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?

[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?

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[Evil Shabazz]

At the Bank of Germany, we're not happy until you're not happy.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[LoRdTAW]

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!

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[kestasjk]

Ah nothing like a 9/11 joke to brighten my day

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[darkpixel2k]

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...

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[JustinKSU]

A little bit of both!

We have actually had TWO different Y2K10 problems at our job. One was related to someone setting certain rules to expire in 2010, because, you know, it was so far off in the future they wouldn't be working here anymore.

The other bug qualifies as complete incompetence on the developer. We contracted another company to write some software to print barcode labels. They encoded pipe delimited values including a date. In order to save digits and thus reduce the size of the barcode they decided to take the year and append the Julian day. For example Jan, 6th of this year would be stored as 2010006. The problem was that they didn't feel that it was necessary to use four digits for the year. Which is understandable, but apparently TWO digits for the year was too much as well. So the end product was a one digit year ex. "0006". The code that reads the label was:
year = 2000 + barcode.left(1);

What's really scary, is that this code had to have been written post Y2K.

The worst part of the whole thing is that we have to go back to the contractor to fix the problem which is going to cost us $$$ beyond the lost revenue of downtime.

Now both of these problems have nothing to do with 2010 specifically, but it just shows how short sighted developers can be.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[ozmanjusri]

They are going to have thaw out a lot of old cobol programmers.

True.

We should start freezing them now, just to be sure.

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?

[TubeSteak]

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.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[bradley13]

Two reasons

1. Many programmers are not particularly competent. Add in the untrained people writing scripts, VBA applications, etc, who have no clue about software engineering, testing, etc. No surprise that simple errors crop up.
2. Dates are really, really horrible. If you have not had the privilege of writing an international application, worrying about different date and time representations, simultaneity across different time-zones (and the date line) - well, it's an adventure, and even careful testing may not catch everything. Gratuitous real-world example: WinXP allows users to set date-separators and the like in a way that makes unambiguous date/time parsing impossible.

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[jargon82]

For your second point, does it really matter? Programmers will rarely if ever get dates, no matter how hard they try....

Re:idiocy? Incompetence?

[Teancum]

Amen this this sentiment. The effort to make sure that the Y2K bug didn't cause more havoc and mayhem is precisely due to the herculean effort on the part of hundreds of thousands of programmers who worked overtime to see that it didn't happen.

I had the cell phone for my company to receive the complaints from customers seeking an engineering solution to fixing any potential problems on the night of December 31st, 1999. The company CEO had this number on speed dial for some very high end clients. That I got through the night with some excellent sleep is a testament to the work that did happen was well done.

It turned out for the company I worked for, there was a Y2K bug that did get missed, but it was relatively minor and only impacted the error logging system. Even funnier was that particular system had only been developed six months earlier, by a programmer who clearly should have known better. The date being logged was recorded as the year "19100" instead of 2000.

I'm far more worried about the 2038 Unix overflow bug, which is a much harder bug to try and root out of systems. We have 18 years to fix that bug, but I'm mainly worried that legacy applications on archaic computers used in situations that has no budget is where it will be the largest problem. Unix boxes in particular are known as workhorse computers that can be neglected and ignored... unlike a Windows computer that will most certainly be in the recycling bin within 18 years.

Also, one of the typical "fixes" for the Y2K bug was to set an arbitrary "century window" on the software.... with sometimes random intervals for when this window actually falls. Instead of Y2K biting you all on the same day, it will happen as a class of failures on random dates when some major epoch happens.... such as 2010. So for me, this isn't even news as this is something I'm expecting. 2020 is going to be another year to watch for similar bugs, and 2040 is going to be a particularly ugly year as 1940 was set as a common century epoch point for a great many companies. 1970 was more common, but I hope that the Y2K bug is finally fixed by 2070.

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?

[GameboyRMH]

You're thinking of when it hit 1234567890, on Valentine's Day 2009...as if to mock us...

Windows Mobile

[michaelhood]

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. :(

MMX Technology

[hound3000]

Geez! Intel introduced MMX Technology to take care of this problem in 1996! Get with the times!

We got hit by Y2.01k

[LiquidHAL]

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.

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."

does the wii has a minor 2010 issue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Playing wii new years eve. The thing hard crashed exactly as the year changed (it was in the menu not a game). After a reboot it was fine.

Re:does the wii has a minor 2010 issue?

[kestasjk]

At least the situation is too embarrassing to file a bug report

Spamassassin

[j_sp_r]

Spamassassin in Kerio Mailserver has a bug that flags all messages dated 2010 as spam. I think it affects the normal spamassassin as well.

Re:These coders are morons.

[Arthur Grumbine]

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.

Re:My ThinkPad had some trouble too.

[B2382F29]

[..] I manually the hardware clock [..]

Did you accidentally the whole clock?

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.

I can certainly vouch for this.

[gorzek]

I work for a software company that's been in business since 1978. The product I work on is a real-time pharmacy benefit adjudication system, so it has to be up 24/7. They had one guy do Y2K fixes back in '99, and he retired last summer without telling anyone his Y2K "solution" was to just add 100 to any data containing a year. With the way this software works, that was fine--until 2010. Something tells me the timing of his retirement wasn't coincidental! It wasn't hard to fix, but some people took really absurd shortcuts fixing Y2K bugs, when there are plenty of ways to do it that are just as simple and won't break after 10 years.