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The Long Shadow of Y2K
Hugh Pickens writes "It seems like it was only yesterday when the entire world was abuzz about the looming catastrophe of Y2K that had us both panicked and prepared. Ten Years ago there were doomsday predictions that planes would fall from the sky and electric grids would go black, forced into obsolescence by the inability of computers to recognize the precise moment that 1999 rolled over to 2000 and for many it was a time to feel anxious about getting money out of bank accounts and fuel out of gas pumps. "Nobody really understood what impact it was going to have, when that clock rolled over and those digits went to zero. There was a lot of speculation they would reset back to 1900," says IT professional. Jake DeWoskin. The Y2K bug may have been IT's moment in the sun, but it also cast a long shadow in its wake as the years and months leading up to it were a hard slog for virtually everyone in IT, from project managers to programmers."
"'People were scared for their jobs and their reputations," says CIO Dick Hudson, Staffers feared that if they were fired for failing to remedy Y2K problems, the stigma would prevent them from ever getting a job in IT again. "Then there was the fear that someone like Computerworld would report it, and it would be on the front page," Hudson adds. Although IT executives across the globe were confident that they had the problem licked, a nagging fear followed them right up until New Year's Eve. While most people were out celebrating the turn of the century, IT executives and their staffs were either monitoring events in the office or standing by at home. Afterwards came the recriminations and backlash as an estimated $100 billion was spent nationwide for problems that turned out to be minimal. Others says the nonevent was evidence the Y2K effort was done right. "It was a no-win situation," says Paul Ingevaldson. "People said, 'You IT guys made this big deal about Y2K, and it was no big deal. You oversold this. You cried wolf.' ""
We see exactly the same reaction today about all the issues that face us (whether personal, local, national or world-wide). The considered, thoughtful and measured responses that would (given a chance) produce equitable solutions with a minimum of fuss get washed away by the ignorant but vocal commentators in the media. These people don't care about the problem, or finding a solution. All they want is the cameras pointing in their direction.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The point is that, when it's going to be 1970 + 2 billion seconds, a lot of computer will fail because of storing dates in an unsigned int (if I'm not mistaking, PHP has issues with it that I could spot, for example), but the vast majority wont understand it. My guess is that we will get into huge trouble because of that. Maybe THAT will be the moment when planes will start falling, because nobody prepared for that.
And why exactly would be that?
The reason for Y2K bugs is pretty ridiculous tho, someone had to see it coming. It's not even like the amount of available IPv4 addresses, it would had required some imagination back then to understand there would be so many internet connected machines today. But years you just saw coming.
In the couple of years leading up to Y2K, I saw my company pour millions into updating any outdated infrastructure. Since were all techies, I'm betting that we all have similar stories. All the negativity aside, is it also possible that we moved ourselves ahead with this non-existent catastrophe? I mean shoot, I know I at least got a new laptop out of the deal ;^)
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
The reason for Y2K bugs is pretty ridiculous tho, someone had to see it coming. It's not even like the amount of available IPv4 addresses, it would had required some imagination back then to understand there would be so many internet connected machines today. But years you just saw coming.
If I remember correctly, the systems that many were concerned about were those systems that had been in place for 10,15,20 years or more that, when they were designed, were not expected to still be in use when Y2K became an issue. Personally, even looking at the computer advances that have taken place since Y2K, I could understand someone thinking a program that they wrote in, say, 1985, would no longer be in use in 2000.
Wasn't there a bug in lots of Twitter applications a while ago, where they used a 32 bit number to store a 64 bit sequential message ID? And many of those apps had been created when the message count exceeded a billion already.
A great many computer systems used two digit dates, and would treat '00' as a date in the past. Changing this fundamental fact would take an awful lot of work; not changing it would mean that all these computer systems break on Jan 1st 2000.
Allot of work was done, and most all important computer systems didn't suffer from any serious problems.
What is being oversold?
I suppose there were 'cowboy' consultants exploiting the problem by offering to come in and look at your recently acquired IT infrastructure, charging huge amounts for a simple thumbs up. That doesn't undermine the severity of the problem though.
Hah, this bug tripped me up when I was working on twitter integration. Fortunately my powers of mathematical intuition can spot powers of two at +-2147483648 metres.
The fact that Y2K is looked back upon as being one big joke can be seen as a giant success for all the effort that was put into 'solving' it, "we" managed to avoid disaster.
I think 38 years should be long enough for us to sort things out before Y2K.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
That's how I feel about the global warming issue. If we succeed in stopping the effects of climate change, all the nay-sayers will claim it was a waste of money and less effort will be taken to prevent the problem going into the future. If we don't, we could really screw up the planet.
There's one question to ask here. Which of Earth's many past climates is the one that we should hold steady?
Earl decides to make up for #24, "Stole a red 'Take-a-number' machine" from a local Bargain Bag. He brings along Donny Jones and Joy and Darnell to help cross the item off. However, Randy runs into the store and takes the ticket machine from him, not wanting to part with it. Earl remembers back to why Randy did not want to part with it; in Christmas 1999 Earl stole presents from a house while Joy, Donny and Randy distracted the family with carols. They go back to the Crab Shack, where Darnell explains Y2K to them, and says that life will not be able to continue without computers, all of which will break down. They all decided to stock up on supplies, and hide in Donny's sister's basement. As the timer hit midnight, all the lights in the house went out. They all thought that the Y2K myth was happening, but in fact it just happened because Donny's sister had not paid her electric bill, and her electricity ran out on January 1, 2000.
It was real, but hyped. None of us seriously expected 747s to invert on crossing the International Date Line, as some more fevered commentators speculated, nor did we expect nuclear power stations to destabilize.
However, we knew that all our systems had to interact correctly for the business to deliver correctly. I was working as a contractor for a major airline, and we knew that lots of our most fundamental systems had been written in the 60's and 70's. They HAD to be checked, and HAD to be tested through the full extent of the workflow.
Moreover, it was always journalist bullshit that it was all going to happen at the stroke of midnight. There were plenty of opportunities for problems to occur at other times. A major food and clothing retailer started rejecting shipments of canned food in September 1999 because the dates on the cans said the Sell-By date was 100 years ago. This really happened.
And yet stuff DID happen at the stroke of midnight - and that news got suppressed because it was embarrassing, and anyway most of the incidents were minor - we had successfully fixed everything major.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
According to a friend of mine who is a manager with a large Indian offshore IT company the biggest impact of Y2K was that it gave offshore IT consultancies a big opportunity to gain some street cred and foothold in the US. The rest is history. (Whether this is good, bad, inevitable, indifferent etc. is a separate matter and largely dependent on viewpoint I guess.)
I had no idea that we, the proud people of Tuvalu, had spent so much to prevent the apocalypse of Y2K.
Why would that be? It's not as if 2010 required an extra digit. A bug in 2010 would only happen if someone started writing years with one digit in 2000.
I'm a procrastinator by nature, there's no way I'm starting to prepare now when I still have 7990 years left to do it.
Why go as far as twitter? Slashdot fell over a year or so ago because message ids were stored in a 24-bit integer, which overflowed. Who ever imagined when Slashdot was created that it would come close to 17 million posts? 2^16 probably seemed like a lot, so wasting another byte per post probably seemed enough to give some headroom. A decade later, it turned out not to be.
If you were writing software in the '70s, every byte mattered. A lot of mainframes around then used 6-bit bytes with binary coded decimals, so you'd be using 12 bits for a two digit date or 24 for a four digit one. Software was much cheaper than hardware, so saving 50% of the storage requirement and requiring the software to be rewritten in 30 years would have been a huge saving overall, especially on machines where 1KB took up an entire rack and cost thousands of dollars. And, because the software worked, people kept using it.
Architectures like IBM's OS/360 and Burroughs Large Systems have maintained backwards ABI compatibility since the '70s, so there was no reason to touch the code. The space saving went from saving them the need to spend $10K on an extra memory module to saving them a tiny fraction of a percent of the machine's total capacity, but no one cared, because the code still worked. Then 1999 rolled around and people found that their system would break next year. The old code was lost, or written by people who had long since died or retired, so in a lot of cases needed completely rewriting. Fortunately, programming languages have advanced a lot since those days (unless you had a Lisp machine or a Xerox Alto back then, in which case they've bone backwards to a painful degree) and so it didn't take much programmer time to rewrite them, although migrating the data and testing took a lot of effort.
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They put street lights into the park across the road from me and cut down a load of trees around the edge so that street lights from the road shine in because people complained that they were frightened of being attacked in the dark. The end result is that you now have pools of light along the path. If you stand there, it completely destroys your night vision and someone standing five meters from the path is completely invisible to you, while you are under a spotlight from their perspective. Apparently this makes you more safe.
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People wanted to fear it.
I was at Wal-Mart getting an oil change (for the record never go there for that) in 1999 while in the waiting area a conversation was struck up between myself and another person waiting on a vehicle. It came out that I worked for an ISP and had done all kinds of other computer/networking work. The person wanted to know my thoughts on Y2K.
I answered "I think there's going to be a few hiccups and glitches. I don't think they're going to be all that big, we've done a pretty good job of preparing, and many things may fail over to a wrong date, but will continue to work anyways. All in all whatever problems come of it a majority will be fixed in the first couple of days and a few may take longer, but I don't think there will be much impact."
The person became visibly annoyed at my answer. We stopped talking very quickly after that. I had many other conversations with people along these lines, a couple of them even sited Art Bell and how his show was talking about the doom and gloom to come. I listened to Art Bell. He must have made a fortune selling crank radios, flash lights, and other survival gear in preparations for Y2K, not to mention his business model relies on crazies and they were coming out of the woodwork for this.
I was working the night shift during the roll over. I wasn't worried about our equipment failing. I went to work armed, I was worried about crazies who might decide our company was going to be the cause of the downfall of civilization.
The only thing I noticed was the IRC chat room had some sort of a reset, 90% of the people connected dropped off at midnight, that was actually the event that caused me to check the clock. Us other 10% stayed connected, I'm guessing it was one of dial up routers dropping everyone.
People were practically begging for the doom and gloom scenario. It gave me insight into the human condition, I'll say that for sure.
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I suppose you meant to write "if (date() < 1980) crash();"
Slashdot has code that makes the "less than" sign disappear magically. And this illustrates something about software bugs, no one expects them.
I know the Y2K bug was real for many systems and I believe that catastrophes were provably averted, which it why it is now popularly perceived as a false alarm.
To convince the naysayers we need a few real examples where the maintainers of some important system knew that their system would fail on Y2K with major real-world consequences without recoding. The articles don't mention any.
The one in which my beach property stays beach property, becoming neither mountain nor underwater property.
How about the one in which modern human beings have existed?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The news must be slow to report on an event that didn't happen 10 years ago.
People saw it coming all right. Look it up.
The problem was that for a long time the people in control did not care. Senior manglement often works on 2 year contracts. Why would some suit wearer care about something 10 years away?
There was never any real argument that it was a real problem, The reason it cost so much to fix is that it was left so late and then we had a load of consultants sticking their expensive noses in.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
How about the one in which modern human beings have existed?
While ones? There's glacial and intraglacial climate. The glacial climate is the most common climate for the last few million years and the one that prevailed for most of our existence as modern humans. We know of several intraglacial climates, including one in the past two thousand years that may be warmer than present (the Medieval Warm Period).
The one thing I found annoying about the Y2K coverage was most "journalists" going on about how the whole issues, was not an issue.
Did it ever occur to these news "professionals" that many problems were patched, *quietly* before they could break?
Many of the COBOL computer systems with the Y2K issue belonged to large, established, mainstream organizations.....many of them financial institutions. They probably wouldn't want a story in the new about how they bought a defective system that they are still using 30 years later and way past the point when they should have replaced it.
Because that would be incredibly slow. Calculations involving time need to be quick and arbitrary precision integers are much slower than primitive integers. A 64-bit integer value will last for half a million years before overflowing if you use it to store microseconds. There's no reason to slow everything down for millennia to avoid some problems in the eventual future.
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The one in which my beach property stays beach property, becoming neither mountain nor underwater property.
Why should you be favored? Let me put it this way, it's possible that we have to make a choice between a significant economic and technological gain and your beachfront property going underwater. I have no problem with putting your property underwater in that case.
https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=6269
a.) had a fear of the dark or dark places
or
b) had poor night vision to begin with.
Basically it was management decisions to not spend the money on the computer storage.
Sometimes really stupid ones. I know a programmer who was disciplined because management decided that, statistically, the "skip a leap year if the year is divisible by 100" correction for date change was important enough to include but not the "unless the year is also divisible by 400" rule. Therefore he was somehow "wasting storage" by removing the first correction to fix things until the year 2100, even though the program got smaller.
There were quite a few systems with BIOS/CMOS clocks, OSes, etc that were going to screw up one way or the other without being replaced or upgraded. Said screwups, with rare exceptions, might seem disasters to managers who treat any unexpected problem as one, but not by the general population; still fixing them in advance was probably cheaper than after the fact.
The Y2K problem is only one expression of the common problem of a data value occurring greater in magnitude than what that given data type can store or represent. This still can occur and presents as much of a problem for critical computer systems. I've found a bug that would have suddenly adjusted the suspension of police cruisers or other models of a vehicle very poorly if they exceeded 128.5 MPH before it ended up in a production vehicle. That did not stop me from wincing back in 1999 at radio commercials from a used car dealer trying to scare people into buying his "Y2K-verified" products, lest they perhaps be left stranded if their car suddenly died on New Years day.
I wonder what happened to those kooks who sold their homes, and bought farms or that stocked up with 2 years worth of spegheti-Os, etc.
OK, I know a moment in the sun is one in which you are illuminated, the brightest thing in the room. But let's try another meaning; basking in the sun on a tropical beach. For me, IT's moment in the sun is when everything is working and there's nothing to do but dream up what the future may hold.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Y2K was Software Engineering's moment in the Sun, not IT's.
I was an analyst for Gartner in the years leading up to Y2K. As usual, the real story is nothing like what is reported in the press.
First of all, the systems failed not because the date itself rolled over to January 1, 2000, but when systems attempted to do a calculation that spanned both centuries and thus did the math wrong. In 1970, 30-year mortgages started having glitches because they calculated into the year 00, and started calculating interest based on 99 years’ worth of time. Called, the “Time Horizon to Failure,” these types of failures increased on a log scale in the 90s as we approached 1/1/2000. Few if any systems based on microcontrollers (say, elevators) care at all about the date, much less that the year is 2 digits.
The bug was very real. There was literally billions of lines of mainframe code written in the 60s, 70s, 80s and even 90s that used two digits for dates. There was actually a 1970 bug, where some systems used only one digit for the date in the 60s. Remember we are talking 80 byte punch cards and memory that was hundreds of dollars per byte. The fixes weren’t hard but there was a LOT of code to slog through, much of which was not documented and in some cases they didn’t even have the source.
Why weren’t there more visible problems? in the early and mid 90s, all the IT departments alerted their managers to the problem, showed where in the code it needed to be fixed, and what the consequences were. But few managers acted, because nobody believed the “hype” and budgets were needed for more pressing initiatives.
Enter the Wall Street Journal, who wrote an article, I think it was in late 1996 or 1997, that said to company executives that their Errors and Omissions insurance would not cover them if their company experienced Y2K failures because the bug was widely publicized and the threat was well known. This means that the executives were personally liable (e.g. they could lose their houses) for Y2K failures that happened in their companies.
The next day, thousands of companies started Y2K projects, and fixed the issues. So, no serious bugs were reported, and those who labeled it hype had all the evidence they needed to support their theory. But it took a legal threat for managers to act.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Also, how long we should keep Earth at that particular climate? As I indicate in my previous post, even on the scale of centuries, Earth climate naturally changes. For example, would it be a good idea to fix Earth's climate at whatever the climate was in 1850 for the rest of eternity?
If you were writing software in the '70s, the speed of change was such that most programs were being totally rewritten within 2 years. We were finding better ways of doing things (both hardware and software) all the time. I guess management hoped that some stuff would not need renewing in less than five years. The eventual news of programs which had stayed in use for _20 years_ was a real surprise. The original programmers had no way of knowing that some of their stuff would live until the year 2000.
Planes are *ludicrous* expensive. They get milked out to the max before they are replaced. I imagine there will be a lot of last minute expensive and complex avionics swaps near to 2038, just like a lot of code and so on got fixed real close to Y2K and not before, it had to wait to hit near panic mode first before the suits took it seriously.
Business, like government, tends to be stupidly reactive just as much as pro active, pretty much a good mixed bag there. Witness hurricane Katrina and adequate level levee building. Everyone knew the problem existed, yet they "couldn't afford" to fix it in advance of failure. So then it cost a lot of lives and ten times the cost.
...it is a signed int....it does support dates prior to 1970. Funny thing is you said, 1970 + 2 billion. It would be 1970 + 4 billion if it were unsigned.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
They decided it was a good idea to grow tomatoes on their farms to sell to Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee and made their living in a new way?
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Some programmers don't even see leap years coming - for instance the incredibly stupid Zune bug.
As for Y2K bugs, I saw one last year in macromedia's flexlm licence manager. For some very stupid reason the new release was using two digits for the year and decided that perpetual licences expired on 1 Jan 2000. It is extremely annoying when a licence software failure of such extreme stupidity prevents you from running the actual software you have paid for on a few machines for about a week - such crap as flexlm is only there to punish the honest.
In 99, a friend of mine was doing a live migration from a mainframe software that was too expensive to fix for Y2K. This was a critical billing system for the business so they had to keep the mainframe working until the migration to the new software was complete. The complex project was scheduled to be over on Dec 15.
What they did not expect was that the end-of-month calculation routine in the old software used a "clever" trick: add one month, remove one day...
So on Dec 1st the software went down in flames (and my friend did not get his Y2K bonus).
They called it the 12/99 bug.
lucm, indeed.
Umm... the one we have now? It's kinda obvious that we, as a species, work pretty well in this, at least compared to one that consists of, say, 20% carbon dioxide.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On Y2K day, the website calendar of the US Naval Observatory (our observational time keeping experts; National Bureau of Standards count them, these guys tell us when they start and stop and need readjusting) read JAN 1, 19001.
See if there's still a screen capture of that around, I know several circulated back then. Then if anyone challenges you, simply show it to them and say "We didn't oversell. We got it right. They didn't."
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Ecstasy
The attack of 9/11/2001 took out the WTC and other buildings near ground zero. This was the heart of the financial district and the IT base of many firms.
In the hours following the attack, the offsite backup sites for many of those firms seamlessly took over. Nobody noticed that.
I firmly believe that without Y2K remediations, 911 would have been a big IT disaster too.
Agony
At the successful conclusion of Y2K remediation efforts, the upper and middle level managements treated themselves to celebrations at luxury resorts. Meanwhile, many IT grunts who put in all the extra hours got nothing more than pink slips. In most cases, the companies didn't even offer to buy them a beer as thanks for their long hours.
It was the most ungracious treatment of labor I ever witnessed. Compare it to calling Viet Nam vets baby killers.
Considering that one third of human population lives at less than 100 meters altitude, I fail to see how there could be a significant economic gain in letting sea level increase.
Part of the overselling was this idea that the systems would just blow the fuck up when the date rolled over. That was not necessarily the case. In particular I think it was oversold for critical system, like computers that control power plants and the like. I never saw any evidence that these things would go nuts, lock up, set the plant to do something dangerous. Looked more like they'd roll over and nothing much would change since the date was used in terms of "On this date do X," kind of stuff, not a comparative function.
Also in some cases, the date was kept on a computer but was totally irrelevant. One system I helped with around that time was an old Windows 3.1 machine. It ran a proprietary piece of software that controlled an instrument. Well the system did keep a date and was not Y2K compliant. What would have happened when it rolled? Who knows, I didn't bother to find out. Instead, I set the date back 30 years. The date on the system was never used in the control software, and thus was not relevant. Simple cheap fix.
I'm not saying there wasn't a lot of work to be done with regards to the problem. In particular the financial industry needed to do a lot since there stuff IS dependent on comparing dates. However I do not find evidence that it was the world ending problem it was made out to be. If nothing had been done I'm sure there would have been plenty of problems, but I am rather doubtful they would have been catastrophic problems, or things that couldn't then be dealt with.
That's not to say the proper answer wasn't for companies to deal with it beforehand. I'm just saying the doom and gloom paranoia was way overblown.
The one that was fit for human evolution, not any of those that were fit for long extinct trilobites, or 1m-wide damselflies, or giant tree ferns, or even giant tree fungi. Not too fond of snowball earths either.
There was certainly a range of climates that were just fine for dinosaurs. We don't have those anymore -- both the climates AND the dinos ('cept birds of course).
That you even ask the damn question is maddening. Do you really have such little clue, or are you so blinded by Republican / Fox News propaganda? Do you really hate humanity so much that you want us to go the way of the T-Rex?
I worked for a telecomms company (one of the biggest) and was involved in Y2K remediation. Most of our software was fixed by 1996 with a few small systems fixed in 1997. Our first Y2K fix was done in 1988! If those systems (and similar from the other big companies) had not been fixed nobody could have made any long distance phone calls after 1/1/2000, but they were fixed. It would have been a big deal but we fixed and double-tested everything and robbed the scare mongering reporters of their disaster headlines, get over it.
> People saw it coming all right. Look it up.
The problem was partly cultural. As my high school American History teacher pointed out to our class (early 90s), "Psychologically, the clock stops in 1999". His point was that "the Year 2000(tm)" had been a holy, distant place steeped in strange rituals and images of a science-fiction inspired world for so long, nobody could rationally think of 2001, let alone 2000, as being a normal year less than 10 years away. I remember looking around during summer jobs in college, and realized it was true... people slapped post-2000 dates on things when making future plans, but nobody really *believed* in them, the way people did when making project plans for 1995 back in 1989. You could even look at projected dates, and notice that they either clustered around 2000 or 2001, or jumped ahead to 2010, 2020, and beyond. City governments could make grand road improvement plans for 2015, but as late as 1999, they could barely bring themselves to think about anything more ambitious than filling potholes in 2001.
I thought it was known as "banking".
I worked for a systems reseller/support provider back then. We had 50 to 100 customers out in the field running a particular OS and associated software products.
Our major vendor was extremely slow at getting updates out. The OS definitely had a problem, as account expiry dates were stored using two digit years, so ever user on every system would get locked out come 2000. They managed to devise a fix to the account security system, but it was well into 1999 before this update appeared. Even then the update was in the form of a complete new release of the latest version of the OS which had some terrible inherent problems not seen in the earlier releases many customers chose to still run.
More annoying with this new update is at the same time many long lasting OS features were discontinued, features which the majority of our customers used. It was as if they simply couldn't be bothered to audit the code, so they simply junked it. These features included WAN connections via serial and leased lines and integration with IBM mainframe architecture - with these features no longer available the OS no longer had an advantage over the then competition.
The knock-on effect was that the majority of our customers simply decided to abandon the OS altogether and migrate to something else, such as NT.
Those articles that mentioned planes and fire and brimstone falling out of the sky should have focused on the positive e.g. guess what, that hardware you bought late this year? The warranty's going to extend itself another 99 years. Heck bring it in even after 12 months, and we'll stick it to The Man.
(And to the OP the reason the damage was minimal was because we DID have people making sure that there wasn't going to *be any damage.)
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
They aren't used often because they are very expensive. You don't know how many digits are in a variable length integer until you run the operation, so you need to perform operations that don't combine well with pipelining (and you can't get fixed alignment, so you don't get good cache usage).
99% of the time, they are not even useful. A lot of programmers go through their entire careers without encountering integer overflow problems. Most high-level languages provide support for arbitrary-precision integers and programmers can use them when required, but few need to.
Storing time in them is entirely pointless, because a fixed width 64-bit integer is more than enough for vastly longer than any modern hardware or software is expected to last. This is true for a lot of things. The overhead of a variable width integer doesn't give you any benefit most of the time.
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This is all very well, but there were people who thought their microwave oven or washing machine would fail on 1/1/00 because it couldn't understand the date.
How often is the clock on the microwave set correctly anyway, and what difference does it make to its ability to cook things? And why on earth should a washing machine care whether it is 1/1/2000 or 1/1/1900? It isn't as if it is programmed to realise that it hasn't been invented yet and should therefore stop working.
In any case, looking at my microwave clock, which is set reasonably accurately, it is a bit less than a minute out, I don't think it even knows whether it is 4:39pm or 4:39am, never mind which century it is.
Y2K was overblown by middle level IT managers who saw it as an excuse to replace all the older equipment and software whose maintenance they hated with brand new toys that would be more fun to work with.
These are the guys that fed the press the bullshit. Naturally the press got parts of it wrong, since most of what they were being given was being spin-doctored to advance a hidden agenda. But these were the available credentialed experts, willing-- nay, often eager-- to be interviewed. With their camera-ready Love Me walls of MSCE certificates in the background.
This sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there was no need for a conspiracy. The majority of persons in mid level IT management from 1997 t0 2000 were the guys who learned all kinds of clever coding tricks back in the day when it was necessary to use tricks to get acceptable performance out of 8088 and 6502 machines. These were not the best programmers of the times; these were the ones who were merely adequate, the ones who could not make the distinction between an elegant solution and one that was only clever and probably a set up for a future failure. These guys realized they could have more fun using their specialized knowledge in clever ways in the politics of mid level management. So the group attitude of these managers was one of disdain for following rules that got in the way of doing the job, and applause for non-obvious solutions that got the job done in an unexpectedly fast and seemingly effective way. They had learned to do quick and dirty programming, and they transferred that skill into management, but as a group they really didn't see anything wrong with being dirty: a little grime was considered a healthy part of the job.
And these guys were the ones who controlled the reports on the potential impact of Y2K, and they saw those reports as an opportunity to modernize their infrastructures. Rather than looking at patches to work around Y2K issues, for only a hundred times more money, just replace the entire computer and all its software, and everything will be better. Who would argue with that? More to the point, who with good credentials would argue with that, when virtually everyone with credentials would see it as a laudable quick and dirty approach to improving the infrastructure?
There was no need for a conspiracy. The selection pressures of 1985 - 1995 assured that the vast majority of mid level IT managers were all practicing quick and dirty office politics. The entire species was going to respond in the same way to the Y2K stimulus.
Will
That's how I feel about the global warming issue. If we succeed in stopping the effects of climate change
Not to worry, we won't succeed. At this point it is accepted that we will be impacted by global climate change, and the concern is how to minimize it, and how to mitigate what will still happen no matter what we do from this point onward.
Will
Huh? You do understand that even today some back-end systems are run on very old machines with very old programs. The reason they don't get updated is that it costs money to update. Unlike the average /. geek, businesses don't replace their systems whenever something new appears. If it works, there has to be a reason to update. The Y2K bug was such a reason. But like other areas, even when experts warn of something doesn't mean management is listening especially if the problem isn't happening today or tomorrow.
This phenomenon is not relegated to just IT. You remember that event called Hurricane Katrina? The Army Corps of Engineers warned that the levees were not enough. Their warnings started almost 30 years ago. Every year the asked for money to address the levees; every they were promised money but not actually given any. Then the levees broke and the government leaders wanted to blame the Corps. The Corps had documentation that they warned the government well in advance.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yes, I am aware of that and no I don't think it is always done. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The industry has also been having a hard time with sub par counterfeit parts, something they don't like to mention out loud much. Then you have examples like the above mentioned F-22 flight crossing the international date line. These are top of the line "new" extremely expensive and what might *think* really looked at designs..yet that snafu still occurred. And you still see fleet groundings when new unexpected problems show up, unfortunately usually after a crash.
When they *really* want to and they really do the work, and the original design was over built really smart and strong, yep, they can keep planes flying and working a long time, past their original estimated service life, like the buffs, by doing continual upgrades. Like I said though, it is all ludicrously expensive. Ain't a single dang thing cheap and easy on airplanes, and this includes very limited production runs of new model avionics.
So, I will stand by my prediction that just like y2k there will be a lot of last minute upgrades done.
Speaking of which, although I am not an IT guy, I was made aware of the y2k date thing in *85* by a friend of mine, an ex IBM mainframe guy. When it hit 97 and 98 and it surfaced in the popular press, I was certainly amazed that it was still a problem....some shops were still coding with the date bug in, while others were just starting to think about maybe looking at it and doing some remediation. Private business and government did in fact mostly wait until near the last minute to do repairs. I know a ton of computer guys were telling me this back then, even my state's head IT honcho told me this, that even though they as the engineers knew a lot of stuff needed fixing, they didn't get permission/funding until the suits started getting harangued by their spouses and customers and shareholders and the press in general, asking how their y2k repairs were going. "Last minute" more or less repairs took place then, at a higher cost than what was needed (due to what you guys call the mythical man month), precisely because they waited so long to do it. As it was, most stuff got fixed just swell, but it certainly cost them a lot extra to do it by waiting.
The one really good thing to come out of the y2k "last minute" fix scene was a huge surge in just "fuck it, we'll just buy new equipment", which really resulted in a well needed boost to the computer industry as a whole, and a radical dropping of prices across the board for computer-stuff because of a lot more competition and economies of scale efficiencies.
None of us seriously expected 747s to invert on crossing the International Date Line, as some more fevered commentators speculated, nor did we expect nuclear power stations to destabilize.
Software Bug Halts F-22 Flight
Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25 2007, @06:35PM
it.slashdot.org
On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s' on-board computers as they crossed the international date line. The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii...
You do understand that even today some back-end systems are run on very old machines with very old programs. The reason they don't get updated is that it costs money to update.
I worked for a Very Big Corporation back around the turn of the century. We had quite a bit of old equipment back then that was at risk for the date rollover. Without exception, one of the questions management asked about each piece of equipment was, "Can we patch it just one more time?"
Sadly, one of the systems was hosted on hardware with a h/w clock that wasn't going to make it. Not due to a two digit year, but a table of leap years stored in ROM ran out the following February, resulting in a system that wouldn't boot. he vendor had long since discontinued h/w support. Management's solution: bump the systems back 20 years and add a script to add it back in to the O/S clock after boot up. Plus some tweaks to the utilities that wrote the date to the h/w clock. It turned out that several different departments had the same hardware and each was responsible for implementing their own fix. Rather than standardizing on one date offset, each group used some multiple of 4 years (to keep leap years aligned) as a decrement. This resulted in transforming the Y2K problem into a Y2K + N problem, where N varied by department. After a while, it became evident that N was selected to move the new failure date to a point just after each manager was due to retire.
Have gnu, will travel.
I've already heard the argument that all the cost and effort to stop the destruction of the ozone layer was a waste since the "predictions about the ozone layer disappearing" didn't come true.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01dutton.html So all of you must be wrong.
Apollo was a company that made mini-computers back in the day. The OS was called "Domain" and the system was used in a manufacturing environment, controlling an automated circuit assembly system.
They, too, used unsigned ints for date keeping, but it used an odd epoch date. On October 30th, 1999 I was notified by our supplier that there wasn't a "Y2K" issue. There WAS a November 3rd, 1999 issue, however. At that time, the system would not boot.
Some of the boot code used signed ints, some unsigned. Early in boot, one of the routines waited for a certain time + interval to start. Essentially, waiting for the last process to complete. However, the last process wrapped and the timestamp was something like 6,500 B.C. and the next process used an == to compare, not >=. It would wait for the next few thousand years before completing. "Oh look, I've got time!"
Luckily we had the Sun Solaris-based replacement equipment there...for a year. We had just needed motivation to actually make the transition. 4 days we motivation enough -- the bastards.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Indeed. Most of the products people were afraid would die didn't even have date clocks.
I was one of the lucky ones. There's only one product I was associated with that even had a time/date clock, an early paperless chart recorder. After reviewing the design and code I determined that it was good until 2039, sometime in February (I used to know the exact day).
The product was abandoned. The company doesn't exist any more as such. (Bought out by ...a certain very large German international company... with many promises of a bright future and then gutted.)
Your average microwave doesn't know and doesn't care what the date is. Your average automobile probably doesn't keep track of the date either -- how would it check? What method do you have for setting it after power has been removed? It keeps track of elapsed time for various reasons, but that's not the same thing.
I write firmware for airplane simulator hardware these days. That doesn't make me an expert in avionics, but I think I have a pretty good idea how things really are. The only part of an airplane I can imagine giving a tinker's damn about the date is a GPS, which synchronizes with the satellites and probably would correct its date anyway. And if the GPS of an airplane suddenly goes wonky? Gosh, the pilot just might have to use the charts and backup instruments he was trained on. ... Just like if the GPS failed for some other reason. If the airplane falls out of the sky solely due to a GPS failure then there's something seriously wrong with the crew.
My wife and I put by a small stash of supplies just in case, but we really didn't expect even temporary interruption of services. We certainly didn't think civilization would end.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
This site (full of spam comments) has a y2k bug: http://www.amtor.com/cgi-bin/links/cougalinks.cgi?action=view-links note that the dates are "19109" (or 19110 now), this is beacause perl stores the year as the number of years after 1900, so 1999 is 99, and 2000 is 100, you were supposed to print years by adding the perl year to 1900 and then converting the result to a string and printing that, but many people didn't bother and instead printed "19" and then the perl year, which is why that site is showing "19109" as the year...
After 1999 infrastructure spending of all sorts dried up. We didn't spend for FEMA, we allowed transportation, water gas and military infrastructure to start to fail. Since then infrastructure spending has been reactive than proactive across the economy.
Americans made a choice in 2000 when faced between
* Mr "wishing makes it so" Bush
* Mr "lets proactively deal with problems" Gore
that they liked wishing makes it so. We now have an infrastructure deficit over 2 trillion. I agree with everything in the article, but the collapse in IT spending that we are still in is a result of the move to systematic corruption and grotesque inequality of George Bush. We had a president who ran on Après moi le déluge, why are we shocked that CEOs would be willing to do that?
This guy, and everybody else who thought the threat was only on New Year's Eve, 1999, are sadly misinformed. The problem happens primarily when calculations occur that span the century boundary. The media reports this garbage then when it doesn't come true the credible alarmists are called fools.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Not the 2010 bug, but a lot of the Y2K fixes were kludged by putting in a 2 digit "window", so somewhere between 2040 and 2060 a lot of systems will start to foul up again, if they haven't been replaced by then.
We are the 198 proof..
I'm reminded of a Carlin piece (Carlin on Campus? Live at Carnegie? I forget) where he talks about practicing for rain dancing.
If you don't practice, how do you know you've got it right?
If it doesn't rain when you practice, doesn't that mean you're doing it wrong?
If it does rain when you practice, why have the dance? When you need rain, just hold practice!
OK, I have no idea why I thought of that.
How about this, then: I carry elephant repellent. How do I know it works? Well, do you see any elephants?
Not sure about that one either. I'm here all week, folks!
The fact is that nobody knows if you've staved off disaster because the disaster never happened. And if the disaster does happen, you've failed. What you need is a time rewinder so you can wait for the disaster to happen, say "See? I told you so!" and then go back in time and fix it.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
I guess I'm that group. First computer was a PET and I know 6502 Assembler. My first structured language was Pascal and the second was C, which was all about performance tricks. I was mid level around 2000 and a CIO today.
And let me tell you I still believe in rip out and replace unless there is substantial business intelligence embedded in the apps. Maintaining crap is expensive and demoralizing. And quite often systems can pay for themselves in 3 -5 years. We don't live in a society with 75% interest rates, our tech spending should not reflect those interest rates.
Humans know how to migrate.
a) Let sea levels rise 100 meters and say have to replace or substantially change 1/2 the cities in the world over the next 3 centuries
b) Drop human energy consumption by 80% of the next 3 centuries.
It is not at all obvious to me that (a) is cheaper than (b). I believe in global warming but I don't think it helps the case to pretend that humans can't and haven't adapted to huge environmental changes.
No one is talking about 20% = 200,000 parts per million.
The debate is about 350-900 parts per million.
The only part of an airplane I can imagine giving a tinker's damn about the date is a GPS, which synchronizes with the satellites and probably would correct its date anyway. And if the GPS of an airplane suddenly goes wonky? Gosh, the pilot just might have to use the charts and backup instruments he was trained on. ... Just like if the GPS failed for some other reason. If the airplane falls out of the sky solely due to a GPS failure then there's something seriously wrong with the crew.
Planes have been known to fall out of the sky recently due to failures of the airflow measurement - a difference of 20 km/hr in measurement can mean the difference between having a safe flight or having no lift anymore and no way to easily correct that. Anything that measures speed also uses time (delta in position over time = speed), and when you deal with time you tend to have a date in there as well, somewhere around 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. It may not strictly speaking be needed, but can you guarantee that it is never done like that? On all airplanes, including some quite old ones, with all versions over all manufacturers of all devices to measure speed on airplanes?
As for the Y2K bug: if you're in the middle of a landing on autopilot, in difficult weather (december 31st is usually not the best of times for clear skies), and the autopilot decides to crap out at 20m above ground and gives you a hard landing, how are you ever going to respond in time to that? And what if the autopilot suddenly figures it's flying in the wrong direction, right after takeoff, and turns around? It only takes one bug, in one routine, to have a major crash.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
In 1973, as a newly hired systems analyst, I suggested in a design meeting that a new major system we were designing use four-character year fields instead of two to prevent future problems. It drew a laugh. Of course virtually all the laughers were long since retired by the time the company spent tens of millions of dollars retrofitting all those systems with four-digit fields or 60/40 assumption logic (which, by the way, just postponed the "Y2K" problem for another few decades). But we could have saved a LOT of grief by doing it right in the first place.
those that refuse to see...
Some software lasts decades and has big side effects. Techniology management is ephemeral, with life-spans measured in months, rarely years.
Managers knowingly mandate stupid decisions, because there is no personal downside and a short term budget upside.
Y2K was because large organizations (or the incumbent management) repeatedly ignored technical advice to allow for 4 digit years, because it saved a few bytes storage for each date (which was significant back then) and they could argue "that problems still 15 years away, we will replace it", "that's still 10 years away, we may replace it", "that's still 5 years away, maybe we can fix it later", "that's still 2 years away, we are asking for a Y2K budget"...
Y2K? Oh Sh*t Fix that now..., then blame the developers!
Technology "management" typically refuses to see or respond to anything with an effect longer than their own Mayfly existence. At the same time mangers (as a group) are hypocritical and unethical enough to blame others, when the fertilizer hits the windmill... Couple that asshattery with a wilfully ignorant and fear mongering media, and you have the recipe for shifting the blame from chronic management incompetence to "the techies did it..." which is completely bogus.
There are few, if any, real technical issues remaining unsolved for most business purposes, and none that go completely unpredicted by systems analysts.
There are an enormous number of fundamentally incompetent CIO's and (worse) "Project managers", who should not be permitted the long term indirect technical influence they possess.
Their myopic decisions can cause potentially dangerous and expensive impacts on society, such as Y2K.
The negative influence, spin, and misleading media, continues; for example, the poor design of security in most commercial applications is directly attributable to short term "not my problem" management thinking.
Fortunately, we have better controls on building bridges than we have software, but the impact of some types of software is now much more serious and far reaching than mere mechanical and civil engineering.
Technology management needs a better professional accreditation and system of ethics, see acm.org for in depth discussions.
In particular, the ludicrous notion that you can manage construction of something you don't understand, (and don't attempt to understand) )by setting arbitrary dates and budgets, is commonplace in IT.
When the time comes to fix the next disaster, our failure to fix chronic management incompetence, will be the root cause.
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
The one that was fit for human evolution, not any of those that were fit for long extinct trilobites, or 1m-wide damselflies, or giant tree ferns, or even giant tree fungi. Not too fond of snowball earths either.
So which one of the past five hundred million years is the one that is "fit for human evolution"? And it's also worth noting that once Earth gained its oxygen atmosphere there have always been regional climates which varied in their fitness for human evolution. Perhaps you have a particular comfortable, regional climate in mind (like the Mediterranean) that we could implement globally?
Or perhaps you think we should live on a Trantor where effectively the entire area of the world has been converted to habitable urban environment? This would be the best fit for humans.
Or perhaps human evolution is better served by adverse climate conditions, in which case, the more extreme and harsh the environment is, the better for human evolution. We might even deliberately stoke disasters and plagues in order to improve human evolution even more.
That you even ask the damn question is maddening. Do you really have such little clue, or are you so blinded by Republican / Fox News propaganda? Do you really hate humanity so much that you want us to go the way of the T-Rex?
That you fail to answer the question concisely is enlightening. Do you really hate humanity so much that fixing Earth at one particular climate is more important to you than the well being of humanity?
You want an economic gain at the expense of other people's property. That's usually known as "stealing".
If I'm forced to forgo economic gain because it might damage someone's property, then that's stealing as well. For example, what keeps someone from deliberately building fragile, expensive infrastructure on the beach, and then milking me whenever I want more economic gain. They're creating the externality not me. For example, the use of publicly subsidized flood insurance in the US (in addition to being theft from the public) has inflated beach front property values and created more externalities for any activity which raises sea levels significantly.
Considering that one third of human population lives at less than 100 meters altitude, I fail to see how there could be a significant economic gain in letting sea level increase.
You're not even looking at a properly defined decision here. You're just looking at the cost. It's like saying, "I fail to see how there could be an economic gain in any activity where I pay another party five dollars." The benefit associated with the above cost of a possible rise in global sea level is increased global wealth and economic activity. And a significant, but ignored question here is whether it's worth more to move people out of the way than it is to have considerably increased wealth and activity? A hundred meters of sea level rise over many centuries (assuming generously that it ever happens) is simply an insignificant cost. Any city in the world will be completely rebuilt many times over in that time period. In fact, I doubt there will even need to be an organized moving program. As properties start to flood, people and the infrastructure will naturally migrate to higher ground.
And doing our part to improve the economy now will pay great dividends. Currently, every dollar of wealth even adjusted for inflation grows more than an order of magnitude in a century. Shifting from today's transportation and energy infrastructure to a less efficient one probably will cost humanity hundreds of billions of dollars a year (perhaps trillions). Saving $100 billion now, means at least $100 trillion more wealth, three centuries from now. Plenty of resources for moving people and infrastructure that are created because we don't do something counterproductive.
Umm... the one we have now? It's kinda obvious that we, as a species, work pretty well in this, at least compared to one that consists of, say, 20% carbon dioxide.
We'd also work well in an environment 2C or 6C warmer. Or an environment 2C or 6C colder (though the ice fields from a new ice age would restrict our habitable range a bit).
They're not Y2K compliants? Wow.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
And do you still believe in gaming the reports so an issue similar in scope to the Y2K issue will appear to be a mission critical threat to high level management?
Oh wait... you now are high level management. Let's put this in your current perspective.
When somebody reporting to you pulls the wool over your eyes and you buy into their fictions and alter the budget to their benefit, what do you do when you discover that they've led you down the primrose path? Do you promote them to higher levels of responsibility?
Will
What seems to be happening here is that I'm saying "I don't think GPS failure due to Y2K is likely, and if it does happen it's not going to be any worse than any other equipment failure. Planes aren't going to start falling out of the sky like dead birds. There will be no mass disaster." Whereas you're taking it as meaning "Oh, Y2K failure cannot possibly cause a plane to crash." No matter what I respond you can come up with a scenario where it can happen. No, I do not guarantee that a Y2K failure cannot cause an airplane accident. I would never make such a claim. I'm just saying that "planes will start falling out of the sky" is hype and panic, and at most you'll have an equipment failure with the same likelihood of disaster as any other equipment failure.
Anything that measures speed also uses time (delta in position over time = speed), and when you deal with time you tend to have a date in there as well, somewhere around 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. It may not strictly speaking be needed, but can you guarantee that it is never done like that? On all airplanes, including some quite old ones, with all versions over all manufacturers of all devices to measure speed on airplanes?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying -- I'm omniscient, nothing can ever go wrong. ...Good God, man, of COURSE I can't say that. Are you saying that the Y2K bug is going to crash every airplane, stop every car, disable every microwave?
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
No I likely have to fire them, or ice them or cut them out... if they were successful. But I also realize I have a deep structural problem. Why do they think they need to lie to me to get their job done? If the Directors and VPs are acting Somalian warlords the problem is really with me not them. I consider getting middle management to genuinely buy into the program important. I don't want yes men, if I don't get accurate feedback then I have no clue what's really happening.
My guess is stuff skips generations. I'm not making the mistakes of the guys who were in charge in the late 1990s, when I was on my way up. Maybe I'm mistakes of the guys who were in charge in the late 1970s when the senior management of the 1990s were on their way up? I just don't know what those were since I was a kid then. :-)
Back then, my first gig in the UK was dealing with Y2K issues.
We had a substantial group of people in an isolated environment moving dates to 1/1/2000 and beyond and finding what was breaking.
I was witness of Perl scripts that failed to calculate dates correctly and SunOS and Solaris widespread patching due to specific Y2K issues.
Whoever says that Y2K was a hoax or myth does not know what he is talking about.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You really are completely clueless about the history of this planet. There were no humans 500 million years ago, no mammals, no dinosaurs either yet, no flowering plants, not much of anything you'd recognize today without a microscope.
And here's a hint: Trantor is a fictional place. It's not true. Duh. For all we know, such a place would have insurmountable problems except with the help of super duper fictional technology we don't possess.
Y2K computer bug is just another bug
I worked with a team offering Y2K services for customers of a large computer company. We fixed alot of code and it would have been a much bigger problem than it was if it hadn't been taken seriously.
One tiny example, which showed up before 1/1/2000 was with a large nationwide toy chain. If you used a credit card with an expiration date after 1/1/2000 every register in that store hung. We found alot of issues that would have had news-making consequences if nothing had been done.
The fact that it was a non-event was because alot was done to fix the code before hand.
One interesting side note is that we hired a bunch of retired Cobol programmers because alot of the code we fixed was in Cobol. Although I hadn't done alot of Cobol programming myself, it became very clear to me that Cobol was at that point and probably still is the most effective Business programming language. Pretty amazing considering its age.
Those of us who wrote software for these machines just laughed and repeated the mantra, "Embedded systems programmers don't use COBOL."
True, but ...
First of all, Cobol didn't force you to use 2-Digit dates and embedded systems at that time were more memory constrained than they are today so the temptation was high to save space where ever possible. For example, apparently there were devices used in the electrical grid to route power based on expected usage which took into consideration weekends and holidays. Some of these used a 6 digit date which rolled back to 1900 and thus didn't have the right date after 1999 and would have routed power incorrectly resulting in brownouts or wasted power.
I never really faced a problem with the Y2K bug, but now I remember it just about any time I sit down at my desk... A couple years ago at a thrift store, my mother found a Y2K snowglobe. Yes. I'm not kidding.
The base says '01-01-00' and 'It's coming...'. And in the globe, there's a computer with '01-01-00' on the screen, and a bunch of components and stuff bursting out of the top of the monitor. And the snow? Little plastic 1s and 0s. BEST. GIFT. EVER.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
A lot of consultants made some money by fixing the problem.
Fixed that for you. Working on pensions systems for people who were born in the 30's and later, who could still be alive well after 2000, we started fixing Y2K bugs in 1990. We didn't alll get paid shedloads of cash, either.
Just because you never saw any of the hard work being done, didn't mean it wasn't happening.
I discovered a bug in a 3rd-party calendar control which was particularly interesting: If the year of the date was set to 1999 (or less) and you added a value to it to give a date greater than 2000, it actually incorrectly made it 1000 more, ie 1999 + 1 = 3000. Not so obvious!
I did indeed read your post as "it's not a big deal, it's just an equipment failure and pilots can deal with it". What I am stressing is that there are a few situations where the pilots *cannot* deal with it, and planes do fall out of the sky as a consequence. Therefore, precautions had to be taken.
Ofcourse it wouldn't crash everything (which is the other extreme, and who cares about a microwave having to reset), but there were a few instances where it could have been lethal. That's why planes were being grounded, just to prevent those instances.
I admit I may have overreacted a bit to your post: I'm sort of allergic to anything that even looks like it might have anything to do with Y2K-denial, a few days ago we had a big article in the newspaper where basically the reporter was just saying "all this was overblown, it was basically a big scam". This, from the best newspaper in the country. Gaaah.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
In the run-up to 2000, I was consulting for a large international pharma company. My area of concern was in making sure that the software that monitored the maintenance schedules of all the expensive (and in-expensive-but-dangerous) plant didn't suffer from date-difference errors. For example, when does that 500 gallon pressure vessel next need a scheduled maintenance cycle? One-hundred years ago? WHAT? QUICK... EMERGENCY! Shutdown the production line of that drug, the FDA will castrate management for un-auditable maintenance logs!!
So, as others have said, the problems were real, but it was the idiot journalists who couldn't understand the real problem. Afterall, if they were real experts, why the hell are they writing for a newspaper instead of doing it for real?
My reaction was somewhere between, about like yours. Lots of potential for problems, most of them could be resolved with a bit of work, some would require a lot of work. Most results (of failing to fix problems) would be anywhere from trivial to expensive but not life-threatening. Most of the disaster scenarios gleefully painted by the press were way overblown. ...And on the flip side, most companies were working like mad to fix the problems, so very few would manifest anyway.
And were I in charge of the airplanes I probably would have grounded them too, just to be safe. On infrastructure, I would have had a full crew on hand for the power plants and so on, with another on standby, and my best trouble-shooters available.
Of course as a software engineer I actually had some idea of the real of the magnitude of the problem. And when people asked me what I thought I said your car will still run, your microwave will still heat food, and your toaster oven will not suddenly try to take over the world. If there are any interruptions in services it will be short. Make sure your batteries are fresh and your larder is stocked and your tanks are full and get on with your life.
And of course ten years later it's easy to say all that. :)
My bosses never looked on us with suspicion afterwards. Partly because we were completely honest, partly because they were pretty technical themselves and realistic about it.
No, I wasn't trying to say it was no big deal; just trying to say that yes, there was potential for problems, but no, the airplanes wouldn't Just Stop Working And Fall Out Of The Sky. I was trying to explain why, not just pat people on the head and say "There, there, the boogie man won't hurt you." :) I find people usually work better when they understand the Why and not just the What. And most people don't like to think they're being patronized.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
It seems like we agree that sending FUD up the corporate ladder is inappropriate, even though those constructing the FUD may have good intentions; are doing it "for the good of the Order". I can see that this is a separate issue from decisions to replace equipment that are based on long term cost comparisons.
In the VA in 1997 - 2000, there was a lot of FUD directed up the corporate ladder that involved both
IT ended up patting itself on the back while clinicians had to delay implementation of some programs and were unable to deliver expectations on other programs for lack of the needed IT support during these years. At that time, upper management did not have enough computer savvy to connect the dots and recognize that the problems in meeting these patient care goals were due to a failure of IT to provide the needed support. After all, the IT staff was interacting daily with the clinicians, replacing their computers, showing them how to work the upgraded software, isolating and fixing the bugs... The IT staff never seemed to figure out why nobody else was happy with them when they had done such a Good Thing. But at the time nobody else really understood why they had this gut feeling that IT had somehow screwed them over. Maybe all the shiny new computers were too much of a distraction.
Will
was the pretty much complete retirement of Windows 3.1 during 1999.
Personally I see this as a good thing.
AG
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
At my company we've had a weekend fire drill thanks to Y2K. I'm not talking about 10 years ago. I'm talking about yesterday. Ten plus years ago some genius "fixed" the Y2K issue by checking to see if the first of the two digits in the year was a zero. If it was prepend "20", otherwise...
time subscription. (Sorry hit a character lime in the subject.) He got a notice that his subscription to his ham radio magazine was expiring. Since it was a lifetime subscription, he called them up and asked if they knew something that he and his doctor needed to be aware of. Lifetime subscriptions were given an expiration year of '99'.
We were a service/hardware provider and we made a killing that year that was completely erased by the doldrums in years following, Everyone had pushed forward their buying cycle into late 1999 so 2001-2003 were unnaturally lean years.
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?