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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?"
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"
2038 is years away - we'll all have new systems by then! No need to worry!
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.
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
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!
(Shamelessly stolen from http://www.gsp.com/2038/ )
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
Update: 01/2004 The first 2038 problems are already here. Many 32-bit programs calculate time averages using (t1 + t2)/2. It should be quite obvious that this calculation fails when the time values pass 30 bits. The exact day can be calculated by making a small Unix C program, as follows:
In other words, on the 10th of January 2004 the occasional system will perform an incorrect time calculation until its code is corrected. Thanks to Ray Boucher for this observation.
The temporary solution is to replace all (t1 + t2)/2 with (((long long) t1 + t2) / 2) (POSIX/SuS) or (((double) t1 + t2) / 2) (ANSI). (Note that using t1/2 + t2/2 gives a roundoff error.)
The year-2038 bug is similar to the Y2K bug in that it involves a time wrap not coped for by programmers. In the case of Y2K, many older machines did not store the century digits of the date year, hence the year 2000 and the year 1900 would appear the same.
Of course we now know that the prevalence of computers that would fail because of this error was greatly exaggerated by the media. Computer scientists were generally aware that most machines would continue operating as usual through the century turnover, with the worst result being an incorrect date. This prediction withstood through to the new millennium.
There are however several other problems with date handling on machines in the world today. Some are less prevalent than others, but it is true that almost all computers suffer from one critical limitation. 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 recent milestone was Sep 9 2001, where this value wrapped from 999'999'999 seconds to 1'000'000'000 seconds. Very few programs anywhere store time as a 9 digit number, and therefore this was not a problem.
Modern computers use a standard 4 byte integer for this second count. This is 31 bits, storing a value of 231. The remaining bit is the sign. This means that when the second count reaches 2147483647, it will wrap to -2147483648.
The precise date of this occurrence is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038. At this time, a machine prone to this bug will show the time Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901, hence it is possible that the media will call this The Friday 13th Bug.
Elevators sticking? Traffic lights out of sync?
Don't believe the hype. Traffic lights for example have failsafes in them to stop such things... anyway why does a traffic light care about the year? The day of the week/month maybe.
Similarly, elevators don't give a hoot what year it is.
Contrary to the press your washing machine will *not* think "ooh it's 1900 I haven't been invented yet.. better explode".
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.
Y2K hasn't come yet. As any coder ought to know, 2K == 2048, not 2000.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
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.
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
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 |
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.
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
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?)
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.
./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.
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
It's signed because it is necessary to deal with dates before 1970.
Don't believe the hype. Traffic lights for example have failsafes in them to stop such things
Twice in my life I've seen traffic lights stuck on green in both directions. I don't know how it can happen, because I don't know how traffic lights are switched. Nevertheless.
What? :-) Look, there's always an April 29th, the leap day being added always to February. And the year 2000 was a leap year, though many thought it so for the wrong reason. The rule is: if year is evenly divisible by 4 if not divisible by 100 unless divisible by 400. Which makes year 2000 a very special leap year as it is indeed divisible by 400.
Stefan Axelsson
one word: simtower
elevator madness
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
Exactly.
The wiki article people keep pointing to also makes connections to outsourcing and a whole host of related issues that relate to bogus ideas of a free market. Clue to all: free markets are a myth sold to you to make someone's subsidy more palatable. So yes, the existence of free markets is a bold lie.
Can anyone show me a free market anywhere on earth?
Not in theory, mind you - where a lot of you libertarian/republican eggheads live - but in REALITY. Show me a real free market - where people live and die by the price of goods and services.
The moment any market is fed a subsidy by the government, it is not a free market - the system will have been gamed for the benefit of a few against the many. But - and this a BIG BUT - all countries have gamed their systems exactly this way and supposedly for the benefit of their people. And when such gamed systems work for large populations, I don't really have a problem with it. Example: I like throwing money at farmers (sadly, usually republican and pyscho Xtian assholes) because I think it is in the interest of national security to have an independent food supply - in my example the farmers gain a monetary benefit, while the rest of us gain something a little less tangible in the way of national security.
It is when the numbers of people benefitted by such a gamed system become so few that we may call this "looting" instead. I don't know that many of us are benefitted by the oil wars we fight such that the same or greater benefits could not be derived from some other energy source which might also have hidden benefits for the environment if they are cleaner energy sources.
So yeah, Bastiat is great. Really. But he also assumes facts not in evidence. And most of us have to live in the really real world.
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!