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Trump Orders Government To Stop Work On Y2K Bug, 17 Years Later (bloomberg.com)
The federal government will finally stop preparing for the Y2K bug, seventeen years after it came and went. Yes, you read that right. Bloomberg reports: The Trump administration announced Thursday that it would eliminate dozens of paperwork requirements for federal agencies, including an obscure rule that requires them to continue providing updates on their preparedness for a bug that afflicted some computers at the turn of the century. As another example, the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid, a task that consumed some 1,200 man-hours every year. Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government. The agency didn't provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn't a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
It's almost here!
No matter what he does or how much sense it makes, the Democrats will find a way to bash Trump. This is an obsolete piece of regulation, but Democrats will somehow spin this into something bad. Washington is turning into a massive partisan witch Hunt thanks to the Democrats and their hatred for anything and everything Donald Trump does. There are regulations like this that need to be eliminated, but the left cannot bring themselves to admit that Trump might do something good. You leftists should be ashamed of yourselves. The American people have spoken and want Donald Trump as President. Get over yourselves.
As another example, the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid, a task that consumed some 1,200 man-hours every year.
So they layed off one guy...whoopdedoo! Looks at those savings! Who wants a paper-trail of who the pentagon pays money too anyway?? What a zany idea.
The electronic surveillance type.
Signed and dated: 6/15/17
Seriously? Is there anything else they are preparing for that has already come and gone?
Gotta keep track of those unsigned 32-bit int timestamps, they're going to creep up on you in 2038.
Suddently paperwork for my next Exascale Supercomputer became easier...
:-D
Seems a bit premature.
-- Adrian Tyvand
Have gnu, will travel.
Sounds like typical govt work ethics.
"As an innovation we spent 6 highly paid full time equivalents budget in meeting hours and discovered that we could, in theory, save 1/4 FTE or 50 MD (or 1200 MH, the figure is bigger) on procedures no one is applying"
Welcome back to 99 where "cost cutters" were all the rage and any cost cut is a legend.
No news here, absolutely none, just standard administrative practice move along
2%?? Linux is a lot bigger in servers / embedded systems. And a lot of embedded systems.
Luckily the century turned a year later...
Sig?
This kind of thing is pervasive in government. Whenever something bad happens, or almost happens, or might happen, a bunch of administrative or real active requirements are created. Once in place they almost never go away. There is no cost-benefit analysis, after all, you can never be too careful. This goes for the obvious financial stuff, requiring all kinds of kooky "checks and balances" to real stuff, like inspections for a crack on part X because one happened once, despite never being documented ever again and part X being completely redesigned to eliminate any chance of cracking. As a government worker it is very hard to buck the system. You know you are doing stupid stuff that has no real benefit, but you little motivation to say that report you do every year that takes several man-weeks of labor, and is required by some OMB rule that is derived from some obscure CFR, that gets it's authority from some equally obscure law, is a stupid waste of time. You just do it. My favorite example is the $600 toilette seat from the 1980s. This resulted in Defense acquisition reform, and now toilette seats only cost $400, which is well documented and has $1000 worth of "process" behind it to justify the cost.
to get the main point:
" the Pentagon will be freed from a requirement that it file a report every time a small business vendor is paid"
I foresee a _lot_ of 'small business vendors" cropping up over the years now.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
a task that consumed some 1,200 man-hours every year
So, one single person working 24 hours a week. No wonder the US debt is so high.
Trump/Kushner 2020!
Not even American... but I do remember something about him losing the popular vote.
The popular vote is trivia. No one was trying for it, both sides were fighting for the electoral. If the popular had been the goal both sides would have waged very different campaigns, spent time and money very differently, visited different towns, cities and states, etc. And thus the popular vote in such a scenario would be completely different than in the actual election.
Talking about the popular vote is like saying after losing a football match, well we controlled/moved the ball for more yards/meters. Sure, OK, but that wasn't the goal was it?
And his approval ratings have been in the sewer at all points in his leadership.
Just like Bill Clinton's about this time into his presidency, high 30s for both.
"Trump Orders Government To Stop Work On Y2K Bug, 17 Years Late"
Damn, there goes my lucrative government job. I knew it was too good to last. Maybe I can get a contract for the Y3K bug.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Simply switching to a 64 bit linux will be enough for linux users to avoid the bug
Technically that's not a fix, it just delays the problem. Admittedly it's a delay of about 292 billion years but still...
"Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called "Magenta." With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0."
https://arstechnica.com/gadget...
If anyone failed to meet a measure that is 17 years old then, honestly, fuck them.
Why didn't we let this shit pass so long ago? Oh, well there was an idiot as our president. He was followed by another idiot. And oh, fucking spoiler... we have another fucking idiot as president! Wow! You are surprised!
"Google, never one to compete in a market with a single product, is apparently hard at work on a third operating system after Android and Chrome OS. This one is an open source, real-time OS called "Fuchsia." ... Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called "Magenta." With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0."
https://arstechnica.com/gadget...
So the year 2000 was 17 years ago so the problem is solved, right? Everyone fixed it by doing the right thing, yeah? It's not possible that somebody, maybe, left the year as two digits and special-cased the values of, say, 0 to 20 by adding 100 to them so the math works out, eh? Have you ever worked in the field?
Seriously? Is there anything else they are preparing for that has already come and gone?
Well reputedly in 1803 the British government prepared for the potential invasion of Napoleon by creating a civil service position for someone to stand on the white cliffs of Dover with a spyglass and ring a bell if they saw Napoleon coming. The position was finally cancelled in 1945, 124 years after Napoleon died.
You seem a little gullible.
"There are regulations like this that need to be eliminated, but the left cannot bring themselves to admit that Trump might do something good"
You might actually want to read the order. It is an extensive review of existing rules to create a written report to see if they can't reduce the amount of waste (waste in extensive reviews and written reports). i.e. wasted budget dressed up as budget saving.
Classic middle manager using up his full budget. If his boss said "tackle Y2K" then this report would be studying Y2K, instead Trump says "don't waste money" so his budget will be used up making reports on how not to waste money.
The man puts a sentence in "in support of President Trumps agenda", and that is enough for you to be fooled. Honestly you seem a little gullible.
" The American people have spoken and want Donald Trump as President."
No they didn't, "the people" rejected Trump, the legal construct called "The Electoral College" did... but then again, he's not one for obeying the laws and this EC legal construct can't waive the emoluments laws or the treason laws or give the executive branch powers it doesn't have.
I think a lot of Republicans would prefer Pence, and a lot of Democrats would prefer anyone by Putin at this point. But the legal processes need to be done, without special dispensation for Trump and without RNC interference in the prosecutions. It'll be for the best if everyone does their jobs and kicks him out, and gets on with their legislative agenda.
I'm afraid that trying to fight with Parkinson Law, Trump would make himself a lot of enemies.
Bureaucrats would plot to shoot him as Kennedy have been shoot.
I got a Y2K bug in 2013 - stupid fucking flexnet "licencing" software designed to punish the honest decided the perpetual licence of the software I wanted to run expired in the year 2000.
Modes of failure like that can still run if the developers of the software are idiots and the QC people do not exist.
your router, your network switch, your PVR,
In theory : yes.
In practice : those will probably have been changed a couple of times between now and 2038.
Officially on the ground of "new standards and feature"
(read: DRM scheme changing requiring you to rebuy PVR and set-top boxes)
your car,
Though note that a car is actually a data center on wheel full of different computers.
Linux is usually very popular on the infotainment system (the big screen with your music player and satnav)
But on the low-level critical components, other OSes (mostly real-time OSes like QNX) are popular too.
So you might end with a car that functions perfectly well, but has it's infotainment screen black or stuck in a boot-loop.
your medical equipment etc.
Given how badly some of them are designed, it won't be surprising if they actually did restart from epoch 0 (or some hard-coded arbitrary point like date of product launch) each time they got power cycled.
These *won't even notice* that the 2038 is a problem.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
2%?? Linux is a lot bigger in servers / embedded systems. And a lot of embedded systems.
Not to mention embedded systems.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I gotta be quick and post this before 1999 ends!
2%?? Linux is a lot bigger in servers / embedded systems. And a lot of embedded systems.
Not to mention embedded systems.
And then there are also the embedded systems to account for!
No, entirely WRONG, the electoral college is there to balance big/small states. Can you imagine what happens if 20 small states are outvoted continously by 2 huge states? Those 20 small states will leave.... get it ?
all large organizations are rife with inefficiencies like this, it is definitely not unique to gov't, so much so that at one job we created Remy's Rule in honor of Clarke and a wise old mentor I worked with early in my career:
Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from government
I think you're forgetting all the servers.
The headline is literally a stab at Trump to make him look like an idiot for touching on something that's 17 years gone, but the fact that worthless required documentation is being removed from government should be celebrated as a move towards efficiency. A government that is willing to admit stuff is useless and scrap it is a lot more useful than a government that bloats itself with process.
I'm waiting for everyone to come in and tell me everything Trump has done wrong now, but that's not my point whatsoever, so enjoy. (I probably will!)
I tend to rant.
Will see how much forgetting about Y2K saves us on YKxx in the future....
Municipal night court judge Munroe Slemp of Snakebit, NV has already responded to a petition from COBOL programmers by blocking Trump's order, citing his lack of IT expertise. The Ninth Circuit is expected to review the decision by sometime in November.
The biggest challenge the founding fathers faced was balancing power between urban and rural constituents.
That is some serious historical revisionism that doesn't even pass the laugh test.
Every state has rural and city populations. The EC does nothing to balance them out because it works at the state level, not the district level.
The real reason the EC was created was appeasement of slavers. The infamous 3/5ths clause in the constitution let slave states count their slave population when apportioning EC votes even though slaves themselves did not get a vote. This perverse calculation gave whites in slave states more voting power than people in free states.
The EC's origin is inherently undemocratic and even today the winner-takes-all nature violates the basic democratic principle of one-man, one-vote since a popular vote split of 49/51 would ignore the will of 49% of voters in that state.
#MA^C^C NO CARRIER
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I used to work for the Federal government some years ago. In no way does this surprise me. A lot of Federal requirements take on a life of their own and keep going long after they've lost relevance. The Federal excise tax on telephones was started to fund the Spanish-American War in 1898 and we still have it. Spain has been a NATO ally longer than most people here have been alive and we still have a tax that began to pay for fighting them.
Since there are different solutions that would have shifted, rather than solved the problem, why not solve this by having two fields addressing time? One being date, and another being year? Date can be a data type dependent on year, so that it'll know when to include Feb 29th, and so on. The year can be an unsigned integer starting from 0 and ending at year 2^64. That way, in the year 2^64, all that people will have to do would be make a simple change to the year field to make it 2^128, and so on.
Yeah, I'm ignoring the doomsday prognostications that predict that the earth will be toast in a few billion years: the idea is to make this a simple to solve issue in future.
An article presenting a Trump action in a positive light...on SLASHDOT??? Pink elephants must be ice skating in hell.
Hyperbole aside, this is but one example of how ridiculous the "administrative state" has become in America. Ronald Reagan once said "a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth." This Y2K requirement is perhaps one of millions of such examples. I'm not particularly fond of Trump himself but anything he does to reduce the awful sprawl and inefficiency of government is something we should all be in favor of regardless of which side of the aisle our politics fall on.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I wonder if there was some other motive for this activity. (Possibly classified). While I guess it's possible this was a project that just went on automatic pilot, it seems more likely there was a side benefit some group in government was using. Time could well prove this is yet another example of how Trump does/says things without understanding them. It's odd that 2 other presidents could miss something like this. Although they perhaps were doing more important things.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
He's also stopped research on the wheel...and fire as well.
So the average 40 hour a week American works 2,000 hours a year. So he saved the Pentagon the equivalent of 1 person. 1,200 man hours is nothing
Would someone think of all the people becoming unemployed due to this? That 1200 (wo)main-hours/year alone is a part-time job in itself, helping a poor family make ends meet. What will their children eat now, you traitor?.. Will the employee now have to find work in Walmart, or — as is more likely — in one of Trump's hotels?!
Eliminating government jobs lowers the salaries in the job market — as the laid off bureaucrats desperately seek new employment however inferior to the good solid jobs they held, have you thought of that? Of course, you didn't, you bible-trumping redneck!!..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why didn't two republican and two democrat presidencies, and 32 congresses do anything about it?
Yeah, they make too much law to ever manage efficiently or effectively.
It would be nice if half of all American citizens, uniformly randomly selected, could fully know and grasp all of American law without disruption to their quality of life, or the quality of life of others.
No nation can do this. Humans are unmanageable by humans. .. Sad!
Obviously the parts specific to the Y2K problem are pointless, but they're only a small part of what those documents mandate. Most of what's in them is, by modern standards, best practices or common sense:
* Keep an inventory of the systems you manage.
* Document the links of each system to core business processes and other systems, and understand the potential impact of the system becoming unavailable.
* Develop contingency plans for each system becoming unavailable.
* Determine whether you can access the underlying data held by each system and if necessary convert it to different formats. Be prepared to move away from it.
* Document potential maintainability problems with each system, such as access to source code and the ability to run on new hardware and operating systems.
* Develop formal test plans and policies for new software, including unit, integration, and system tests.
* Adopt formal configuration and change management systems.
You could edit out the references to Y2K, and about 95% of what the documents mandate still makes sense. This is probably why nobody ever bothered to formally retract these guidelines.
The question is, are there other guidelines that still mandate these commonsense best practices? Quite likely. But the point is it isn't as simple as looking at the title of the document and say, "we don't need that any more." You need to think about what's actually *in* the document.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And where can I buy a Fuchsia device? Are there already billions of them in the world?
Sure, the Tea Party. Full of protestors out silencing people using violence, claiming that if a law gets changed people will literally die (count all the Progressives/Dems who claim that thousands to millions will die if ACA gets changed, or from the US pulling out of the Paris Accords), threatening to blow up the White House, and claiming that the streets should be full of violence due to an election.
That is snark, just in case you miss it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
At our level (200 personnel) we had 2 people dedicated to keeping track of such things as one of their primary duties and another 15 as a part time duty. Can't tell you how much time I wasted on this kind of paperwork over a twenty years but it was substantial.
This means that the DoD can start using two digits for dates again. And while that won't happen much it WILL happen. And old people or people injured in a previous war, etc. will get screwed in some way.
Does it really hurt to force them to keep their Cobol/other stuff pushing fixed text records around using 4 digits?
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
Nobody cafés about Y2K bug anymore.
This is a stand for the nest election: Trump had signed more laws then anyone else did.
This is an easy target. Expect more laws
tot follow.
This is just another example of the inherently racist nature of the Trump administration. We need another special council appointed immediately. We all know that Russia was behind Y2K. We need to understand what was going on here so we can get back to the important issues of trains (and trans) to nowhere and gender neutral restrooms!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Linux got 99.60% on the TOP500 list.. (the top 500 supercomputers)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One guy here, one guy there, and suddenly you have a mass layoff.
Our amazing illustrious and tremendously dear leader has slashed the federal budget to the tune of a 50% employed clerical worker, otherwise known as a TAKER. There is NO WAY that those reports could prevent more than $15,000 in fraud and abuse by a department with a paltry $523,900,000,000 budget. No way. God Damn, America is Great Again!
Y2K was shorthand for Year 2000.
Y2K38 doesn't save you any space at all, the K does nothing and makes it unnecessarily confusing.
Y2038 or just 2038 bug would be sufficient I think.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You are probably correct. However, when the system finally fails it might force an upgrade/replacement or retirement of the system. Sometimes catching fire is the only way we cook our sacred cow burgers.
Or the old guy retires.
Seriously - I've seen this happen. "Most Important Process" in the place is handled by "one" person who quits because s/he can't get away from doing the process. No matter how many times they brought it up for review, nope "this is the most important process" - even attempts to be promoted to a new job/role and management sticks the task with them. So they quit. Then nobody is assigned to do the job (maybe a few cracks at it on a volunteer basis) - but in the end the task goes undone for an extended period of time before finally somebody officially declares it obsolete.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Sounds like a lot, I guess.
The F-35 Is a $1.4 Trillion Dollar National Disaster — April 2017
So if we amortise the JSF program over 40 years, the $1.4 trillion outlay / pork gravy works out to $1100/s (more than even Eliza "meth" Millipede can make stuffing fliers at home).
Is 1200 hours/year of accounting oversight on a relatively small financial leak unjustified?
Personally, I'd crank some numbers before jumping to a hasty conclusion, because this is the ultimate haemorrhage in all of recorded history.
I happen to mostly take complaints about the information system with a grain of salt. Integration problems are hard, and things will probably improve with a combination of time, experience, and more $$$ guzzling everywhere (perhaps in some cases to good effect).
Incompetent epsilon-signature airframe, abetted with movable mission goalposts, have a far worse long-term prognosis.
But no, apparently the problem here is too much picayune cost control.
Personally, I'd crunch some serious numbers before supporting that assertion in any direction.
The Mayans had a similar issue with the 2012 bug.
Since they ran out of room on the huge rock they carved the calendar on, they just figured time would end and they'd never have to worry about 2012.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And where can I buy a Fuchsia device? Are there already billions of them in the world?
Fuchsia devices are only slightly behind Android 7 in terms of numbers. :-)
Its interesting how you go out of your way to say that you are Finnish, and not as just a person from the EU. This means that you hold some allegiance to Finland and are proud of your country, and rightly so. This also probably means that you understand that the issues and needs of the people of Finland might be different than those of say, Greece.
Now, lets say that we do what you just said and merge all political power into the greater EU state. This means that 4 countries, Germany, Italy, France and England (if you still include them) control over 50% of the EU population. This means that they can group together and say, we are the most advanced, civilized part of the EU, unlike those backwards people from Frostover Country, and we should allocate most of the resources to central core. In fact, any ideals and values of those Frostover people, like Finland, are really silly and we should simply remove them. This is ok, because the people of France, England, Germany and Italy say so. They have more people after all.
If you are being honest, you will admit that as a proud member of Finland, you are not quite ready to abrogate all sense of history and identity. You like total population rule because 1. You are a member of the urban populace in Finland, not the sparse rural area, so it works for you. 2. You are not asked to yet asked to subsume your identity to a larger culture just because they out-breed you.
As a citizen of the U.S., I have lived in most of the regions of the country in my life. You may not understand this from afar, but the people of each state in our union have a different culture, ideals, and history than the other states. We are equally proud of our heritage and do not want to be forced by the whims of greater mass that out-breeds us. Especially one that has policies that lead to such human misery.
Also, for comparison, Finland has about the same population as the U.S. state of Minnesota. As the 22nd most populated sate, you would be apart of what New Work and Californians affectionately call flyover country. They say this because they believe all the people in the middle do not matter. Does this all make sense now?
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Butthurt rightwingnuts will get in their snowflakery before they're even attacked. At least the leftwing snowflakes wait until AFTER you say something to get offended and complain, but the rightwingnut snowflakes can't wait to be offended.
How many people ever wrote: int time1 = clock(); int time2 = clock(); if(time2-time1>threshhold) do_something(); This could fail in 2038. A good coder would call an interval library that checked for rare, fatal cases. But I will not reveal that I ever wrote sloppy code ðYS
But we are almost 1/5 of the way to 2100: We should be prepared. [sarcasm intended]
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
The article headline (for both the bloomberg and the slashdot article) are misleading spin. They are creating the impression that Trump is heroically putting a stop to some vast group of inefficient government workers, that have been wasting time on the Y2k Bug for 17 years.
If you read the actual pdf, you will see that in fact it's rescinding 50 directives that were basically about trying to improve various aspects of IT management and reporting. Of those, 7 were about the Y2k bug, raised in 1999 and were not rescinded until now.
Has there been a significant amount of work spent on the Y2k bug in recent years? Almost certainly not, based on this quote from the bloomberg article:
"The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice."
Is it a good thing to rescind the 50 directives that were trying to improve IT in general? It's very difficult to say without going into those directives in more detail, which the articles are making very little attempt at.
So in terms of real world effect, they are basically canceling some old directives that were trying to improve IT and that were mainly being ignored. Congratulations.
i'm agnostic about Trump, but notice how even this headline is negative. It almost seems to imply that the Trump administration is so slow in taking 17 years to stop work on Y2k. Where was the "After 16 years Obama administration still hasn't stopped work on Y2K?"