Slashdot Mirror
Review:Year 2000 In A Nutshell
It says volumes about our times that when most Americans talk about the year 2000 they think not of the many symbolic or mystic implications of the Millenium, but of the mundane but potentially significant programming glitch that threatens many computer systems.
"Because programmers in earlier decades economized on space by cleverly dropping two digits," writes Langdon Winner in the Tech Knowledge Revue, "we are now obsessed with the problem and the costly challenge of minimizing its possible damage."
It's typical of the mass media's narrow-minded approach to technology to focus so obsessively on the worst possible consequences of Y2K computer problems that some people are planning to stockpile food, water and cash in case our collective lights go out. And it's typical of cyber-gurus geeks, programmers and Web developers to forget that there are political, social and cultural issues surrounding the approaching Millenium that go far beyond technics.
Winner, a political scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and one of the country's most thoughtful technology scholars, argues that the approach of the new century offers an occasion to ponder the condition of humanity and the planet that sustains us.
"How many of the world's nearly six billion people live well or in circumstances that are even marginally agreeable?," he wonders. "How many still suffer poverty, war, disease, illiteracy, and the other scourges of the species? Will the policies of global civilization merely magnify well-known ecological, economic and social ills? Or will the next century finding ingenious remedies?"
Nobody knows, and nobody's even talking about it much. The media's technology coverage has increasingly focused on Internet stock prices, Silicon Valley businesses, the gee-whiz computer gadgets of tomorrow, and the handful of panicked people digging bunkers in preparation for the supposed havoc to be wrought by the Y2K bug.
Small wonder some people are scared out of their wits. Few people outside the computer industry know how seriously to take the Y2K bug. Are predictions of possible chaos alarmist and exaggerated? Should reasonable people take steps to protect themselves and their families? Should we, as a culture, be taking the Y2K issue more seriously? Will we be able to withdraw our cash from banks next January? Turn on our faucets and furnaces? Will our E-Z passes still let us through the toll booth?
Journalists don't seem to have a clue. While every Internet stock blip is covered like the outbreak of World War III, Stories on Y2K range from the hysterical to the ignorant.
But there is at least one intelligent, useful and highly credible guide, "Year 2000 In A Nutshell", by Norman Shakespeare." ($19.95 www.oreilly.com). O'Reilly is perhaps the best publisher of technical and computing books in the United States. Its "Running Linux" and "Linux In A Nutshell" were so coherent and intelligently presented, I almost ordered "Year 2000" hoping it would make some sense of the approaching traumas.
It did.
"Year 2000" has O'Reilly's trademark clarity and organization. It contains one of the best overviews of the Year 2000 problem I've seen anywhere, along with a master plan for conversion projects, ways to identify Y2K problems and fix them, and reference information on the date and time functions in the computer languages most likely to be affected: COBOL (a business language), PL/1, Visual Basic C, and MVS LE.
For those who don't grasp the origins of this mess: decades ago, when programming code was tight, it was common practice to use two-digit storage (e.g. 69 for the year 1969) for date code within software. The earliest computer programmers had so little memory to work with that any trick for saving two bits was worthwhile. The chances that a year entered into records would need to begin with anything other than "19," seemed to unlikely that dropping the century digits was adopted as a memory-saving method.
As computers became more powerful, this abbreviated dating convention continued to be the standard, mostly out of habit.
In l950, asks Shakespeare, "who was even worried about how computers would handle data in 2050?"
But when the clock rolls over at midnight on the last day of December, l999, many of these older computers won't recognize "00" as the correct date. How odd in the Digital Age that poorly designed computer programs won't be able to handle the transition to the next century. The (Y2K) dilemma might render applications and hardware ineffective unless the original code is altered, an expensive, time-consuming but urgently necessary task. This is not merely an American, but a global problem. As politicians and Wall Street analysts like to remind us daily, we live in a global economy whose infrastructure literally is computer networks.
Small Year 2000 errors are already occurring, says "Year 2000." A computer program recently determined that a prisoner's release date, 1/10/15, had passed and he was almost released after serving only a few days. New York Stock Exchange executives want to close on the 31st of December in l999, because NYSE managers fear that all prior dealings could somehow be accidentally invalidated due to Year-2000 computer errors. Malfunctioning programs could cause businesses to lose track of critical systems that affect both production and cash flow.
For organizations and institutions in the healthy and public safety areas, Y2K problems could be life-threatening. Lawyers and firms are already cranking up in preparation for all sorts of litigation, as companies and governments try and pin blame and responsibility on someone. And it will be tough for companies to argue that they weren't warned or didn't have time to prepare.
There is widespread disagreement about just how urgent and dangerous the Y2K problems will prove to be. Some warn of the collapse of power and utility systems, along with banking and other financial operations. I know sober and knowledgeable computer programmers and engineers who say they won't fly on the last day of December in case air traffic control systems fail, and who plan to set aside cash in case banks shut down.
Plenty of other knowledgeable computer experts ridicule these alarms and insist that the disruptions will be numerous but minor. Meanwhile, engineers and programmers are making a fortune helping government agencies and corporations scramble to get their programs in order.
For most Americans, it's all as disturbing as it is bewildering.
Clearly, some of these fears are real. Many computer programs still aren't ready to handle the transition from l999 to 2000. Not only are most computers and applications suspect, but electromechanical equipment, networking and process-control hardware and operating systems could also be affected. Unless all such systems are checked and converted, there could be global repercussions.
While most banks, utilities and government agencies are working to update their programs and applications, nobody really knows how companies or countries -- especially outside of the United States and Europe - haven't, or how their problems might affect a world of networked computing systems.
"Year 2000" is sober and clear-headed. The book doesn't warn of apocalyptic disasters so much as smaller problems: the point-of-sale terminal at the counter of your favorite diner won't print a receipt; the gas pump won't work because the date set by the company's back-office computer is invalid; the parking gate at work won't function because its logic has been reset; elevator buttons all flash simultaneously since routine service appears a century overdue. And operating systems on computers fail to work because of network failures sparked by invalid dates. When you call your Help Desk, the phone may not accept your code because it automatically expires extensions that haven't been used for a year or more.
This book suggests that Y2K problems will be greater than most Americans think, yet fall well short of media-invoked notions of Armageddon. And Shakespeare reminds us that in our litigious culture, the biggest costs might be legal bills.
"The actual cost of achieving Year-2000 compliance will go far beyond analysis and conversion costs," says Shakespeare. "Production delays, reduced market share due to poor PR and media reports, and the loss of profitability or important data will all affect companies. Once the dust has settled and everyone is compliant, another ugly chapter will unfold: the search for culprits within companies, and the search for corporate accountability by shareholders and victims of accidents or other losses."
According to "Year 2000", the U.S. government is budgeting $30 billion for conversion, and Fortune 500 corporations have earmarked between $20 million and $200 million. That's excluding, in most cases, the cost of litigation, which without some form of government intervention, could exceed that of conversion. Government figures suggest that only 30 per cent of small to medium size companies (those with between five and 100 staffers) will be even close to compliance by the big day.
Small wonder Americans are increasingly coming to associate the Millenium with still more computer troubles instead of more symbolic and ultimately, much more significant, issues.
This, Winner suggests, has a hidden and poignant irony. Our culture has become so slavishly dependent on digital technology that it is increasingly unwilling to face any technological issue other than Y2K.
"Among the issues that cry out for attention as a new era dawns is the widening gap of inequality that characterizes the world's population, " he writes. "Our much heralded global economy has been good at producing a handful of millionaires and billionaires, but a third of the earth's people live in grinding poverty.
"While we're at it," Winner suggests, "why not tackle some of the 'bugs' that threaten the environment that we hand to our children? How about fixing the technologies that spew millions of tons of CO2 into the air each day, exacerbating global warming? How about replacing the systems that pour toxic chemicals into the air, water and land, slowly poisoning human populations and other species?"
Winner is right, but he needn't hold his breath if he thinks journalism will suddenly start covering technology in this more detached and thoughtful way. Like other scholars of technology, he guesses that if enough time, money and effort are invested this year, most of our computers will actually remember that a new Millenium has arrived.
It's the humans that might forget.
You can buy this book at Computer Literacy and help Slashdot out.
We have been replacing the industries that put toxic elements in the air and soil - pollution has decreased dramatically in the past two decades. (I only know the US data well) We have much cleaner air and soil than ten or twenty years ago. There continues to be improvement there, too. That said, two of the other goals are rather hard to achieve at the same time. Decreasing poverty is extremely well associated with increasing CO2. It is practically impossible to decrease the worldwide poverty rate without increasing CO2 production worldwide. On the bright side, there is a scheduled population crash in Europe, as birth rates have fallen well below replacement rate throughout the continent, leading to a perhaps 50% shrinkage in 50 years.
Bah. What kind of idiots store dates internally as a character string (The only way shaving off the century would make any sort of difference), when there's more compact integer forms?
The real problem with Y2K is when programs have to read in human-readable dates - like the one in the URL that brought me to this form. :P At least, it looks like a date.
Luckily, all is not so doom-and-gloom. Pollution, esp. in the US, has decreased a huge amount over the last twenty and ten years. The air, soil, and water are all much cleaner. Industries are becoming cleaner and being replaced. It can be done, and it is being done.
Unfortunately, there is a conflict between the two goals of reducing poverty and reducing CO2. Frankly, to reduce poverty we must increase CO2 production, given current technology. There's not really a way out, unless there's a population decrease. Luckily again, the world population growth rate is slowing down, especially in Europe, where they are heading for a crash, as birth rates have dipped dangerously below replacement rates. (Of course, this leaves all those unfunded Social Security/pension plans in _real_ trouble)
Your review would have been a lot easier to read if it did not contain all those question marks in places where one would expect apostrophes.
ObMoreOnTopic: Social, environmental etc problems are certainly important, but quite unrelated to whether or not we will be going into a new millenium (which, as we all know, will happen at the start of 2001).
Bas.
Hey Jon, where did your k-rad article on NetSex go?!?!?
"Because programmers in earlier decades economized on space by cleverly dropping two digits," writes Langdon Winner in the Tech Knowledge Revue, "we are now obsessed with the problem and the costly challenge of minimizing its possible damage."
:)
I think that 6 digit dates were selected because they represent and natural range for humans to relate to.
Six digit dates are just as "good" as eight digit dates for almost all purposes. But they have defined limitations. The problem we are having with Y2K is that very few people recognized those limitations and programmed for them
A date with a 2 digit year (yy/mm/dd or mm/dd/yy) has a range of only one hundred years: 01/01/00 to 12/31/99. Because there isn't a century, using this date format, we have a problem comparing a date that comes before the century boundary with a date that comes after the century boundary. For example 99/12/31 is less than 00/01/01 but the numbers would indicate otherwise. The only solution is to derive a century making the assumption that if the year is greater than some arbitrary number, say 30, then the century is equal to 19, otherwise, the century is equal to 20. The pivot point can be calculated from the current year and give a correct century in perpetuity.
A date with a 4 digit year (ccyy/mm/dd or mm/dd/ccyy) as a range of 10 thousand years, 01/01/0000 to 12/31/9999. This date suffers from similar problems as the first, but on a larger scale. Think about the Y10K problem. It will be here sooner than you think.
Each date format is a distinct data "type" in the same manner as (hang with me here) an "integer" versus a "long integer" is in the computer language C. An integer field in C takes 2 bytes of memory and ranges (can hold numbers) from -32768 to 32767. A long integer takes 4 bytes and ranges from -2147483648 to 2147483647.
An integer would be suitable for holding counts that will always be less than 32767 just as a date with a 2 digit year will be suitable for events that have less than a 100 year range. Which is almost everything. For example a classroom size is *always* less than 32767 and the date a child started school can be held in a date with a 2 digit year. Why? Very unlikely that schools will keep records for more than a few years. If the meat on your grocers shelf has a date of 01/01/99 you won't be confused as to whether it is 1899 or 2099!
All dates should be manipulated by a "date calculator' subroutine or called program whose processes would include:
1 Conversion of a date from 1 format to another.
2 Comparison of 2 dates to determine which is greater.
3 Comparison of a date to "starting" and "ending" dates to determine if it is in range.
4 Computation of elapsed days between dates.
5 Computation of elapsed months between dates.
6 Adjust a date by a number of days forward or backward.
7 Adjust a date by a number of months forward or backward.
8 Returns the system date to format specified.
9 Returns the day of the week
Date formats (but not limited to) could be:
Gregorian:
Yymmdd
Mm/dd/yy
Mm/dd/ccyy
Ccyymmdd
Mmddyy
Ccmmddyy
Also alphabetic such as Month name dd yy where Month name = Jan...Dec, etc
Julian:
Ccyyddd
Yyddd
You've got enough of a credibility problem as it is, believe me. Fix your damn ????'s once and for all, OK??
Three things:
1- Global warming is a fraud.
2- How can a symbolic problem be more significant than an actual technical problem?
3- Income disparity across the world is largely a direct result of freedom disparity.
You know, we should always make sure there are a few people who 'feel' (as opposed to 'think') the way Mr. Katz does. It serves as a great example and warning to others.
BTW, get an editor or somebody to read over your work before you post it.
Yes - but when you increase the taxes, you're making more people poor. Increasing taxes on Fuel drives more people into poverty.
I tend to be a skeptic on global warming, at least
in the conventional sense. A lot of the research
done on global warming is funded by the government, whose high officials have said that
it's "irresponsible" to come to conclusions about
global warming that are contrary to the majority.
I have (in various places) read about two large
potential sources of global warming that don't
get coverage when they want to talk about their
latest global warming treaty, one of them manmade;
The sun is currently at a 400 year maximum in its
energy output. That could be causing a lot of the
problem, not just because of increaced heat, but
because of the way the solar wind, sunspots, etc.,
affect the weather.
The other problem, which you'll probably never
hear about, is the one generated by dams. Since
they greatly inhibit the movement of sediments
and minerals into the coastal estuaries and the
oceans, they're rather bad for the ecology in
those areas. Since 95+ % of the CO2 "uptake"
or recycling is done in the oceans (not in
rainforests, although I think rainforests are
important for other reasons), things like
Hoover Dam, or the Three Gorges Dam, tend to
have a bad effect, ultimately, on the level
of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I think "ocean thermal" power plants, depending
on their mode of operation, could fix this, and
provide power at the same time.
Another thing some people are studying is simply
dumping Iron Sulfide into the ocean, to jump-start
the production of algae.
Finally, as for other power sources, nuclear power
doesn't produce any greenhouse gases.
Phil
(who doesn't have his password at work)
Did you bother to notice that the "informative" site you posted (www.euy2k.com) was /gasp/ selling books!!...sure they want you to believe that the utilities are going to collapse, they sell more books to scared survivalists...
/.ers and I understand the problem, and i'm not scared. Neither are the thousands of businesses that fixed their mission critical systems in '93.
Same with Gary North, his site (www.garynorth.com) is easily the funniest out there. Come on people, it's the clueless non-technical pundits that are causing this hysteria.
I'm a computer science major, like many
Running Netscape 4.06 (under NT) the article shows correctly, with ? where they are supposed to be and not anywhere else.
To avoid a nulcear misshap, all countries pocessing them can momentrarily switch off one minute before y2k and switch on after one-minte after y2k, one by one(possible?) to see if any one mal-fires.
the rest of the world, including the united states, is increasing too fast in population. one of the worst things we are doing is building cities over farmland.
shhh!
I'm making a lot of money off this!
there is a big difference between being a CS major and joining the real world. if you are just a CS major in college, you will have a horribly rude awakening about what goes on outside of the safety shell of school.....any graduate know what I mean....
>Three things:
>
> 1- Global warming is a fraud.
So it is, huh? I guess 99% of the great scientists in the world, including practically every Nobel prize winner is suddenly wrong, huh?
I'd have to agree with the last guy,
YOU ARE AN IDIOT!!!
Look out, my truck thinks it's 1900!
It didn't exist then!
It's going to blow up!
It's absurd to think that every electronic chip ever manufactured has a date input and will cease to function if given a 0 input. Binary, boys and girls, TTL voltages, too simple to care about the date. How in hell is a fuel injector chip going to know or care if the year is 00!
Unless you're selling a book...then spread that fear... the "embedded system" in your stove will quit at midnight!...your hair dryer may spit flame!
Stop the insanity!
Was how we stored all our dates. Format YYJJJ, where JJJ is the Julian Date. Was great for sorting, efficient for storage and easy to read in dumps. All space savings had a flow on effect. One less tape meant a greater chance that the job would run to completion without a tape error. The tape record contained about 15 date fields.
There were two online databases where a team of DBAs would perform contortions to support 100+ users with transaction times 5 secs. All with 16MB of main memory. Every BYTE on the database was scrutinised for maximum space and access efficiency.
Was it the best thing in hind sight? No. Did it make day-to-day operations efficient? Yes.
Regards Anthony David
He did however manage to squeeze in an advertisement for a lame book (only $19.95).
An intriguing aspect of the y2k issue, as was hinted at by the author, is the media attention it has received while other potentially severe and equally deserving problems of technological origin receive little or no attention. Take for instance ozone depletion: a similar tragic scenario can be painted for how the problem stems from industrialization, on how the scientific/technological world realized at least to some degree the scope of the problem early enough to draft policy on the matter, and yet the problem is a dead issue in the media and, consequently, in the political machine here in the U.S.
The central difference between the two appears to be the clear-cut "day of reckoning" that we have with y2k. If only we could convince textile-industry pollution to wreak havok on, say, Sept. 4, 2003, topsoil depletion due to inferior farming techniques to dismantle the world's economies on March 9, 2011, etc., each spaced sufficiently far apart that the public would not tire of crises. We could ride the wave of litigation to a better tomorrow, beneficial public policy might actually be made for a change, and Cambell's soup sales would boom every three years or so. (And if you buy that, I got a bridge to the 21st century I'd like to sell you...).
In the second place, programmers can't control what the media covers. Programmers didn't refuse to cover the topic as a serious concern until 1997, and programmers aren't refusing to cover other topics today. In many ways, Y2K is a problem caused by journalists.
Finally, programmers can't control the fact that people are attracted to relatively simple problems with clear solutions. Even you, Jon Katz, made an oreo with crunchy social issues on the outside and a nice soft filling of technical stuff.
The simple fact is that the technical glitches are easily seen and fixed. Social issues, such as modern slavery in Africa, are hard to confirm and nearly impossible to fix.
Trivial example: a local elementary school has been raising money to buy slaves and set them free... and been critized (with justification, IMHO) for actually encouraging enslavement because there is now an international market for them! If slavery is a problem when each slave is worth $5, what happens when the going rate is $50? $200? More? (This is the same reason many people think decriminalization of drugs is worth considering. Drugs are bad. Corruption of the police and courts are worst.)
If you don't buy slaves and set them free, what do you do? Send in the Marines and undoubtably kill some of them accidently? Organize an international boycott/blockcade and get all warm&fuzzy while the real problem goes unchallenged? Let ask the Iraqi people their opinion...
I hate to be pestimistic, but humanity has been struggling with these social issues for at least 5000 years. I seriously doubt that we'll fix it, globally, in my lifetime. That doesn't mean we don't try, but there's a lot of wisdom in the Eastern philosophy which says that the best action is often inaction. The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) should serve as a recent cautionary tale.
And instead it's got people's knickers in a twist.
I'd like to see how techies could conspire to reorganise things from the ground up. Sort of along the lines of Bruce Sterling's Manifesto of January 3, 2000 .
What an overstatement.
First of all, this says nothing about our times. Look back in history and you see that, in EVERY time, in EVERY era, human beings have been convinced that armageddon is just around the corner. If it's not the ending of computing as we know it, it's nuclear annihilation, the rapture, or volcanos and earthquakes wrought by wrathful gods. If we have nothing else to be concerned about, we have the ever-present gigantic meteor from outer space, which I'm sure will return to its number-one status of probable source of global peril on January 2, 2000. (Don't worry, Katz, ecological dysfunction will be number two.)
Secondly, it is humans' concern with symbolism and/or mysticism that brings about this sort of hand-wringing in the first place.
Lastly, if one is to be concerned with problems that one does not understand and cannot possibly do anything about, it is a tad bit more rational to be primarily concerned with the ones that might lead to one's OWN peril.
Unless your tax on gas makes the people too poor to afford a new car. Although a tax on gas will reduce the consumption (isn't gas already taxed like 60 and 70 cents on the gallon in some states?) it won't be as dramatic as you thing. Due to the layout of most of the communities in the US, people HAVE to drive to get anywhere (no bus/train/bike paths, and people are out in the suburbs) so a tax on gas is like a tax on water. People will still use it, but they will try to conserve somewhat.
I read the internet for the articles.
On the contrary, a natural instinct would be that in 50 years, your software would be obsolete (and it should be - for example, Unix today is not the same as Unix in 1971). Why bother with algorithms to calcualte dates from 16 bit data, when the language (COBOL) allows you to more easily manipulate digits? It's not the programmers fault - it' managements fault for not having the foresight to replace outdated software. If you use a modern computer with an operating system, you know that over time, functionality changes, and new / better ways are developed to handle situations. I remember a few years ago, change management (or risk management) was a very popular subject with managers. Basically, change management deals with the process of evolution in business. I think it's funny that nobody mentions change / risk management when discussing Y2k problems, because that exact management should have dealt with the problem years ago.
By the way, 2038 is only a problem if your Unix is still 32-bit. I believe Linux (and other Unices as well) on 64 bit platforms has already solved that problem. If you are still using a 32 bit system in 39 years, you deserve what you get.
Why on earth should any rational human pay any attention at all to a reviewer whose research is so unbelievably wretched that he takes the idiot Winner seriously?
Craig
Basically he's just another postmodern academic spouting touchy-feely kindergarten Marxism.
Craig
To the two anonymous idiots who posted above: if you want some references, write me.
Craig
Who, precisely?
> It is capitalism as a system that is the problem...
Odd, most of the rest of the world has concluded that capitalism is the solution, a proposition which is supported by the history of (at least) the last thousand years. What new facts have you unearthed?
Craig
No, I'm saying that the history of the last thousand years shows that every conceivable alternative to capitalism produces results that are disastrous by any rational criterion. Socialism is simply a return to the medieval idea that an elite needs to decide for the common people what to do with their lives, since they're too stupid to decide for themselves; all it adds is the window-dressing of voting.
> Capitalism is a recent thing, popularized by such great thinkers as Adam Smith ...
Nope, capitalism is simply what happens when people are free to make their own economic arrangements. It's been around for a very long time. So has socialism; note that the government of ancient Rome provided free bread to its citizens. Write me for references.
> ... pits people against each other and discourages cooperation.
How many people had to work together cooperatively to make your car, or your computer, or your ballpoint pen? Capitalism encourages cooperation to a greater extent than any known economic system; that's why the 19th century -- having for the most part gotten rid of mercantilism and the feudal system -- was by comparison anyway so peaceful compared to the twentieth century. (Notice what the remnants of feudalism and mercantilism did to Ireland in 1848-49, for example, and observe that the system under socialism as proposed by "agrarian reformers" would be little different.)
> Read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle ...
Upton Sinclair was an idiologically-motivated liar. References upon request.
Craig
Consider just these two facts --
- Over the last thirty years there has been no global atmospheric temperature rise; in fact, the best evidence says there's been a very slight cooling (within the range of expected normal variation).
- There has been a warming in this century, but nearly all of it occurred before the second world war, while most of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere happened after the war.
In fact, most of the worlds climatologists do not believe any serious global warming is occurring now. References on request.> You won't happen to represent the oil industry, would you?
No, I represent the five or so billion people whose health and well-being are endangered by mendacious fascists with megaphones.
Craig
Done. In fact, I've lived and worked near both, and (modulo the sheer size of the plant) a nuke is a much better neighbor than an oil-fired plant. Much cleaner, for one thing.
> Three Mile Island ... Cherynoble (sp) ...
Chernobyl was a wonderful example of socialist engineering; even the original design engineers warned that the graphite-based sheilding design was grossly inadequate and accident-prone, but of course the government had more pressing concerns at the time than the mere safety of its citizens.
TMI, on the other hand, showed that in spite of completely wrong decisions by operations personnel at every point during the incident, the plant design avoided any danger to the surrounding area.
(Basically, what happened was that a valve stuck open. During the next six hours the plant repeatedly tried to shut itself down but the operators, misunderstanding the cause of the problem, kept overriding the automatic systems.)
Observe that radiation never rose above normal background levels anywhere outside the plant's boundary, notwithstanding continuous mismanagement.
Craig
I agree that y2k is overhyped.
However it did make sense to use 2 diget dates in cobol programs. Cobol didn't provide an easy way to store dates ie base intiger type. You could however do lots of neat things with money. Cobol is still the number one language (lines of code) because buiness needs map well to cobol making cobol an efficant language to program in.
Remember cobol was deisgned in the early 60s, and was one of the first non machine languages used. They didn't have the binifit of modern knowlege of how to design a langue, and it shows. However cobol turns out to be good enough that it isn't worth the bother of changing, minor issues like y2k are delt with.
don't forget that many of these programs were written on punch cards which have been destroyed by floods or mice, leaving only the compiled version. (stored on mag tape, most importantly lacking the comments)
PCs and unix have problems with y2k, but compared to the old cobol code (especcially the lost source code) that is a minor problem.
Don't forget too that the correct date isn't important to many things. Where I work we have told customers that the boxes we stoped sell in 1985 won't work, upgrade to our latest box. They respond by setting the date to 1972 or something. Not a big deal for a router, or a small buiness cash register. Come to think of it several small buinesses in town are using a mechanicl cash register that cannot work byond 1970, but they set the date to 1950 and keep going.
Having 6-12 months worth of food is a good idea for a lot of reasons, not just for the possible fallout of Y2K. I live in an earthquake zone.
Anyway, I don't think that Y2K is overhyped. I think it is underhyped. The thing most of us who are preparing are afraid of is panicky irrational underprepared neighbors, not starvation.
Frightened people have a great capacity to be grand-mahl shitheads, especially in large groups.
If the government or the media could convince people to plunk down $50-$100 on minimal food storage, anything else that might happen would be bearable.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Most farmers are definitely not relying on anything that depends on Y2K stuff. On Dec 31, 1999 there will be 90,000 turkeys at my parents farm, and on Jan 1, 2000, there will be 90,000 turkeys on the farm. If the processing plant wants some of those, they will fill up their trucks with diesel (that they have in private tanks attached to analog number pumps), and drive to the farm, load up some of the turkeys and cut them up with knives.
The bank came out to my parents to check on their "Y2K compliance". My dad looked at them and said, "I'll write a different date on this piece of paper." Basically, there wasn't anything related to raising the turkey's that was directly dependant on anything affected by Y2K bugs.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
1) Millennium
2) Millennial
3) starts 01/01/2001, midnight,
366 days removed from 01/01/2000
Various ramblings
Jon's article talks about potential Y2K computer problems being used as a smokescreen to avoid dialog on the various (and much more serious) social and environmental problems that will face us in the new millenium. This message has already been expressed very forcefully by Bruce Sterling in his "Manifesto of January 3, 2000":
h tml
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian.
And is pursued in more detail on the Viridian mailing list:
http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/
How do we get people to address the real problems? Marketing!
Check it out.
You don't get the point.
People will have an incentive to buy new cars that use less fuel. Companies will have incentive to produce cars that use less fuel.
It's possible, with today's technology, to design car motors that use up to 10x less fuel. But since it's more expensive, and less powerful, people don't buy it.
With 2 bytes you get storage of 2 ascii characters (the first of which is from the range 0-9 and the second of which is from the range 0-9)entered by hu-mans into places in databases and such, often with another (full line - 2 characters) per record, and this was back when "RAM" was assembled by hand out of teeny tiny ferrite toroids and wires.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
As I recall, somewhere in the original Star Trek they said that the StarDate calender started counting with the first moon landing. Maybe we could do something like that with 01/01/00. But depending on what happens that day will future sci-fi shows start out "...FubarDate 90210.7.."?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So how much of this book actually covers the details around the Y2k problem, as opposed to spouting off on how we have to put a flower in every child's hand? Admittedly, the other things he mentioned ARE problems to be dealt with, but I don't think people are going to be buying this look looking for a way to end poverty. If the issue is viewed from a strong technical side, I'd be willing to take a look at it, and see what the author has to say.. :]
Ah well, it'll be an interesting New Years to say the least.. I partied hard this year on the Strip, so next year we'll probably have a quiet party sipping glasses of wine and holding loaded shotguns.
C
--
driph
"Jon, I'd really like to see you do a Y2K article for Slashdot. That is, a piece allowing for the fact that 99% of us are intimately familiar with the basic aspects of the problem. Pieces like the above are great for Wired, but not so exciting for ./ "
I agree with you here.. I would like to see Katz put together an article that doesnt spend 1/3 of the text explaining what a XX versus XXXX century date is.
Yeah, he does write editorials, not technical pieces... so what's your view on the whole Y2K thing, Jon? Did Year 2000 in a Nutshell have any impact on your thinking towards the matter?
C
--
driph
Pieces like the above are great for Wired, but not so exciting for ./
Yes, here at "dotslash" we're all so gosh darn brilliant we can't possibly deign to read anything that we may or may not alreday know. I was thinking of contributing an article on IPv6, but since everyone must know all about that I won't bother.
Geoff Hamilton
Check it out at: http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~bgannon /booksearch/
Let me know what you think, it will find the cheapest price on the net... if I'm missing some sites let me know.
Football Sports Contest - Win $500 for having an e
Now, what are the details -- or the major points -- that we're missing? I feel like we're all examining the works of pointillists under a maginifying glass. Help us take a step back and figure out what the picture is.
If something has a half-life of 10,000 years it's not decomposing very quickly, which means it's not producing very much radiation per unit time. The stuff which is actually worth _worrying about_ has a half-life of weeks or months or days.
Look at it another way: at least it is decomposing! We use chlorine to clean our pools and protect our drinking water but chlorine gas (and chlorine bleach, for that matter) stays poisonous just about forever.
Three Mile Island was just about the worst accident imaginable and yet no civilians were ever endangered by it. I deny the "could devastate an entire eastern state" claim; what are your assumptions there? And while you're considering worst case scenarios, compare it to a big hydroelectric dam breaking...
Check out Th e Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon. Especially the nuclear power chapter.
I play Nerd-Folk!
DEMORONISER
Correct Moronic Microsoft HTML
This page describes, in Unix manual page style, a Perl program available for downloading from this site which corrects
numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps
you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.
NAME
demoroniser - correct moronic and gratuitously incompatible HTML generated by Microsoft applications
SYNOPSIS
demoroniser [ -u ] [ -wcols ] [ infile ] [ outfile ]
DESCRIPTION
Many slick, high profile corporate Web sites I visit seemed to exhibit terrible grammar completely inconsistent with the
obvious investment in graphics and design. Apostrophes and quote marks were frequently omitted, and every couple of
paragraphs words were run together which should have been separated by a punctuation mark of some kind.
This remained a mystery to me until I wanted to convert a presentation I'd developed in 1996 using Microsoft PowerPoint into
a set of Web pages. A friend was kind enough to run the presentation through PowerPoint's "Save as HTML" feature (I have
abandoned all use of Microsoft products, so I did not have a current version of PowerPoint which includes this feature). When
I got the PowerPoint-generated HTML back and viewed it in my browser, I discovered that it contained precisely the same
grammatical errors I'd noted on so many Web sites, and which certainly were not present in my original presentation.
A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a
computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are
written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this
prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own "extension" to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in
Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0x82 through 0x95--this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and
Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters.
These characters include open and close single and double quotes, em and en dashes, an ellipsis and a variety of other things
you've been dying for, such as a capital Y umlaut and a florin symbol. Well, okay, you say, if Microsoft want to have their own
little incompatible character set, why not? Because it doesn't stop there--in their inimitable fashion (who would want
to?)--they aggressively pollute the Web pages of unknowing and innocent victims worldwide with these characters, with the
result that the owners of these pages look like semi-literate morons when their pages are viewed on non-Microsoft platforms
(or on Microsoft platforms, for that matter, if the user has selected as the browser's font one of the many TrueType fonts
which do not include the incompatible Microsoft characters).
You see, "state of the art" Microsoft Office applications sport a nifty feature called "smart quotes." (Rule of thumb--every
time Microsoft use the word "smart," be on the lookout for something dumb). This feature is on by default in both Word and
PowerPoint, and can be disabled only by finding the little box buried among the dozens of bewildering option panels these
products contain. If enabled, and you type the string,
"Halt," he cried, "this is the police!"
"smart quotes" transforms the ASCII quote characters automatically into the incompatible Microsoft opening and closing
quotes. ASCII single and double quotes are similarly transformed (even though ASCII already contains apostrophe and single
open quote characters), and double hyphens are replaced by the incompatible em dash symbol. What other horrors occur, I
know not. If the user notices this happening at all, their reaction might be "Thank you Billy-boy--that looks ever so much
nicer," not knowing they've been set up to look like a moron to folks all over the world.
You see, when you export a document as text for hand-editing into HTML, or avail yourself of the "Save as HTML" features
in newer versions of Office applications, these incompatible, Microsoft-specific characters remain in place. When viewed by
a user on a non-Microsoft platform, they will not be displayed properly--most browsers seem to just drop them, as opposed to
including a symbol indicating an undisplayable character. Hence, the apparently ungrammatical text, which the author of the
page, editing on a Microsoft platform, will never be aware of.
Having no desire to hand-edit the HTML for a long presentation to correct a raft of Microsoft-induced incompatibilities, I
wrote a Perl program, the demoroniser, to transform Microsoft's "junk HTML" into at least a starting point for something I'd
consider presentable on my site. In addition to replacing the incompatible characters with HTML-compliant equivalents
wherever possible (a few rarely-encountered characters which can't be translated result in warning messages if
encountered), the following sloppy or downright wrong HTML is corrected.
The missing semicolon at the end of numeric character escapes (=) is supplied.
Numeric renderings of special characters ( &) are replaced with readable equivalents.
Unquoted tags containing non-alphanumeric characters are quoted.
PowerPoint's mis-nesting of and tags is corrected.
PowerPoint's boneheaded use of
- and
tags to accomplish paragraph breaks is corrected and the proper
tags are removed.tags inserted.
Missing tags in text-only slides are inserted.
Nugatory
Unmatched
tags in headings are removed.
Idiot "paragraph-long lines" are broken into something suitable for editing with a normal text editor.
OPTIONS
-u Print how-to-call information and a summary of options.
-wcols Wrap output lines at column cols. By default, lines are wrapped at column 72. A cols specification of 0 disables line
wrapping. demoroniser attempts to wrap lines so as to preserve their meaning. Lines are broken at white space
whenever possible. If this cannot be done, a line longer than the cols specification will remain in the output HTML.
BUGS
demoroniser is a Perl script. In order to use it, you must have Perl installed on your system. demoroniser was developed
using Perl 4.0, patch level 36.
FILES
If no outfile is specified, output is written to standard output. If no infile is specified, input is read from standard input.
SEE ALSO
perl(1)
Download demoroniser.zip
AUTHOR
John Walker
http://www.fourmilab.ch/
This software is in the public domain. Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, without any conditions or restrictions. This
software is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
by John Walker
January 16th, 1998
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
we all know the millenium *really* starts on Tue Jan 19 2038, somewhere around 3am GMT.
Look like it's time to switch to Linux for good John. You've been made to look like an idiot by Microsoft "smart quotes" - a prime example of de-commodification of standards. Microsoft smart quotes are those specially formatted `` , '' and ' (as single chars) symbols. Applications running on windows tend to through them in regardless of what charset they are supposed to be using. They're characters with decimal codes somewhere in the 128-159 range.
They don't work on anything except Windows. That's why we have to read through all those ?'s in your text.
From someone on the Ottawa-Carleton LUG mailing list:
The insidious bit is that applications get them without asking (or wanting) them. - Richard Perrin
The questions marks are from Netscape in Linux incorrectly formatting the HTML code.
Uhhh. No. Read De-commodification below. The problem in that's it's not proper HTML. (Or even a proper text charset).
- Richard Perrin
Actually the problem IS with the OS, specifically with the API that the OS provides to the applications. This API (for writing text) in this case doesn't conform to the proper codage standard.
Linux in this case is merely a reference to his current project of getting it running. I agree that if he were working on a Mac (or in BeOS, MS-DOS, UNIX, or hell, even on a PDP-11 connected to a DecWriter paper terminal) he wouldn't have this problem.
He does have a problem when writing HTML using any application that uses the standard Windows API. Check out RandySC's post for a detailed description of the problem and a good program to fix it.
As for the decent apps on Linux, who can beat vi, sed, awk and emacs for all your integrated office suite needs? ;-) Oh yeah, throw in Netscape for easy writing of busted HTML.
Seriously, I've never found myself wanting in the apps department, I just wish they'd develop Total Annihilation and others for Linux.
- Richard Perrin
maybe it's just me, but i find it very fitting that this time around our millenial fears are so fundamentally secular.
we've replaced religion with technology.
My other car is a cons.
Yes, inquiring minds want to know... Too spicy for slashdot?
My computer. My Way. Linux.
--
Howard Roark, Architect
Howard Roark, Architect
I believe in a Man's right to exist for his own sake.
I have done y2k consulting for banks and powercompanies. They arent ignoring it. The only thing that is going to cause problems for y2k is panic the media is creating. This is the digital age and everyone is affected by a computer system somehow its those that dont understand and rely on the media for technical information that will panic and cause problems. I had a woman ask me about her appliances, I told her did you have to set the date on your washing machine last time you lost power? no? then dont worry. Computers will not crash, they will show an incorrect date which will foul up programs that rely on the YEAR for computations. Thats all people. There is no line of code that says:
if (year_current(yy) - year_previous(xx) 0) over_heat_reactor_core(TRUE);
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
That said, poverty does not exist because there isn't enough stuff being produced. Poverty exists because the resources are being consumed in a monsterously inequitable manner. The wealthiest 5% or so of all nations out-consume the planet's ability in nearly all nations, and most everyone in the wealthiest nations (esp. here in the Good Ol' U S of A) overconsumes.
Yes, in the high-tech nations things have gotten cleaner. Talk to the Ogoni people of Nigeria and ask them if things have gotten cleaner in the past two decades. Europe's population may be crashing just in time to make room for floods of 3rd world refugees. Look at India's birthrate, for example.
For the most comprehensive look at the numbers I've found, check out the State of the World" series from the Worldwatch Institute.
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
The year 2000 issue is mostly hype. Think about it. Computer companies now have a reason to demand that their customers upgrade. Software companies will follow in the same manner.
Governments now have a reason to raise taxes to pay for all the new hardware and software. Banks will justify raising fees to pay for the upgrades.
Insurance companies will raise their costs. And on and on..... It will be a buyers boon in the markets, especially after all the fools buying heavily inflated stocks, aka Yahoo at 250+???, panic. As always their will be winners and loosers, what makes the difference is who understands the game, and who doesn't.
Oh, one more thing. Expect to see governments taking advantage of the ignorance that abounds. Expect to see the executive branch grab even more power with the use of states of emergency. I doubt we will see marshall law, if the executive branch is cleaver enough, they will grab the power in ways that few americans pay attention too. The biggest danger is not Y2k, its our collective ignorance.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
Cool :)
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
This is an excellent, well-thought out article, so all you nay-sayers can... I think you get the picture. I have been waiting for somebody out there to point out the SOCIAL CONTEXT of the "Y2K Problem" for months -- instead all I get is moronic techno-visionary bullshit about the millenium, or on the other side of the equasion, computer illiterate media morons blathering about issues they don't understand.
Let's be clear: a small percentage of the world's population is profiting at the expense of the majority. Until technology becomes a tool for aleviating that problem (which it could be, but isn't), we should be subjecting its industry to ruthless criticism. It is capitalism as a system that is the problem, and we need to use our combined knowledge and energy to make the next millenium one that belongs to the entire human race, rather than to a few select masters.
ryan
When Jesus was born is totaly unimportant, there's still 1000 years in a millennium, not 999 like all the bozos seem to think.
--