wrong way because of the Y2k bug, things could have gone very badly wrong for quite a lot of people.
Yes, it was a hoax, in that it was blown out of all proportion by the media (no surprise there). If you believed the media, then the changeover from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00 represented the end of the world, or at least of civilisation as we know it. Nukes would fly, planes would fall, reactors would go critical, fortunes would vaporise.
In a sense, the media attention was good, in that it forced companies and other organisations to address the problem. But make no mistake - the media blow almost *everything* out of proportion. "Potential Slight Problem, Fixes Being Developed" doesn't sell as many papers or as much ad space/ad time as "Y2K Bug Set To Cause Havoc - Millions Could Be Dooooomed!".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I worked for a company distributing and supporting a certain OS in the UK. Many of our clients had policies that stated that all software had to be year 2000 compliant by either the beginning of 1999 or by the middle of the year. However our supplier was very slow at getting the compliant software out.
The base OS only used 2 digit years in the user account expiry code, and a neat fix was designed to work around this and added to their latest version of the OS. However this version had a number of other serious flaws that made it totally unsuitable for production use, including a obscure data-loss related one that only affected files written with European codepages.
However the biggest issue was this vendors hardware support. One product used by the majority of our customers was a specialised serial card sold by the OS vendor and supported just by their OS. During late 1998 they determined that these cards were not compliant, despite the fact that they consisted of little more than some UARTS, RAM chips and a low-end Intel processor. It was probably something to do with the card's own firmware, which was probably not written in house. This caused many customers to abandon the platform and jump to something else.
However there was a good side to this too. We had one large customer who ran many third-party products (message boards, menuing systems and so on) that integrated with this OS. Some of these products were many years old, with at least one dating back to 1988, and none had been updated for at least 5 years. We'd been wanting them to dump these products for a long time as they produced many support issues; finally year 2000 compliance got them to do so.
However by mid 1999 it was clear that the company wouldn't last, so I went to move elsewhere.
I worked on two separate Y2K projects in 1999 (not '99 ;), in banking. If left unfixed (we actually replaced the whole system), the losses would have exceeded $100M - actual loss, where money "disappeared", not just spent on the wrong person, staying in the economy. I knew many other people in the NYC financial IT community with similar stories, and I'm sure other industries were similar. The Y2K bug is a story of IT excellence, at least in the late 1990s when we averted disasters. The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is another story, though those ingenious engineers turned the balloon payment on "planned obsolescence" into the best COBOL retirement package imaginable.
We're just dealing with the "Geek Backlash". The late 1990s were the Revenge of the Nerds: riches, fame, coolness - we saved the world from a recession, and taught a generation how to be "cool". Of course the jocks are trying to take that away from us, now that their computers are working again. If they don't step off, we should just leave their computers alone to rust when the epoch expires in 2038.
--
make install -not war
On holidays, slept in late, and dreamt about y2k last night. Wake up to find a slashdot story on it. Both years after the fact.
I/we personally classified the y2k issue as largely hype at the time. Not that we didn't have issues and updates to do as well as some modifications of minor systems which had some peculiarities that needed to be addressed.
But the fear, gloom and doom was hype pure and simple. Addressing this issue, while somewhat largely in scale, is normal course of businness for IT departments and developers. There's a bug, fix it and move on to the next.
Umm not to say we didn't have staff onsite at the time just in case;) Ok so we were relaxed confident and yes a little paranoid and worried;)
Some elevators have a "Phone-home" capability that is set to schedules. It's possible that the Elevator could have been prevented from calling back to the service office. But that's about all that could happen.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
I used to work for a major UNIX vendor that supplyed financial companys with servers and when thouse systems were tested, all the tested software on the machine would crash and core dump becouse of problems in the kernel. We worked day and night for about a year to fix all the systems and when y2k came everything worked without problems. If we had done nothing the banks we supported would stop.
-chris
I made a banner for my site back in 1999, mocking the imminent demise of Y2K specialists (who were thriving from the fear):
I still have it at the bottom of the page here
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
For those interested here's the link. Not a bad read overall.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I work for a large company. We had a Y2K remediation effort that started about one and a half years out. We had about 60 people on-call across the globe for midnight (great way to spend New Years Eve :/ and had one server outtage near midnight not related to Y2K.
What we did do is leave several servers in different datacenters that were going to be retired unpatched and running. As midnight swept across those datacenters and the patched machines kept running the unpatched ones would fail. Some right at midnight and some a few minutes later. It was a nice verification that all the work we had put in was worth the effort.
-CZ
PS - Yes the unpatched machines ran fine after a reboot. That's not the point of the story.
on my windows box i set the date to the date of peril, logged out + in, and low and behold, windows seemed fine and the two brilliant applications steam and realplayer just crashed with memory read errors!
The credit card industry is pretty used to fixing problems like this anyway... it comes up a lot when new card number formats come up, etc. As much as you think you can think ahead, something eventually bites you in the rear.
The core systems of the various processing companies were generally in order well before the cards were issued, it was just a matter of finding which of the millions of terminals etc were messed up.
A lot of merchant terminals and point of sale software had date problems that would cause the 2000 or later cards to be rejected. Not really the merchant's fault - Joe's Fishing Shack didn't write the software on his credit card machine. But it did affect some of those transactions.
Luckily there aren't a lot of manufacturers of those. If there was a problem, say, with a verifone terminal (just picking on the most common maker), they could easily get updated firmware out through their support channels with low impact to the end user and fix a major chunk of any problems that happened to be there all at once.
Websites that had credit card processing code etc. might have been another story. You can't fix every 1a-buymystuffnow.com's order page to take 4 digits instead of 2, etc, you can just call them and tell them that their stuff's broken.
Even my 80486 was y2k compliant (i checked myself), but anyway...
Anything, anything worth running would have been running on unixtime anyway
Much cleaner is signed 64 bit time_t, which is easier from a database conversion standpoint and should only require re-compilation of your code.
Do you know where your source code is today?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I worked for one company that accelerated plans to scrap older computers because the UNIX version they ran was not Y2K compliant, and was no longer supported. This was IBM AIX for PS2s, not a high use system, to say the least.
This was discovered in 1997 and the "sometime soon we will replace them" attitude immediately changed.
Somewhere, somebody probably got caught even by this.
I can't believe how many people here just don't get it. Nothing happened because of a huge effort, not because it wasn't a real problem. I'd have thought the ./ crowd would have a clue about this.
/. (I just realized how silly that sounds.)
This is the same promlem IT always faces. What we do is abstract enough that management can barely believe we do anything at all, but the fact that you are able to use your computer systems at work doesn't mean that you don't need any IT staff. Come on folks, just 'cause it's working doesn't mean we aren't doing something.
Is your car running? Then I guess you don't need gas, much less oil.
I know I averted a lot of problems for a lot of people. I was doing IT & POS Support, and spent a considerable amount of time dealing with Y2k issues, and my boss spent more time, including dealing with an unfixed Y2k bug in the most popular retail back-end system. But before the year end and after the bios updates & bug fixes, _our_ systems worked. I was on call that night, but I didn't get called. That certainly didn't convince me my Y2k work had been useless. Oh, and dates matter. Talk to anyone doing Sarbanes-Oxley work, or making sales projections, yadda-yadda.
I expect this kind of nincompoopery from the mainstream media, and that's where much of the panic came from. I didn't tell anyone to buy a generator. I expect better of
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
This was not the first, nor will it be the last time that the saying if it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done applied to the efforts of a whole industry and the whole country.
Actually it just came to me: why on earth would any computer system ever use a '2 digit date'!? who would store years as decimal digits? - certainly no-one who was trying to save memory (as they did 30 years ago hence the 'problem'). storing 2 digit dates would involve 2 chars (for the truely wasteful) ie 16 bits, or for the less wasteful 2 4-bit nibbles (0->15) and both those would waste a ton of memory! Am I totally missing the point? anyone care to explain?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970.
a ted+Universal+Time
h tm
l _Time
ROFL. That's so utterly incorrect.
Here are some links to the definition of UTC, although I guess the damage has already been done.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/Coordin
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-009/_1277.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universa
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I rolled on the floor laughing at those stupid white men fearing that there would be power shortages due to the Y2K bug. Come on, what's Y2K having to do with the hydroelectrical plants? It's just turbines and "primitive" electric distribution systems.
...and here's Mike with the weather.
Ah... glorious days. I laughed even more when I saw on the news that people started collecting food for their shelters... oh boy! Bring me my popcorn. X-D
On related news, check out RFC 2550 about the Y10K disaster that is looming above us.
I think it really is a shame that it is going to take 33 years to find out this isn't really going to be a big deal.
The sky is not falling.
The problem here was one of logic, not of programming. Yes, many applications stored dates as two-digit numbers. The question is this: Why would a date roll over from 99 to 00? Every human being capable of rational thought realizes that 99 is followed by 100.
Now this may sound like a joke, but I'm completely serious. Every time I saw something that actually was affected by the Y2K bug, it was a date that read "1/1/19100" instead of "1/1/2000". That was it. People EMPTIED THEIR BANK ACCOUNTS because they were afraid that they would get negative interest, or some such ridiculous notion.
Y2K was nothing more than a bunch of hype. There were many people who stood to profit from an end-of-the-world type scenario - specifically, people who sold survival gear and ran grocery stores, among others. Once they realized that there was even the slightest possibility that something could happen, they started advertising like crazy, and demanded that "research" be done into the situation.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Let's call it a zeitgeist. Anyway, I can't believe someone would even have to ask the question of whether it was real or not.
It was not. Period.
Now, some of the doomsdayers are saying that everything was fixed quietly, ahead of time.
Bullshit.
How many programs exist out there which are that dependent on correct dates? Very few. And among those where dates play a role, there are even fewer where having the EXACT date is important.
The only programs which were at risk were those dealing with aging and other similar financial computations.
Traffic lights, automobiles, planes, heating/cooling, water systems, embedded systems of all sorts; these systems always were totally safe from the Y2K bug.
However, thanks to all the idiots out there crying "wolf!" people will probably ignore the 2038 problem, which is (technically) a very different kind of problem, and a much more serious flaw.
Proverbs 21:19
It is the Mayan calendar which ends on 21-DEC-2012.
Um... consider me too optimistic, but I think that by 2038 all desktop computers will use Linux or a derivative (or who knows, an open-sourced Windows clone). Anyway, we'll all be using 64 (or even 128) bits CPUs, don't you think?
Open source will take care of the 2038 bug... I hope ^^;; )
I hate it when people trump up issues like this.
Y2K was a very real and very serious problem. A close friend of mine was one of the top project managers for Y2K remediation at a Very Large Company You've All Heard Of And Talk About Frequently, and I know for a fact that it took a Herculean effort by her and many other people to prevent a major disaster for that company and its customers. (And no, it's not MS.)
Frankly, I think the people like Ed Yourdon, who should have known better but scared the shit out of so many, should be shunned. I hope he never sells so much as one more copy of any of his books.
Its not a problem, I've seen that movie!
you just need to inject the positronic brain with nanites to clear its synapses. Then all the good robots will be saved.
yay!
However, if we had not done any of that, critical systems would have gone down and we would have lost serious money (millions) on bad trades, fines for failure to settle properly, loss of business from negative publicity, etc.
Yeah, right.
----------------
Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
According to this report, the Berlin Fire Department's central radio dispatching system broke down at 0:04, including the backup system. The whole system was replaced a year later.
The breakdown was a whole series of unfortunate bugs of several systems. There's more detail in an article in c't issue 13/2000.
With the system missing, the fire department used fully manual dispatch via radio, pen and paper, but without their infrastructure, they were completely overwelmed.
Without the central dispatching system, the reginal fire departments were given several false information. In Germany's bigger cities, the fire departments also operate several ambulances, so this isn't just about fires, but also about regular injuries.
According to the article, one single fire was visited by 20 fire engines, unaware of each other's dispatch. Sometimes the police used riot control water cannons to extinguish fires, some injured people people were brought to the hospital by police staff long before the firemen's ambulances were able to arrive, in two incidents, victims had to wait 30 or 60 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. In another case, the neighbours of a small house used their garden hoses trying to control a fire that began small but wouldn't die during the two hours they waited for the fire engine to arrive.
Helpless, the fire department sent some fire engines and ambulances "on patrol" starting at 2:00 and told them to look for fires and act on their own without the central dispatch.
I wasn't affected (I don't live in Berlin), so I just report this second hand. But considering that this was new year's eve with several wild parties and firecracker incidents and Berlin being Germany's largest city, we were lucky that no really big fire or emergency occured that night.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
In late 99, I went to "town meetings" where people asked "experts" if their gasoline powered generators would stop working, if their car would still start, etc.
I could not help but laugh out loud at these fools. I was even interviewed by a news crew at one of these meetings and said just that. Of course, the sensationalist bastards didn't air it.
On the other side, I had friends charging $100/hr to "Y2K test your PC". Guess what that involves:
- Change date to post-2000
- Run MS Office programs
- ???
- Profit.
There may have been a FEW things that would have gone wrong had people not fixed them, but it turned into the most rediculous hoax ever.
no comment
There were real problems that needed real solutions. I imagine the over-hype started with a combination of the doomsayers that are always there, but there were also lots of IT people telling their bosses that if they don't fix things that there will be grave consequences. I imagine that a lot of people were playing up the consequences because they knew if they didn't, what needed to be done wouldn't be done.
As for problems, my power went out at the turn of the year. It was about 5 seconds after the ball dropped (replayed locally because of the time difference). When I got out and drove around, it appeared to be an entire grid, but just that one grid. It was either a coincidence, or there were still a few systems affected. Now, one grid here or there that goes down and is up in an hour or so is no big deal. But it would have brought the country's economy to its knees if every grid went down until the one hour of work could be done to bring it up starting at midnight on the 1st.
Learn to love Alaska
I have a Y2k proof box that runs windows 95. There was a freeware program I got on a 1000 windows programs CD that could make a windows box tell the year in 4 digits instead of 2. To this day i wonder why people (on windows anyway) could not just get that program. Does anyone know the program I'm talking about?
.... in 1985. I was working with a guy who had retired from large & blue, who had gone into consulting. Helping him with some big iron installs, he just brings the subject up "You know in the year 2000 all this crap is going to crash and burn?" paraphrased. "Say what?" sez I. He tells me about the problem, but says "micros will be taking over by then and surely they will be programmed correctly". Now go forward to 1995, I get on the internet and IIRC I started reading about the y2k problem again, or perhaps 96. Basically it hadn't been "fixed" ten years later, in fact I find out that millions of lines of code had been written in the meantime with the same problem. Like WTF??? I knowe that did it for me, I thought, "these people are complete idjits, they are going to allow this crap to crash and burn because of ..." whatever reason, fill in the procrastination blanks. 97 starts the real big time concern, because it still hasn't been fixed and that reality hit millions of people in a short time.
Those millions of people who are non IT people who raised a big stink loudly and often and constantly in public (I was certainly one of those people) deserve just as much credit for "fixing" y2k as the coders, they helped force it to happen, got the ball rolling, because without the thousands of IT people being harangued by their spouses at home "are you guys gonna fix that crap yet or what??" and bosses getting nailed and politicians being questioned on it by millions of just the general citizenry, a lot of the "fix" would have been ignored,postponed, all the typical big business incompetency and short sightedness, just like it was from the origins up to 85, then 95, then onto 97, 98, 99. I was thinking "eGAD what happened, why did they wait so (*(*^ long?" and I sure thought there was better than a 50/50 chance of some pretty serious and major catastrophes possible the more I looked into it. I personally talked off the record to my states head honcho contractor in charge of the states computers and remediation of same. HE said he wasn't sure it would all be fixed enough "in time" to avert some major screwups, all the way to the point that he had bought an additional home out in the sticks with a generator, etc and told me he planned to move his family in before rollover. I took that as a clue. If guys like that thought it still might be real bad, what else was there to rationalise about at that point?
I think it would have been a huge problem if people hadn't "over reacted" because "the computer industry" proved that it wasn't going to do enough about it on it's own. They failed it bigtime and it was public pressure that made the fix happen in the large way that was really needed. When things were still being "fixed" up to millenia rollover, well, there's the proof. You can't blame people when that was reality.
The results of:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use POSIX;
$ENV{'TZ'} = "GMT";
for ($clock = 2147483641; $clock 2147483651; $clock++) {
print ctime($clock);
}
on FreeBSD 5.3
#Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
#Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
#Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
#Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
#Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
#Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
#Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
#Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
#Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
#Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
As a programmer who did some Y2K work, I would say that a lot of potential systemic business problems were averted by the large effort, and if they weren't corrected ahead of time, there would most likely have been some business upheaval that would have cost an order of magnitude more than the cost of the upgrades themselves. But this is just my opinion. But would the business upheaval have been something resembling a disaster? I think that would have depended upon one's perspective and position in the economy.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
This sounds like the perfect excuse - to the boss at work or the CFO at home - to step up to 64-bit machines across the board.
Plus maybe it meets with Intel's original timeline of when we were all going to need 64-bit desktops, anyway.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
After all, we were mmmmmmmm, quite a lot years past that so going on that basis, any idiot would define 00 = 2000. Being honest tho, the 2 digit year format is a pain in the ass as the problem will occur again, so invalidating any old archived data using 2 digits as the year. It's a nitemare waiting to happen :P
muuhhhaaaaaaaa
In my opinion, no one benefited more from the Y2K hoopla than the indian software outsourcing industry.
If you look at the client list of any mature indian software company (infosys/wipro/satyam/hcl), the biggest names on this list are those who moved on to the outsourcing bandwagon for their cobol/mainframe Y2K conversion projects between '97-'99.
The knowledge the infosys's and wipro's gained from these projects helped them lock in customers through application maintenance contracts and provided them with the perfect platform to bid for projects higher up the value chain.
it was political. Events around November of 2000 have set the political calendar back to the year 1900.
The disaster was not averted.
ok I actually did see an affect of Y2k I didn't upgrade or check or whatever any of my equipment. Anyways my father had an old laptop, and on it the last two digits of the date changed to physco asciII characters really weird, anyways it was like Version 3 of Wordperfect I think made in like 1985 or something, so technically since all of this powergrids and stuff run on really odd crappy junk, it could cause them to bug and die Of course this shouldn't be any different then some other crash in the program and hopefully they have a system to handle crashes, if not we would already be majorly screwed many time
Signatures are so 90s
I missed an absolute freakin' classic opportunity in 1999.
..... sorry, for a reasonable fee. Then move on to a new town and do it all again another day. I'd even be able to effect a "fix" by changing the fuse in the mains plug {in this country, every plug contains its own fuse, there is a 30A wire fuse or trip switch for all the power points on a floor} for a "special" one. After which the tester would of course pass that appliance.
I had this plan. I was going to build myself a "universal Y2K compliance tester" -- a simple plastic box with a power socket and some flashing lights, basically -- and then travel from town to town, going around residential areas, offering to "Y2K test" their small appliances (kettles, toasters, microwave ovens &c) for an extortionate
I suppose I ought to say that I would only have ripped off people that I thought deserved it, so of course I would have stayed away from council estates and any house with a Mini on the drive, and not gone overboard anyway with the charges unless I thought my victims were just walking stacks of pound notes.
Back in '99, most VCRs had a 14-day timer: you wanted to record a programme at nine o'clock next Thursday, you set it to THU 21:00, or if you wanted the Thursday after next you set it to 2ND THU. Didn't even care what month it was, let alone the year. The more sophisticated ones had a range of years spanning from before they were made to longer than they could be expected to last. Boiler time clocks usually kept track of the day of the week -- so you can have an extra hour's worth of DHW on working days, for a bath in the morning. Some microwaves had -- if not a simple electromechanical timer -- just a 12-hour clock. After all, they don't even care if it's morning or evening -- but that VFD needs a way to earn its keep somehow while the oven isn't being used to turn innocuous foodstuffs into deadly poisons, and counting how many times the mains is reversing is as good a job as any. As for the {actually very few} DOS and Windows PCs that genuinely minded the rollover, I was prepared. As well as some simple test programmes, I'd written a pair of DOS batch scripts, one for startup and one for shutdown, that could also be run through windows 95 or 98 even. The idea was that you stored the "real" date in a text file and picked a "safe" date before switching the computer off; then added the number of days the machine must have spent switched off to the stored date at start-up. Fine, unless midnight struck between telling it you were going to shut down and shutting it down, but we all need a bug. {My general experience was that almost all mobos of the time could live through the transition from 1999-12-31 23:59:59 to 2000-01-01 00:00:00 if they were switched on as it actually happened, and would correctly store dates beyond 2000; but would not roll over properly if they were switched off at the critical moment. Therefore, I didn't expect Linux users would have any problems. They all seemed to know what they were doing, anyway.}
But I lost the nerve to do it. Now I'm just sitting here on this bar stool telling you this story about how I almost could have made me a fortune out of some dimwits who had more money than they were smart enough to be looking after, when I should be describing the thrill of the chase, cops on my tail, need to get out of here fast; buying second-hand suits in charity shops, watching myself on the TV news, a dozen times over and larger than life in the window of D.E.R.; travelling for free, hitching lifts or being inhumanly quiet in unlocked bogs on the trains. The way I came out of nowhere and went back just as quick, as though the money hardly weighed me down. And perhaps I could have got in a f
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
We simply need to move to 64-bit systems before 2038. That will happen.
.com boom and people are already paying $200/share for Google. Memories are astoundingly short.
Y2K was a concern because the problem was systemic, not confined to just some versions of some OSes.
I agree Y2K was massively overblown.
As to problems in 2000 hurting responses in 2038, I doubt it. It's only 5 years since the
I on the other hand, at the time worked for a regional ISP donig technical support. I worked both that night and the next morning, and surprising (to me at the time, as I bought into much of the hype) it was very quiet. Erie almost. Even a distinct lack of "I need to know how to delete my history, for no paticular reason, but before my wife gets home, please?" calls.
I was writing programs in the 70's and 80's that used time extensively and never had a problem. The occasional operating system that was actually engineered, (such as VMS, with a 64-bit time value) also had no real chance of problem, except by screw-ups who believe you do not need to design such things, but code first. Of course, VMS never had overflow-susceptible buffers either, using buffer size counting in descriptors (until it got overwhelmed by C code from Unix).
Y2K started as legitimate FUD and was blown out of porportion by oppurtunists. No admin worth their salt was going to put their reputation on the line and declare that it was all a bunch of hooey. So we waited, paid oppurtunists loads of cash, and sighed relief the next day.
End of story.
PS: the cobol developers in my company went right back to 2 digit years on 01/01/00. So here's to Y2.1K!
Do loose faces fall off? Do you have to pin them on with safety pins?
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
<?php
."<br>";
for ($clock = 2147483641; $clock < 2147483651; $clock++) {
echo date ("l dS of F Y h:i:s A", $clock)
}
?>
Tuesday 19th of January 2038 04:14:01 AM
Tuesday 19th of January 2038 04:14:02 AM
Tuesday 19th of January 2038 04:14:03 AM
Tuesday 19th of January 2038 04:14:04 AM
Tuesday 19th of January 2038 04:14:05 AM
Tuesday 19th of January 2038 04:14:06 AM
Tuesday 19th of January 2038 04:14:07 AM
PHP Warning: date(): Windows does not support dates prior to midnight (00:00:00), January 1, 1970 in 2038.php on line 4 PHP Warning: date(): Windows does not support dates prior to midnight (00:00:00), January 1, 1970 in 2038.php on line 4 PHP Warning: date(): Windows does not support dates prior to midnight (00:00:00), January 1, 1970 in 2038.php on line 4
wrong!! number of seconds since 1970/01/01 is a unix-ism. UTC is something else entirely, it's a reference point for start of seconds, but still measured in normal hours, minutes, seconds, day, month, year.
who writes the software for the controllers our company makes. None of our thousands of elevators installed in the past 20 years have any RTC built in. Admittedly our company is a smaller regional company and I can't speak for the larger international companies who do large banks of high-rise elevators. I believe some of those do, indeed, alter traffic patterns depending on time of day and day of week, but even in those cases, it's just the traffic pattern and where the idle elevator park that are affected. An RTC fault won't make them suddenly stop in mid-flight between floors. The worst that I could see happening is that it might take longer to get one to respond to your hall call.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
The AC is right that temporal logic is hard, calendars are nastily irregular, and there are inevitable errors. As late as 1999 I bought new books with incorrect leap-years examples. Really silly, as unless you need to process birthdates or the like, the % 4 is the correct answer from 1804 to 2096 - more than adequate if you're dealing with the current timestamp.
The vast majority of real-world control systems are embedded systems, not running either mainframe or server or consumer OS -- both good and bad. Various tests of Y2K effects did trigger a few glitches, but the predictions of aircrashes, etc., were always overblown, and mocked at the time.
But! around 1 March 1992 I started to try to get people interested in starting to fix the problems during routine maintainance - too early, no one listened until at least 1998. Similarly, 2038 isn't the only epoch date around - 2036 for those same mainframes is another. In 2009, a number of Y2K "repairs" will need re-patched. Know your epoch!
At the elevator company that I am an Engineer for, we've been installing nothing but microprocessor controllers for over 20 years. Yes, I still see working installations dating back decades that use relay logic, but we're replacing them every day with the newer, more compact, more efficient, more reliable microprocessor controllers.
It amazed me 20 years ago when I started working in the industry that I was seeing motor generator sets still used to produce the high current DC to run the motors in many of the traction installations. They are high-maintenance, though, given that they use brushes and commutators that have to be cared for religiously. The carbon dust they give off is very annoying, too. They are rapidly being replaced by solid-state drives.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I worked my ass off to get things working through the Y2K bug. I had some trouble in the first days of 2000, but if it wasn't for my team's hard work, the 24/7 production system we were responsible for would have just collapsed.
The Y2K bug should be considered one of the biggest success stories for the IT pro community. With a lot of hard work, we avoided a catastrophy of unpredictable consequences. I always answer this to the morons that disregard the Y2K bug as having been FUD to get more profit for the IT industry.
It's ironic that, if we had't managed to get things right and one or more major incidents had happened, every analist in this world would be calling us incompetent and lazy dumbasses. We managed to get our work done extremely well, and we are disregarded as crooks and alarmists.
Well, who said life is fair? Screw the others. In our hearts, we know we succeeded.
masquerading as Y2K IT experts. They advised everyone to issue a survey to their supply chain, for the purpose of identifying suppliers who were likely to have Y2K problems. My company received hundreds of these surveys, most of which were copies of our customers' internal Y2K surveys. Most of the questions had no context and were therefore irrelevent -- a complete waste of time. And then there was the dreaded follow-up calls and e-mails for any surveys that were not completed.
If I had it to do all over again, I would have charged for the time spent on survey responses. I'll bet 90% of the survey problem would have disappeared.
When people looked back at the real Y2K problems and solutions, the IT ignorance of the big-time consulting firms was finally exposed.
We DID have some BIOS and OS problems with a few ancient PCs (hooked up for low-tech data capture). Of course, nobody wanted to spend the money to buy replacements. For those PCs that were truly Y2K challenged, we printed up these very large flourescent pink stickers with a picture of a bomb and an ominous Y2K warning. Then we slapped the stickers on the ancient PCs. As if by magic, the old machines were gone in less than a month.
Even if your locality has almost no crime, you can always justify adding to the police budget, because you can claim that the police have some responsibility for the low crime rate. And this will go completely unquestioned by the public.
My logic in 1999 was this: Everything is always breaking anyways and we still seem to get by, why should 1/1/01 be any different? Servers die, applications crash, battery backups fail, power outages happen, cars crash, trains derail, planes wreck, secretaries with "temporary" admin permissions delete entire file servers. From my point of view, I'm amazed that we even make it from one day to the next!
"Yea, but on 1/1/01, it's ALL gonna break at the same time!!!!" Dude, it's already all breaking at the same time. We'll be fine.
And now I get to say: "See, I told you so."
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
you want to grep for "= time(" ( allow for whitespace of various kinds ). Then check to see if what is on the lhs is *not* being used for anything other than error checking.
emt 377 emt 4
It will be fixed inside the next decade by a combination of moving to 64 bit machines and using a 64 bit value for time_t on 32 bit machines. This does require a recompile of code for 32 bit machines to work with the larger time_t value.
Of course, hype it a lot for me, cause I will be retired by then and could use the $240 an hour consulting fees.
for only 39.95!
( per millisecond, including "lunch breaks", tax not included. Read other fine print on https://oh_no_not_again.com )
emt 377 emt 4
A friend of mine sent me a URL to Sanyo (IIRC) or some company that made home appliances, and on the main page of the items shown, it said each was Y2K compatible. I wonder why they felt that had to be included. Were they that stupid, or was it done to allay customers' fears that potentially anything would just quit working and catch on fire unless it was certified compliant? Or maybe they were just in on the hype or was done as a subtle sarcastic joke. I think I even emailed the company about it. Wish I had copied some of the pages to show later.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
"Anyway, back in those days we had a problem every four years. Yep...you guessed it, some programmer had forgotten to take leap year into account."
Considering we're still buying wristwatches that fail after any month with less than 31 days, and that pretty much every time-aware item in the typical house fails twice a year when the timezones change, it's hardly surprising to find a computer that doesn't know leap-years!
W00T here as well! nivenhuh@trecko nivenhuh $ ./blah.pl
Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
nivenhuh@trecko nivenhuh $ uname -a
Linux trecko 2.4.20-gentoo-r8 #2 Sat Nov 15 15:26:09 CST 2003 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
John Titor I'm Telling You!!!
We had to fix several inhouse bugs, discovered in testing.
We had to patch the main OS (AIX) for y2k and we had to run several downlevel systems (AIX 3.2.5) patched but unsupported for awhile.
The Truetime GPS time receiver needed firmware upgrade to avoid (pre y2k) gps week rollover problem.
Several fancier Truetimes had rollover troubles a year later.
My wifes office 97 crappola needed y2k patches.
A couple of older pc's needed circumvention code loaded to fix bios limitations.
But it was all fixed (or circumvented), except for the later gps issue, before y2k so I guess the answer is no, we had no y2k problems at all, at least not at y2k. I do recall stories about numerous not so well prepaired sites having real issues at arrival of y2k, many were reported right here on slashdot.
Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
I hope they update it in time.
$2 billion spent on windows and doors is certainly a bigger boost to the economy than $2 billion spent on a Nuclear missile sitting in a bunker.
The reason being, that after spending the money, people can now realize the direct benefit of the windows and doors, thus further continuing to profit from them.
The case of realizing the profit of the Nuclear missile is less clear. While there is an indirect realization of benefit from the deterance force stabilizing our markets... it's not as easy to measure, and there becomes a rapidly declining payback as you buy more. That is, if 100 missiles are enough, does having 2,000 really add any additional benefit?
It's an interesting question.
Our medical records system ran off of a bunch of Wyse and IBM dumb-terminals, all connecting via serial links to terminal servers, where the session was then sent via IP over to the actual servers. We even used serial line printers to make chart labels.
After one weekend passed, we all come into the office, and EVERY dumb terminal had a "Y2k compliance" sticker on it, as did every keyboard attached to a terminal, and every serial printer had them, too!
I realize that the implications of the bug could have had serious consqequences, but what genius thought devices that don't even care what the date is!?
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
What about S2^32, the 2^32nd second from Jan 1 1970, when every POSIX-conforming UNIX time system will overflow?
The clock on Darwin actually stops - that will most probarly kill some not-2038 ready programs if it were 2038 right now. Think about it, timing etc. won't work. E.g. cron daemon.
;)
So, it's better to live in 1901, but have the time moving, -- than being stuck in 2038 without any progress whatsoever
Clicking on the link made me think the 2038 bug just meant you had been slashdotted. Seriously though, I read about the 2038 thing, sounds like we have 34 years to fix it, should not be a problem. But when we fix it to use longs instead of ints aren't we just setting up people in the year 60538 or something to get screwed by our shortsightedness. Won't replacing int with long ultimately result in the same issue. Damn computers. Its never good enough, they always have to cause some new problem.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Ahem... can't imagine why this was brought to my attention.
For those of you who believe that it was all a hoax, I'd ask you to do a little bit of research.
Do a google on the terms: Y2K Pathlan Downs NHS
Read the report, and the consider the consequences of this 'little' problem. This wasn't covered by the media... the report was released on Sept 10th 2001... I can see why it got lost in the shuffle.
There were other problems. Most of the companies I was in contact with confided that they had 100-200 problems over the coming months. Most minor, some major. I was in touch with Fortune 1000 type companies from around the world.
Ask yourself, what possible motivation any of these companies had for contacting the media and telling them they had a significant Y2K problem. All of them, rightly, stayed as far away from the media as possible.
Was it hyped? Of course it was... and MANY of us, myself included were stating throughout 1999 that we'd taken care of the issue. The media didn't give that perspective much airtime... instead Gary North and his ilk, as well as some prominent IT folks continued with TEOTWAWKI.
Glad it's over.
Glad I was involved.
Never Again.
Yours Truly
Peter de Jager
p.s. And no. Despite MANY media reports to the contrary. The site was NOT sold for $10M
From www.johntitor.com:
:P
"November 15, 2000 14:41
Why did you go to 1975?
The first "leg" of my trip was from 2036 to 1975. After two VGL checks, the divergence was estimated at about 2.5% (from my 2036). I was "sent" to get an IBM computer system called the 5100. It was one the first portable computers made and it has the ability to read the older IBM programming languages in addition to APL and Basic. We need they system to "debug" various legacy computer programs in 2036. UNIX has a problem in 2038."
For all those who don't know, John Titor is a time traveler who came from 2036 to find a way of fixing the 2038 UNIX bug
His predictions include the American Civil War II and an odd increase of funny hats.
"President Clinton will declare a state of emergency. He will invoke executive power beyond our wildest imagination. He will become our very first dictator. He will seize control over utilities and industry. He will federalize the National Guard. It will ration food, gasoline, etc. Your money will be declared illegal..."
0 0. html
Nothing is more Christian that feeding you greed by scaring the hell out of your flock by lying to them. Now go out there and hate some gays or something, Jesus says so.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,15759,
I have the entire essay saved forever on my home computer.
Y2K+38 will kill us all!!!
But not for FreeBSD/sparc64 anymore. It has 64-bit time_t's now.
Regardless of whether you think it was a hoax/scam or not, it has definitely had an impact even today -- I have yet to see a software contract that didn't include a Y2K compliancy clause. From lawyers though, I'd expect a 'will continue to work in perpetuity' clause
AK Marc wrote in his .sig...
Want to get modded OT and flamebait? Mention religion, even if on topic (whether you are for or against) Emacs _is_ better than vi!
Apparently there is a Y2K bug in Slashcode that puts comments on Y2K subjects into the wrong discussion threads
Stupid ingrates. I worked tirelessly for many weekends and nights to make sure that my firm (a large advertising firm) would not have any problems, as did countless other technology professionals. For my efforts, and for everyone else's, here's a big fuck you to all the people who think this was an overblown hoax.
Perhaps if we were as careful as the "professionals" in the financial sector who gave us such wonderful things as junk bonds, enron and the like, and half the world did turn off permeantely on 1/1/00, there would more appreciation.
Fucking stupid users. Go download some pr0n on IE and come whining to me about spyware. Fuckheads.
I worked at a major medical center at the time and began asking the IT director to appoint a Y2K coordinator around '96. You can imagine how many systems are running in a shop with tens of thousands of employees.
Well, it was all a "hoax" or "overblown" according to the beancounters until around early 1999, when the press picked up the story for real. Then there was a realization, a sudden panic, and by March of '99 there was a Y2K coordinator in place. The rest of the year was spent in a mad panic to fix/certify the systems. You can imagine how much real work got done during that time.
I imagine this wasn't an isolated incident. Anybody else?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The only thing we have to do is change the definition of time_t
If you're changing time_t in all the code in the world anyway, why not change it with a permanent fix (64-bit)? And make it signed.
Then we could use unixtime for useful date math for all of modern human history.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm stil amazed that my GE VHS VCR from 1985 handles the year 2000 and beyond just fine. Everytime I program the time and date on it, it accepts the year fine and calculates the day of the week just fine.
I'm certain that as soon as midnight hit and and the lights stayed on, on January the 1st, 2000, that the media went, "Oh, crap! People aren't going to want to hear about this anymore!", and that was the end of it.
However, buried in all the "people-are-sick-of-Y2K since-nothing-happened" hoopla, I remember a story about a nuclear power plant in one of the USA that would have had some sort of accident had they not had all the extra staff handy.
I was in my last year of high school, and the computerized clocks failed. At first they didn't work at all, then someone managed to get the machine rebooted. The date displayed was humorous.
"January 1st, 10100"
Now, anyone knowing anything about programming sees what happened:
In other words, 99 + 1 = 100
"19" + "100" = "19100"!
...or did your XP host just give up. Mine (using cygwin on Win XP SP1) says
btober@D4JS3N31 ~
$ perl tt.pl
Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901
btober@D4JS3N31 ~
This may come as a shock to many but those two field dates are still imbedded in legacy systems and still being stored in archive records to this date.
All that was accomplished was a bandaid in the form of 'windowing' the date. Except for the Social Security Administration not a single vendor or shop that I was aware of in my two years of Y2K consulting gig ever went back and corrected the field sizes of their records in storage. Not a single one. Well maybe a few small shops here and there.
I repeat... Only a windowing algorithm was added and that very same algorithm is in effect in all MSFT Windows OS's currently.
You key in a date and its managed to resolve via a 'windowing' algorithm.
No one had the resources, time or money to go back and change the old records or alter the record fields to acccount for 4 years date fields.
The sliding alogorithms will have to continually be updated and 'slid' to the next date range or 'incorrout output' will result.
In one major Electrical Utility I observed their tape archives , which were honeycombed via a robot system( the vendor name escapes me at the moment) and I turned to the DP manager and asked if he had plans to alter and rewrite all the 2 field dates to 4 field dates. Even though they had only been in business for 20 years or so he claimed it was an impossibility to do so.
My response was that I was willing to undertake installing a new Y2K test mainframe and install all the testing software but he must realize that the dates are still incorrect and can lead to a future problem.
As I proceeded on the consulting contract I was amazed at the sheer amount of ignorance and ineptitude displayed by this shop. It was beyond understanding how they did survive in the end.
The costs were such that massive restructing of employees occurred. Blood was on the floor everywhere. They did survive but only after lots of changes. The testers did find many many problems in the legacy code.
In fact the XXXXX(vendor software) tape utilitities actually bellied up with incorrect dates. At one time we could not even create SCRTCH tapes it was so bad.
The Y2K problem still exists. Its just hidden with clever bandaids.
I made some money. I spent lots of months away from my family. For this the USA industries thanked the Programmers who saved their asses by offshoring and outsourcing their very jobs.
Thanks assholes!!!
...
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
That works. Sure. It works. No really, it works. I swear.
"are we likely to still be using very many 32-bit processors 33 years from now"
Don't you think that's what lots of COBOL programmers said in 1967?
good god that's the funniest thing I've read all week
My own personal experiences...
In Cook County, MN on Dec 21st 1999 at midnight, PRECISELY ten-point-zero days before Y2K, the subscription scheduling PC which generates the transmitted signal to control thousands of off-peak electric heaters, failed. Soon, there were vastly more heaters on the grid than it could support, and the result was a countywide power outage which lasted several hours.
Famous last words: "Our plants are immune, since they are not computer controlled." (ROFLMAO....) They still don't admit it was Y2K related.
At work, we process credit cards through the Vital Processing network. On February 27-28 of the year 2000, we started seeing batches rejected with the error code, "Invalid Date." This was a problem with the transaction processing network, not with our local systems or software. Somewhere upstream, it seemed that the settlement date was being calculated in advance as February 29th, which of course did not exist in the year 1900 so the errors were kicked out. Someone somwhere neglected to test that case.
When I spoke to Vital about it, it became clear that everyone was getting this error. But they REFUSED to concede it was Y2K related, probably for reasons of liability.
Then of couse, are all the web sites and invoices which show the year as 19100. Some of these are still not fixed.
My mother-in-law was a big Y2K skeptic, but I got a chuckle when after Y2K she started sending me emails from her Leading Edge "Model D" computer showing a date which had reverted back to 1987.
Other info...
I seem to recall that Wisconsin had a Nuclear power plant which was affected by the Y2K bug. Also Japan had a surveillance system for nuke plants, and this system was offlined by the Y2K bug.
And last but not least...
The public learned after-the-fact that the NRO / NSA had major failures with their satellites over Y2K, with some reports saying the birds were offline for days.
This was Y2K directly affecting the national security of the USA and its allies! OUCH!!!
Overall I'd call the Y2K effort a tremendous success story. It could have been far, far worse. (Think grocery stores and EDI. A lot of that code is COBOL... or even [gasp!] DIBOL.)
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/05/0 216220
Before the Y10K problem proves how short-sighted you are if you are only using a four digit date!
Definitely not a hoax. There was a prominent website (www.6200.com or something, I can't quite remember) that had a clock on its front page and the clock said "January 1, 100" instead of 2000.
Now, a clock on a website isn't exactly earth-shattering but a time error like that in the wrong place (eg. a shuttle launch sequence) could have had dire consequences.
People make this mistake all the time: "ooh! hurricane! I bet all that spending on new windows helped the economy!". No, it didn't. It took money that would have otherwise been spent at restaurants, book stores, etc., (or left in banks and brokerage accounts, where it helps build other sectors of the economy) and moved that money into glass repair shops and plywood factories.
;)
You are right in that it did not magically create more money in the economy, but you forget that it's really good to be a worker in the glass and window manufacturing industry at that time.
With the Y2K scare, the money that was going to be spent on other things (like down payments on corporations CEO's nice yacht and private savings of small business owners), instead went to the pockets of those who were in the IT industry.
As a member of the IT industry I really benefited from this as well (as I am sure) many others on Slashdot.
The people that were spending money were usually the ones that refused to ever upgrade their systems unless forced to and I always saw a side benefit of building new computers to replace 286 boxes that in the end would only bring the price of new processors down.
So not only did I get more money, things that I liked to buy would become cheaper.
It's a win/win situation all around
That it put the money in the hands of corporations investing in technological advances (such as computer technology) and that is always a benefit to mankind.
Otherwise this money would be wasted on things not involving me!
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
At a fairly big bank, our mainframe scheduling software started reading dates as 10/10/10. They later upgraded from VSE to MVS, so the issue was kept pretty quiet. For the life of me, I still have no idea how one can get 10/10/10 out of 01/01/2000. I can understand 01/01/100 or something similar but not October 10, 2010. Any ideas?
We were saved from Y2K as described in the After The Y2K related comic, After Y2K has documented the whole thing. The main page is here:
/ af tery2kmain.html
/ y2 Karchives/220.html
http://www.geekculture.com/geekycomics/Aftery2k
Why we are saved is documented here:
http://www.geekculture.com/geekycomics/Aftery2k
an alternate universe was created with all the Y2K problems (caused in part by Arthur C. Clarke) and fortunately we aren't living in it. We are in the saved one.
Some other interesting dates caused some electronics to go haywire, including Jan 1 2001 (01/01/01) which was apparently used as a "reset" for some clocks. We got a preview of some of these issues on 9/9/99 as well.
I worked my A$$ off to fix or replace elderly government systems... and all during 2000-2001 heard how "useless" my work was.
:}
Next time maybe we'll just let you all freeze in the dark.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I think the evil geniuses who created the pre-y2k date standard knew what they were doing.
:)
"Lets only use the last 2 digits of the date, so when 2000 hits, we can cause a worldwide epidemic, I can be resurected from the dead and world domination will be mine!!!!"
just my 2 cents
Where I work (air traffic control) we did extensive testing for two or three years prior to the big event. Most of our major systems were unaffected or easily corrected, although about 20% of the corporate desktops were red-flagged.
We did have one legacy system that we couldn't replace that was known to be a problem. The short-term solution was to roll back the clock to 1972 (the last leap year that started on a Saturday). Everything was fine for about 4 months. Then one day all the flight plans were wrong.
After some investigation it was determined that the shift to daylight savings time in 1972 was on a different weekend than the one in 2000. Normally that wouldnt't be a problem as all aviation-related time and date fields are stored in UTC form. This particular computer, however, was responsible for automatically injecting the scheduled carrier flights into the flight-data system on a daily basis so the airlines wouldn't have to send new flight plans all the time. When the clocks change in the spring and fall, the airlines shift their schedule by one hour UTC so that the 7:00 AM (local) flight still takes off at 7:00 AM. Since this computer thought it was daylight savings time a week or two early, it added one hour to all of the proposed departure times just like it was supposed to do.
We don't normally send flight plans to the computer more than an hour before departure, so the airlines were loading the passengers, closing the doors, and then finding out there was no record of the flight with ATC. The controllers would hand-write the flight data strip and send the aircraft on its way, only to have the computer-generated flight data strip pop out shortly thereafter.
This bug was very easy to fix, but obviously very difficult to predict.
pretty much every time-aware item in the typical house fails twice a year when the timezones change
Timezone changes?? You must live in an RV.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
The 2038 article referenced mentions a time error happening on Jan 10, 2004, but offers only a line of C to explain it. Can anybody clarify what is supposed to go wrong 5 days from now?
Our staff has completed the 18 months of work on time and on budget. We have gone through every line of code in every program in every system. We have analyzed all databases, all data files, including backups and historic archives,
and modified all data to reflect the change.
We are proud to report that we have completed the "Y2K" date change mission, and have now implemented all changes to all programs and all data to reflect your new standards:
Januark, Februark, March, April, Mak, June, Julk, August,
September, October, November, December
As well as:
Sundak, Mondak, Tuesdak, Wednesdak, Thursdak, Fridak, Saturdak
I trust that this is satisfactory, because to be honest, none of this "Y to K" problem has made any sense to me. But I understand it is a global problem, and our team is glad to help in any way possible.
Speaking of which, what do you think we ought to do next year when the two digit year rolls over from 99 to 00?
We'll await your direction."
I remember when looking at the Y2K problem seeing that there were some major problems that needed to be fixed before the year change. It was, however, blown way out of proportion with many companies taking advantage of stupid people who thought that everything was going to blow up. One main example I saw of this was several adverts in papers saying we will insure you electronics such as a microwave, PS2, and vacuum sweeper against Y2K for $50 each but also saying does not include PCs, servers, or anything that would actually have a problem (wish I thought of this first, could have made thousands and not have to pay out any money).
I don't think you were very deep into mainframes.
Consider then a tape expiration failure causing many tapes to be placed into the scratch pool and reused when they contained valid data.
There are many variations on such a scenario.
I saw some of them. You must have not.
I started coding in the 60's. I worked on mainframes both as CE and as a Systems Programmer.
The failures were extant and numerous. You are wrong.
All Dasdi control labels stored in the VTOC have dates. Do you have any idea what I am talking about? Same for tape labels.
Steps are already in hand to ensure that when 2038 rolls around, all systems will have been patched. (Many have already been patched. No 64 bit systems will be vulnerable, because the new systems are already patched.)
The Y2K problem happened because during the 1960-70 memory was a critically short resource. People went to extremes to save even a single byte. And processor time was expensive! But RAM was even more valuable. This is no longer the case. So we are patching things decades before we need to.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
err, ok. Think this might be more a perl issue.
uname -a
SunOS mechapig 5.9 Generic_112233-10 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
isainfo -v
64-bit sparcv9 applications
32-bit sparc applications
perl test2038perl.pl
Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
I'll be quite content if I'm still alive and not suffering from senile dementia in 2038 - I certainly won't still be working.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
on everything
...on the PCs
......on the Monitors
..........on the abacus
When users ask if they can reomove them now, we say "No! It'll stop working!!"
I don't know about others, but I certainly spent enough time preparing for the event.
:)
I maintain about 2 million lines of Cobol code and had to find the 700 places of code that would have broken the program. Took me a few months and a lot of sweat but my changes held up.
Without those changes? 250 offices of medical doctors running on pencil and paper on Jan 1st.
Don't know about you, but I think it was worth the effort.
also, the notion that it was laziness or sloppiness was just plain wrong.
:)
many of those programs were written at a time when every character (not necessarily 8 bit bytes) was a significant expense, whether extra keypunch time, sort time, decryption time (binarybcd was not close to free on most systems), as it is now, or storage in core (hey, the buck/byte/month in *rental* for memory was a *huge* cost breakthrough).
In fact, a few years ago someone did an estimate in constant (inflation adjusted) dollars, and found that the costs of avoiding the problem would have been a multiple of the costs of fixing it.
Besides, when they were writing, it was pretty clear that the code wouldn't be in use 50, or 40, or 30 years later . . . noone goes that long without a complete code rewrite
hawk
b0rk3d
patrick.. enough slacking.. back to work..
suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Sher is going to turn 60 and have Dick Clark's kid!
Libertas in infinitum
The Skytrain here in Vancouver ... an elevated mass transit train thingy ... failed due to y2k issues. They did fix the software in time, but apparently they didnt fix it well enough. Jan1 2000, the trains wouldnt go. problems kept happening for a week or two until the last bugs were worked out.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
"Timezone changes?? You must live in an RV."
Most places change timezones twice per year
i'm a bit surprised nobody pointed it out yet, but the good people from the IETF aleady worked how to store and represent dates for the rest of the time our universe will exist (and beyond):
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2550.html
But it isn't just a matter of counting correctly that is the problem, it is also the fact that data is transferred across networks and many computers and software (such as "intelligent" databases) are designed now to send data to one another without human oversight or control. This ranges from interfaces between banks, insurance companies, government agencies and military systems. With that kind of intimacy without human intervention or review thousands, if not millions, of decisions are made without one human being. Often the one human being who designed the code or the logic upon which these various systems work may even be dead!
Even if the programmer were alive, it just is beyond human capacity to examine billions of lines of code -- alone. Rather many, many teams of programmers must comprehend the problem at hand and design a solution to avoid the problem. However, what is a solution in one age or period of time is likely to become a future problem anyway.
This will always occur because humans live within time and cannot supercede it. We cannot outdo or foresee all future outcomes. Certain mathematical models, even reliable for a narrow range of future time (a few days, or weeks or months ahead -- fail); the weather for all the modern talent available is still very much a thing most people refer to the yearly Farmer's Alamanac for.
The situation is not hopeless, as much as that for the first time in human history it will be and remain necessary to support and maintain a whole class of mathematics and programming professionals for the duration of human history across all human societies from this point in time to manage successfully these kind of problems and other's yet to be discovered! This is something unprecedented and unknown in thousands of years of human experience.
Y2K is just a tiny bit of this ice berg which humanity has yet to seriously wrestle with.
Mitakuye Oyasin: Translation from Lakota Sioux, "We are all related."
see Dates Potentially Causing Problems in Computer Systems (from today to 2100)
Even the 68K Amiga systems run into trouble 8 years after Unix.
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(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"