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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.
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.
Signed and dated: 6/15/17
Gotta keep track of those unsigned 32-bit int timestamps, they're going to creep up on you in 2038.
The issue isn't that this is bad per-se. It's that it's not very good. As the article points out, no one was really applying these regulations. Ultimately, this is grand standing more than anything else.
I'm always happy to see redundant legislation go away, but don't get grand delusions that this is Trump somehow removing burdens and making the government magically super efficient.
By "gamed the system", you mean "followed the system in place for 200+ years", right? And, according to your losing candidate, questioning this system is âoehorrifyingâ and "talking down our democracy" as recently as 2 weeks before the election?
Got any other deep thoughts to share?
It is evident that you don't understand how the Governments work. Unneeded/unenforced are traps for people/organizations that are targeted. An unused or little known regulation can wreck havoc with "out of favor" people and organizations. Laws that aren't enforced should be removed so that people/organizations can live and work in a functional manner.
Y2K38 bug already leaked over into politics:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar...
“I asked CBO to run the model going out and they told me that their **computer simulation crashes** in 2037 because CBO can’t conceive of any way in which the economy can continue past the year 2037 because of debt burdens,” said Ryan."
So the CBO's forecase software could get *up* to 2037, but not past it, i.e. it couldn't compute figures for 2038. What's the more logical explanation, a "does not compute" error, or that they were using Unix 32 bit time?
Luckily the century turned a year later...
Sig?
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.
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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.
He most certainly not removing burdens with the new burden that government software will now have y2k problems again.
One thing the simpler man doesn't understand is that problems like Y2K (or 2038) don't go away once the date has passed. Too small storage containers used in already existing data won't magically transform. Someone needs to make that happen, each and every time old data is accessed. Do a study of things like census records, and you'll be hit by the Y2K bug.
The very preparation for Y2K caused additional problems. Uncoordinated preparation caused forms that suddenly changed from YY/MM/DD to mandatory YYYY/MM/DD at arbitrary dates in the late 90s.
This means that you'll run into the problem when handling and comparing data from the same sources from before 2000.
Relatedly, the "2038 problem" will also still be with us long after 2038, because of all the data stored in signed 32-bit time format won't magically transform. Someone needs to make sure it's done.
The regulations are probably too specific, and focus on the specific instance of the problem when a generic regulation[*] would have been better. But then again, politicians who couldn't see the bigger picture existed back then too.
[*]: Like "All data is to be converted to representations not subject to container size prior to processing, or a justification for and implications of the limited container size must be documented."
Among the effects, this could lead to a resurgence of BCD and CPUs who handle them natively again, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
If it has systemd you wouldn't be able to read them anyway.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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...
I hear that will also be the year of the Linux Desktop.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No they won't. Get rid of the electoral college and everyone gets an equal say in who rules. The fact that more people live in place A than place B does not mean that the people in place B should be given more power in a democracy,
Please explain to me how having less than a third of the populace support the president translates to 'a broad, nationwide support'?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
so I I'm not buying insurmountable technical justifications other than simple lack of will.
It boils down to the fact that correctly handling time is complicated. Leap years, seconds, gregorian nonsense, .. the rules just pile up higher and higher. Nobody wants to touch that code and I dont blame them.
"His name was James Damore."
This is very simple, actually. The problem statement is, "how to best conduct a single majority vote election across multiple, independent entities of varying sizes and densities of the population"? The answer is, "hold a majority election in every independent entity and the winner overall of each election is the winner overall of the race." But what if the entities are of _vastly_ different sizes and densities? Then the answer is, "weight the individual elections by population."
The Electoral College is a perfectly legitimate solution to the problem. Maybe you're getting confused by the notion of a "College". There is a body of people that forms a College, but exists only as a formality, because someone must keep a record and report the results of the election. The College, for example, is temporary and changes at every election. It is honorary.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
>...but it is my understanding that the system was originally put into place to safeguard a takeover by a tyrant...
The electoral college is an attempt to balance political power between rural and urban voters. Its an adjustment to a pure democracy designed to weaken the "Tyranny of the majority".
The biggest challenge the founding fathers faced was balancing power between urban and rural constituents. This is arguably our greatest challenge today. This is why each state has 2 senators regardless of population and representatives based on population. The number of electors in the electoral college in each state is the sum of its U.S. senators and its U.S. representatives.
In our last election, rural voters preferred Trump and that is why the rural voter trumped the urban voter to override the popular vote.
Greed is the root of all evil.
get rid of the Electoral college and a few big cities run the nation
No they won't. Get rid of the electoral college and everyone gets an equal say in who rules.
Campaigning would only occur in major cities, so they would have a much larger impact than now.
The fact that more people live in place A than place B does not mean that the people in place B should be given more power in a democracy,
It's called federalism, and it was put in place for a reason. The founding fathers realized that even though we are one country, we are composed of several different cultures with different values. A law that might make sense in a metropolitan area might not make sense in a rural area, so you don't want the population centers making all the rules for everyone else.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.