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Y2.01K
After our recent discussion of decimal/hexadecimal confusion at the turn of 2010, alphadogg writes in with a Network World survey of wider problems caused by the date change. "A decade after the Y2K crisis, date changes still pose technology problems, making some security software upgrades difficult and locking millions of bank ATM users out of their accounts. Chips used in bank cards to identify account numbers could not read the year 2010 properly, making it impossible for ATMs and point of sale machines in Germany to read debit cards of 30 million people since New Year's Day, according to published reports. The workaround is to reprogram the machines so the chips don't have to deal with the number. In Australia, point-of-sales machines skipped ahead to 2016 rather than 2010 at midnight Dec. 31, rendering them unusable by retailers, some of whom reported thousands of dollars in lost sales. Meanwhile Symantec's network-access control software that is supposed to check whether spam and virus definitions have been updated recently enough fails because of this 2010 problem."
Wait until Dec. 31, 9999. Watch as people panic about there being 5 digits in the year and how programs were only written to accommodate 4 digit years for the past 8000 years!
Wait until Dec. 31, 9999. Watch as people panic about there being 5 digits in the year and how programs were only written to accommodate 4 digit years for the past 8000 years!
They are going to have thaw out a lot of old cobol programmers.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10425455-56.html
this is affecting me and the other 3 guys on the planet with a Windows Mobile phone, too. :(
Geez! Intel introduced MMX Technology to take care of this problem in 1996! Get with the times!
January 1st our 15 year old security badge system started marking all badges as invalid. Couldn't fix it until we rolled back the system date.
At the Bank of Germany, we're not happy until you're not happy.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
Hmmm so the 9/11 hijackers were Y2K bugs then? We better keep an eye out for more aircraft bugs on Sept 11 2011 .... holy shit there is an 11 in 2011 AND 9/11! ZOMG!
Didn't I hear this before? I remember people talking about scamming banking systems via the confusion caused by 2010.
Wait a second... isn't that the plot from Superman IV?
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Ah nothing like a 9/11 joke to brighten my day
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
For instance, I'm doubtful there will be anything in existence in 2 billion years that will be capable of reading your code...
That's probably what the Ancients thought when they built the Stargates. Never underestimate the need future species may have for a plot generation device.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Because everybody forgot about Y2K on Jan 1 2000. Planes didn't fall from the sky, remember (well not immediately, anyway).
Yes. I anticipated this. I now store all my dates much like the Unix epoch, except I store it in a 1 gigabit integer field (f*ck 64-bit integers) that counts the number of seconds since midnight January 1st, 50,000,000,000^1024 years ago.
We should be safe from now until the universe collapses, Jesus comes back, Allah blows us all up, or the Great Green Arkleseizure wipes his nose.
Oh--and you do have that new holographic storage tech in your laptop, right? You'll need a few exobytes just to store the timestamps on all your files...
There's no place like
At least the situation is too embarrassing to file a bug report
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
[..] I manually the hardware clock [..]
Did you accidentally the whole clock?
Move Sig. For great justice.
True.
We should start freezing them now, just to be sure.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
End of the world? I just checked my calendar, and the last day is December 31st. This has me deeply concerned.
How on earth could this happen? This is shear blistering incompetence that no one thought to include any more days past this point.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
They are going to have thaw out a lot of old cobol programmers.
I, for one, welcome the Lords of Cobol.
/All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
For your second point, does it really matter? Programmers will rarely if ever get dates, no matter how hard they try....
Indeed. They even said if the cache machine in your branch did not work ...
Well, this works actually very well. The machine is caching all the money ...
There are reasons of business and budget that trump incompetence, but your post reminded me of a story.
Technical background: I worked in VAX/VMS, where dates were stored as binary but commonly displayed as dd-mmm-yyyy, such as "01-Jan-2000".
Once upon a time, there was an Oracle DBA, whose primary claim to fame was being female and good looking in a line of work where such attributes were uncommon. She applied for a job in my IT department and we interviewed her. Although we found her visually refreshing, her technical skills were lacking. So I promoted an existing staff member into the DBA position. The candidate we passed on landed at a nearby IT shop. Later on, we had a collaborative project with that other IT group. My DBA (the one I promoted) drops into my office...
DBA: "You gotta see this! Remember Ms. xxxxxx? You were right. She built a database where all of the date fields are STRINGS!"
[DBA goes on an on about how wrong that is, but misses the real implications]
ME: "Do you know what the funny part of this is?"
DBA: "No."
ME: "She just made April Fools Day the first day of the year. In fact, years don't matter all that much, since they are relegated to the tail end of the string. Any select statement that sorts by one of those string/date fields is going to give you some fascinating results! As of now, the calendar is April, August, December...."
[Laughter for the rest of the afternoon]
You're thinking of when it hit 1234567890, on Valentine's Day 2009...as if to mock us...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel