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."

Comments

idiocy? Incompetence?

[rueger]

How on earth can things like this happen? After the Y2K debacle how can anyone
not anticipate and extensively test for future dates?

Is this sheer utter incompetence, or just a total lack of intelligence?

Yee Gods!

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[MichaelSmith]

Because everybody forgot about Y2K on Jan 1 2000. Planes didn't fall from the sky, remember (well not immediately, anyway).

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[xous]

This is because they let people that shouldn't be anywhere near a production system write software.

Almost all of these issues can be attributed to developers rolling their own date handling functions or misusing built-in functions.

I'd blame some of it on retarded user interfaces that accept two digit year values.

DO NOT REINVENT THE WHEEL!!

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[jlarocco]

100% incompetence.

I would bet all the money I have that 99.99% of these problems are caused by people not taking the time to learn the standard library of whatever programming language they're using. For some reason there's a gut instinct among programmers that they have to write all date processing code themselves. I can think of 4 separate occasions, off the top of my head, where I've replaced dozens of lines of sketchy, hand roled, date formatting code with a single call to strftime.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[mlts]

Its neither. It's ROI and worrying about this quarter's earnings over anything else, pure and simple. Because there isn't any primary returns from finding date errors in the future, businesses just won't plunk down funds to fix them, and will reactively fix problems when they happen. I see this a lot in businesses, and not just the big boys. Plenty of SMBs also are not interested in hearing about anything they need to spend their money on, but stuff that has a positive return. They would rather forget about time issues. When zero hour happens, most feel that they can hire a ton of consultants to fix any problems that arise, even though it costs way more than if it was fixed before stuff failed.

Just the same with computer security because to a typical MBA++ PHB, security gives no financial gains. I've heard so many times, "I'm not worried. If I get hacked, I'll just call the Geek Squad guys and they will fix it."

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the contractor is going to be paid a second time, I would say it demonstrates their forward planning.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Re. point 1: Coding is complex, and newbies turning out poor code doesn't mean they are morons or poorly trained. A lot of the finesse of proper software engineering comes through hard-won experience, and quess what: rarely do we give those newbies a chance to gain that experience.

What I am talking about is mentoring and code reviews, two things that seem to have gone the way of the dodo. "Catch errors early" has always been a good coder's maxim; but there really is no excuse to have a newbie's code go unscrutinised. Catch their errors early so you can both have a good laugh about it, and he can fix the error at his leisure. If such errors come up during final testing (or worse: after release), you're too late. Instead of a valuable lesson you'll have an expensive embarassment on your hands.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[ais523]

Personally, I blame it on bad reverse-engineering. 9 looks the same in binary and binary-coded-decimal (the bit pattern for each is 00001001), but the bit pattern for 10 in binary-coded-decimal (00010000) is the same as the bit pattern for 16 in binary. I imagine what's going on here is people guessing at a protocol and not having enough information to distinguish binary from BCD. (If they do that because the protocol isn't available, it's forgivable; if they do it because they're too lazy to look it up, it's incompetence.)

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[MrKaos]

Because everybody forgot about Y2K on Jan 1 2000. Planes didn't fall from the sky, remember (well not immediately, anyway).

I've been confronted with the idiot at dinner(s) who says "what about that Y2K bug - what a load of crap that was, nothing happened". I gently remind them that a lot of people worked pretty hard to make sure nothing happened. Maybe this time around there won't be any budget to handle it. Guess we may find out on the 10/10/2010.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[Bigjeff5]

This is precisely why Windows no longer even fits on a DVD disc any more, and they are moving on to Blu-ray discs for distribution.

Says someone who has no clue what their talking about.

Windows OS code is not bloated because of inefficient libraries, it is bloated because, with the exception of Vista, MS bends over backwards to include hacks for legacy software. Essentially they make sure people whose code relied on some bug or quirk in a previous version of Windows still works in the next version of windows, even though the bug itself was fixed.

One example was SimCity 2000 back in the Windows 95 days. Microsoft actually put in a SC2000 specific hack just so that program would work on the next version of Windows, because they had relied on some odd behavior of Windows at the time, and there was no way to update all the copies of SC2000.

They do that kind of thing for thousands of companies with each new version of Windows, just to maintain compatibility.

Combine that with all of the new features each new upgrade brings, and you have your size increase right there. And I predict the next one will be even larger, for these very reasons. ;)

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[Firehed]

Actually, some early problems would have been discovered two years ago (think: 30-year loans). In all likelihood, there are plenty of bugs out there going unnoticed because some database table is silently capping the value at the signed int limit rather than throwing some sort of overflow error. Come 2038, there may be plenty of people who get a bill for an unexpected balloon payment in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or on the flip side, bills will stop being sent out and some bank ends up losing a ton of money.

the eternal curse of the software developer

[Tumbleweed]

Programmer: "I want to take some time to refactor some of the older code."

MBA: "What's the ROI on that?"

Programmer: "DIAF."

Good.

[AK Marc]

I did Y2K remediation. I've seen it called a waste of resources and that because nothing happened, nothing would have happened. This is the smallest taste of what would have happened if Y2K weren't addressed. Only we would have had airliners fall from the sky (silly? Military jets had all navigation crash when crossing the date line, and if not for a tanker with them and that communications worked when navigation failed, they would have crashed). But with a lot of hard work, it was a non event.

Though, if anyone could tell me why my power went out at exactly midnight on that night, I'd love to know. The Preston Hollow neighborhood in Dallas did have a power failure right at midnight. And I never could figure out what happened. But all the equipment I was responsible worked flawlessly.

stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not about a 2010 problem. This is about incredible stupid programmers / hardware designers.