Slashdot Mirror
9/9/99: News? Nein!
SEWilco writes "As Slashdot readers know, today's date abbreviated as 9999 may cause problems in some older computers. So far only one report of a Tandy problem.
9s-day no problem in New Zealand and Hong Kong, Guam OK and USA still has electric power on 9/9/99.
But seriously, folks, today is a big day for numerologists, pagans, and Nostradamus. So far today the NASA Near-Earth Object Program has not seen a comet coming to hit us. But what is so special about the Era of Alexandria 7491 anyway?"
Yes, it is quite nice to see other techno-Pagans floating around :)
Selena FireSinger
-- Shadowcat
kageneko@kageneko.net
"I can roleplay. I can frag. I can PK while you lag."
I agree. If I absolutely had to encode a date as two bytes, I would have not used BCD as that would require three. Instead, I would have done the following:
And end-of-date field marker would thus be all ones in the bit field for a total hex value of $FFFF which would be a date value of 15/31/2029 which is nonsense and thus couldn't be confused with a date. On the other hand, this scheme would have a Y2K-like problem at year 2030, which is why I wouldn't use this scheme unless I absolutely had to such as in a small microcontroller with very limited RAM or something similar.
UNIX tracks the number of seconds since it's creation. Systems where a time_t is 32 bits will wrap around in 2038
send + more == money?
Well, the utility company I work for picked today to have a "dress rehearsal" of their Y2K backup systems.
:)
Various conspiracy theorists around here suggested that it was just in case 9/9/99 was a real problem and they could blame it on the drill, but given that we've had no problems with either 9/9/99 or the drill, I'm not overly worried.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
In the old days, when programs and data were punched on Hollerith cards and run on batch operating systems, an all 9s field was a popular way to mark the end of data. The problem was that a user's card deck was loaded into a card reader along with other people's jobs. This meant that there was no EOF from the card reader and a special sentinel card was needed to prevent the program from reading the next job as additional data. Even when Hollerith cards became obsolete, many mainframe programs still read/wrote card images from disk files. There are even microcomputer programs that still use card images because they were ported from an original mainframe program and the file formats were preserved to retain compatibility with existing data files.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Here in California, power is down in parts of many towns between San Mateo and Palo Alto this morning. Menlo Park had outages last night and this morning (9/9/99).
The media is always going to come and predict the end of the world due to some computer problem. They wouldn't make any money if they predicted that everything was going to be fine...
This is why there are things such as the CIAC... They are not trying to make money, they are providing a public service, and are often the best source of information on computer viruses and the like...
I'll bet you run KDE on a Red Hat box w/Mandrake on it don't you?
No, we're afraid that the bastards are going to shut our electricity off when they see their records indicating that we've missed payment on the last 10,000 monthly bills.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I rarely ever find humor at this site. The only funny thing I remember is the blowing up of the dead whale carcass with dynamite.
More to the point, no computer will represent today's date as 9999 internally. Two digits are needed for month and day, yes? So that would be 090999. And there's no "all 9's" magic quality to this number. This is truly a non-event from the code's point of view.
And today says absofscking nothing about what may happen when 1/1/00 gets here.
I'm still withdrawing large quanties of cash, stockpiling food and water, and getting some more ammo. Let the bozos think 'all is well'. It may be all right. But I will be prepared either way. Trusting that nothing major will go awry in 1 Jan 2000, is like trusting that your sysadmin is doing backups for the inevitable disk crash. Not a smart strategy. Doing my own backups of my own data at the office has paid off twice so far over the last 5 years. Why not to be prepared, eh?
"And hey, if Y2K doesn't end the world, you will
.
be able to pick up great camping gear for next to
nothing at garage sales!"
That's what I've been counting on. .
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
someone tell me where i can get the june-twenty-third-two-double-oh-one Patch and updates, because i need to make my UNIX box compliant!
I've already cancelled my flights to Canada, and will drive to my june-twenty-third-two-double-oh-one shelter in Ontario! What do i need to stock for this catastrophy? Already bought my generators and year's worth of canned spam, macaroni and cheeze, and Whoppers! Anythign else i need?
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"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
On the way to work this morning, I heard of a woman in Ohio or somewhere that was born at 9:09 on Sept 9th, 1900. That means at 9:09 on 9/9/99, she is 99. Freaky.
I went to that web page and now I don't know what day it is. Who am I. (in background -- Your an anonymous coward). Oh now I remember.
PS I heard that Taco will be giving a $1,000,000 to whomever can find the web-site that causes the whole internet to self-destruct when 9/9/99 is entered as a date. It's out their, now find it.
You only need 30 minute's worth of gold bars.
If you know much about software development, then you know that it is not likely that 9.9.99 will be a problem. Aside from being ignorant, the pop media is hoping to capitalize on the Y2K thing.
I believe that the programmers who are responsible for the Y2K problems had the same idea... ie, by the time we get there, they won't be using this anymore...
Just my $.02...
Isn't he in Redmond?
Well, to clarify, I live in a 200K city, the center of about a 1-million-person metro area. (Rochester, NY, to be exact.) I work for the utility company here; I used to work for a local hospital and a bank. Everything I've seen so far indicates that we're in good shape and that MOST people aren't going to be playing paranoid. This is all good. The biggest problem I'm having is with friends of mine who all want to throw their own parties and want EVERYone to show up to them. Yet another reason why I'm going to the Barony party -- it's the most neutral decision I can make. :)
Then again, as I've posted before, the only marauding gang I've ever dealt with around here is the one that pushed my car out of a snowdrift for me. I've *seen* how this city pulls together in a crisis (very well), and I also know my way around here. So I'm going to "party like it's 999" with my SCA friends, though I *will* make sure I have a full tank of gas and that I take the same precautions that I do pre-expected-major-snowstorm.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
There definitely have been real problems with the GPS rollover, and not just with cheap car units.
My brother works for a local seaplane company, and about 9 of their GPS units quit working completely. These were all from one manufacturer - other units were fine. It's particularly annoying for them, because (being diligent and careful) they had specifically asked the manufacturer if the units were ok, and had been reassured that they were fine.
It took several weeks to get them all fixed. (An expensive software upgrade was required, and it took days to get through the busy phone lines to the company.) In the meantime, the planes were flying without working GPS, which is apparently ok since the weather was good. If there had been a need for navigation by instruments only, that might have been a worse problem.
Adding to the hassle, the software upgrade caused the units to forget all the named coordinate points that had been programmed into them. This will be hours of work to restore.
They won't be buying from that instrument manufacturer any more.
Don't underestimate the problems that these date issues can cause. Dates and times are the hardest fundamental data type to really handle correctly in software development, and are made worse by unpredictable users dealing with badly designed software.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
While doing some Y2K work yeasterday, I ran across this little gem in a CA-IDEAL (Cobol style) program written in 1995.
SET W-TIME = $TIME('HHMMSS')
SET W-DATE = $DATE('YYMMDD')
SET W-TODAYS-DATE = $STRING("19",W-DATE)
Notice adding the string 19 to the 2 digit year to determine todays date. There was no other windowing logic. Ugly ugly ugly.
-Scott__
-Scott scott@surrealistic.org
If you are in Chicago, it's just more of ComEd's crumbling infrastructure rearing its ugly head. I'm half-expecting complete outages by Y2K, but the bugs aren't going to be related to 01/01/00 -- they are a result of years of criminal negligence on the part of an underregulated power monopoly, the results of which are just now coming to fruition.
Having said that, I am indeed skeptical of all of the "Y2K readiness" leaflets I receive in the mail. I suspect a good percentage of them are written from the standpoint of "we're not quite ready yet, but we will be, so let's sooth the unwashed masses." Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever written anything more than a trivially simple program realizes, deadlines have a way of slipping real fast in the world of software. I suspect there will be two major dangers resulting from the whole Y2k hoopla:
1) People being stupid and panicky (as many others have mentioned already), cleaning out stores and what have you before Y2K arrives.
2) People having done too little to prepare, trusting deceptive reassurances from those companies and services who weren't able to make their deadlines and be compliant on time, who then do an about face from blase' "it's nothin' to worry about" to full-fledged panic as they discover a whole host of inconveniences which combine to make their lives more than a little difficult.
In both cases the danger will be a result of panicy people, not technology. But to dismiss the notion that one should be planning for contingencies invites a whole host of problems of its own, quite possibly making a touchy situation worse. The best approach IMHO is to take some reasonable precautions:
* Have a little extra cash on hand in case the ATMs are down
* Have a hard copy of your statement from a day or two before the new year on hand
* Have a little extra food on hand (maybe a month's supply, instead of a week's)
* Have a few candles lying around
* Have a warm blanket handy in case the power does fail (thanks ComEd).
* Have a good book or two, for the same reason
* Relax. All those preparations were probably unnecessary, but now you don't have to worry even if things do come unravelled for a little while.
If one has made reasonable contingencies, one won't be one of the idiots consumed by panic when we usher in the new year with a few bumps. Of course, don't go shooting your gun into the air new years eve. Not only could the bullets injure someone when they fall back to earth, but, more importantly, you'll probably need that ammo come January first. (For the humor impaired: the last comment was a joke!)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
YYDDMM format is not a good format for computing. Generally, regardless of cultural format (I'm in the US, we use the completely scatterbrained Month/Day/Year format) stored format should be some variation on YYMMDD or YYYYMMDD. That way you can do comparisons and sorts on the dates, and have them come out right.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Um, so does that mean that the devil will show up in seven years? (6/6/6)
I bet Nostradamus missed that one.
And in other news, computer experts are warning of the another date that is fast approaching: February First. Some computer programs may represent this date as FF which combined with a time such as Five Fifteen can be represented as FFFF. Such symbols are often used as "synching" signals in multimedia streams and it is feared that if such a date were stored in a multimedia file such as an "MP3" file, the sound would get distorted and ultimatly might make the computer speakers catch on fire.
Bob Byte, a computer expert for High Tech Technologies, says that that Fs are used because of an obscure way of representing numbers called "hexidecimal". In the opinion of this reporter it is a short form of an error message consisting of swear words: f**k f**k f**k f**k.
This is good news. I always thought this one was likely to be a red herring. Does anyone think this bodes well for 1/1/00, or not ?
Does anyone know of any data on how the GPS rollover went ? It can't have been too bad, or I'd have heard, but I heard Tokyo had traffic problems due to failed recievers.
Of course, the Christian calendar-challenged who worry about 2,000 years being significant should learn that Christ was probably born about four years before year 1, so actually 2,000 years of Christianity began three years ago...although others think He was born 33 years before year 1, and wonder whether His birth is as significant as His deaths.
There's too much ambiguity...unless you simply stop counting years when you run out of rope for your Mayan calendar.
Just finished to read a bit outdated but still interesting and actuall poll from december 1998, here named "AMERICANS AND THE Y2K MILLENNIUM COMPUTERBUG"
:
;-/
In the poll there was a question asking
"Will you withdraw all your money from the bank ?"
16% told that they will ! And 31% told that they will "withdraw and set aside a large amount of cash "So i afaraid it can be a LOT MORE people rioting !
The biggest danger to our society isn't from the actual Y2K problem, it's from the Y2K paranoia.
Totally agree here, but.... writing this makes me thing if this what will happen (collapsing financial system due to the money withdrawal from the banks), maybe it's better to pull the money out of the bank before it's happenes ?
Oblom
Is it the 9/9/99 bug?
Whoops, it's solar and I had the panel covered with my hand.
-- I lived through the IPO Rush of '99
I used to work with Environment Canada, the Canadian government branch responsible for the environment and weather. Their environmental database was loaded with 9/9/99's. The 9/9/99 bug wont show up right away, but perhaps 2 weeks/months/years from now, some poor database manager will say "Oh *&^*!, where did all the data go?".
:)
Not as bad as the weather prediction center next door that used the single last digit of the year in the filename to indicate the date. Hooray for 8.3 file sizes... (Co-op students get all the fun). Made things real easy: all years that ended in 2 or 6 were a leap year. They have no money to fix these sorts of things, I can't wait to see how they do in 4 months....
It's soooo nice to see fellow earth children pop their heads up like prairie dogs whenever we are misrepresented. :-)
You all beat me to it.
Yes, it's a new moon, so where will I be? At band practice with our new guitarist and new percussion guy! New beginnings, wee!
Y2K riots will be fun to watch while astrally projecting myself over New York City. LOL
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Every program I've ever written looks at
the date to determine what to do next.
It's very common.
Textbooks have been written on the subject of
date checking.
Don't you just love the media.
And the sheeple they feed.
it's based solely on a date system that revolves around some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in...
Actually, it's based solely on a date system that revolves around when the mother of some Roman emperor or another thought some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in was born.
Whew.
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
Obviously Sony must have used COBOL when coding for the Playstation 2.. see Playstation2 delayed.
I woke up this morning to find my computer crashed, the sheets on my bed had flown onto the floor, all my clothes were no longer folded or hung up, the microwave was on fire, I tried calling the fire department and the phone was out, the tv would only pick up CSPAN, the radio was locked on country music station, and I went outside to find all four tires on my truck flat! Damn this bug! 1.1.00 is gonna be worse I bet!
i have noticed that the catholic religion as a whole seems to be aimed at the destruction of all other forms of thought though.....
*elevator music plays*
think about how many people are in the US alone, say 250 million (Probably more, but that was the last real number I heard), say 1 percent of those people are going to panic and riot on dec 31, that's 2.5 million people, say 100 thousand people in 25 major cities
... this looks like "Make Money Fast" logic to me. Any very big number multiplied by 1 per cent still looks big. Why don't we assume that 1 per cent of the remaining 247.5 million people take to the streets to defend their property -- when the rioters saw that the odds were nearly equal, they'd soon give up. Or how about if we assumed that 1 per cent of people became nicer and more generous as a result of the scary experience. Or if 1 per cent of slashdot readers did a random act of kindness today. Or something.
Hrrmmm boing
And getting rid of your social security number is not a brilliant idea which will make you exempt from Federal income tax.
Oh yeh, and those Echelon keywords are a waste of space too.
did I forget anything
jsm
PS sorry and all that.
Why would 9/9/99 be a problem for any computer? Why wasn't 8/8/88 a problem, or 7/7/77. And what's going to happen on 0/0/00? Seriously though, does anyone have a good explination for why 9/9/99 would cause a computer to have a cpu fart?
-matt
I posted this story weeks ago!
Let me share this with you. Today (9/9/99) I went to the dentist, to get a filling. From what I observed:
So there is an example of 9/9/99 at work. Or an example of what happens when the janitorial staff accidently kicks the equipment. Either way.
Richard Frost
It's been a coulpe of hours now, and the Novocaine no longers works, and it hurts to open my mouth. Ow.
i'm not waiting to find out what bad things might happen on "9" day. I'm just leaving now!! Gonna go spend the weekend in a cabin.
hahahahaha. losers.
waitaminute. no slashdot for 3 days. aaaaagghh!
i wonder if i oughtta change my sig...
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
i remember hearing 280 million recently from a source that would re reliable but which i can not remember the name of. until hearing that 250 million was the number that i would have used as well.
Well.. there was some kind of power surge or something here where I am.. all the computers temporarily lost power, but they came right back up.
;-)
Makes you wonder.. hmmm..
So confidence-boosting articles are just fine by me! :-)
-----
New E-mail address! If I'm in your address book, please update it.
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
No 9999. No Y2K. Ah for the simple life again!
well we're already at 64bit with many chips, and even intel has it on their roadmap. actually intel has some in silicon now
Stock market's a workin'
:)
ah.
As a former SCA person myself (there really isn't much SCA activity in my area - so I basically dropped out when I moved here), I can say that SCA folks are probably best equipped to survive "the armageddon".
They know how to camp - often not using modern equipment. They know how to survive by creating their own civilization out of the wilderness. They're well versed in fighting, and with weapons and techniques they also know how to fabricate, and are likely to have all the equipment they need to do both (fight, and fabricate weapons).
And they know women who not only know how to sew, but LIKE to sew.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Ah, but I come from a small town where I have alot of family and friends. Approx. 7,000 people not exactly "the hills". I'm not talking about heading into the country. But a small community where you know everybody around you. Atleast I would feel safer in that type of environment. Even a good suburb where you know all your neighbors, isn't bad.
So I do want to be in *A
--
?
Two points:
1) The MS NSA story was not an assertion, it reported a factual discovery made by a reputable security consultancy. At worst it made some reasonable, if provocative, speculations based on the facts known at the time. Microsoft's later response to the story was painfully emberrassing to any who read it, not to mention profoundly insulting to the reader's intelligence. They have unwittingly given the "NSA back door key theory" a huge boost in credibility, and would have been much better off keeping their mouths shut.
2) A "trusted agency" is a single point of failure, capable of erring just like an individual, or being suborned by third parties for their own purposes. An industry wide consensus, or lack thereof (ie an open, ongoing debate), is a much better indicator of the veracity of a story than a single, offical stamp of approval. Neither approach is perfect, and certainly neither can substitute for a lazy reporter's lack of research, but the latter is much less subject to manipulation and/or outright corruption than the former IMHO.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Well, SuSE still hasn't gone public yet, but /. is so biased that you won't hear that around here.
So, I do want to be in A city just not a large metropolitan area.
--
?
My time reversal experiments are going much
slower now.
It's my birthday today.. and these
Was born in 77
Today I'm turning 22, on 9-9-99.
Heh.
-Stu
The subways also experience problems.
I sat at the computer lab, as the power went out today, at 15:13, and left a server down.
Probably just a coincidence..?
Duh! What do you expect? btw, the aNtIcHrIsT is playing it cool for now (got to conserve some energy for the big party soon).
For the archive readers in the future who look at this after the problem has been corrected, as near as I can figure it this reply will be displayed as having been posted about 7:03 AM CDT. In about an hour and a half Hemos will post the article to which I am replying.
It's not a 9/9/99 problem, but any time problem in this discussion is may be... moderated Funny?
If you stand on your head, 999 becomes 666. Now #9 point above has a whole new meaning. Just something else stupid for us to ponder.
Life sucks, then you die.
That's when all of Microsoft's product go KABOOOMM!!!!
AFAIK everything went fine, at least as far as aviators are concerned. My Lawrance worked fine all the way through the "rollover" and the upgrade.
I did have the GPS go out on me for ten or fifteen minutes one night flying back to Chicago along the Indiana shoreline. A quick look at the satelite page revealed the Satelites in an unusual constellation -- a bunch of them were all lined up in a row! Once the satelites were out of alignment with one another the GPS found itself and continued to work just fine.
This is an example as to why one NEVER relies on a single instrument for navigational and situational awareness (unless it simply can't be helped) -- cross checking your GPS against your LORAN, VORs, and MARK I eyeballs (is that river outside where the GPS and LORAN say it should be?) is the only way to be certain you are where you think you are.
Ob Y2K: If even a fraction of the banks and other firms are even half as dishonest and non-forthright about their Y2K readiness and infrastructure as Commonwealth Eddison has been this summer (not even bothering to tell the proper authorities after their efforts to fix serious problems on the sly failed and resulted in a huge power outage downtown, for example, coupled with numerious, ongoing power outages throughout the city which show no sign of letting up as their neglected infrastructure continues to show its age), then the Y2K issue could well end up being more than just a little hiccup. Armageddon? No. A royal pain in the ass, bigger than most expect? Quite possibly.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Rochester, I liked the town when I was there on business. I really like the Empire Brewery. Damn fine stout.
I live in St. Louis, Mo (2.5 million). I've only lived here 2 years, and would feel much safer in the town I grew up in, in Nebraska(pop. 6,639). Still, I will probably be in St. Louis on 12.31.99, and I'm not really worried, but I would feel safer somewhere that I lived for 18 years.
--
?
The line is a direct answer to "Americans will use any excuse to riot...". On the other hand, it could be moderated down as "Bad spelling". But then afain there is no such an option.
As for the post, its is not the europeans, but the English that are more prone to riot, mostly during soccer games (so we know where the Americans got the idea, right?).
That's not a half bad idea Shadowcat, I've got some workings of my own that would be well suited for a new moon. And I'd love to check out your site, but apparently my job's SurfWatch won't let me. :(
I work at an ISP, and since about 9:00 AM, most of our routers have been freaking out. We've already had to reset a couple of the internal switches, and some of the reouters as well. I'm not convinced that the problems with the routers and switches are related to 9999, but it's a kinda funny, no?
== That terrible green-green grass, and violent blooms of flower dresses, and afternoons that make me sleepy.==
Personally I think the only problems we'll have on Saturday will be that most people will have a really big hangover. :-) New Year's Eve 1999 is a time to party and celebrate. Worry about the other shit IF it happens WHEN it happens. Me, I'm not going to worry about it. I'll fill up bottles of water perhaps and make sure my car has gas in it so I can get to work Monday morning , etc. But other than that it shouldn't be a big deal. I'm sure people will try to sell gas for inflat4ed prices too though... I should probably stock up. *grin*
Yep, most of the problems that are going to happen on 1/1/00 are going to be from people, not computers. I have an acquaintance who's with the local police dept, and about the only thing they're anticipating come "the day" are people riot^H^H^H^Hpartying like the folks in Chicago and Denver did when their respective sports teams won championships. Somehow, I'd almost rather have problems caused by widespread computer failures than problems caused by a bunch of fscking idiots who think celebrating involves torching cars and looting.
It wasn't John Lennon chanting, it was a tape loop made from an Abby Road studios test tape of some sorts... just lettin' ya know.
-- Object known as a camera. Vintage uncertain, origin unknown. - Twilight Zone
No, tomorrow night will mark the change between 5759 and 5760.
Easy way to remember this - the last digit of the gregorian year is the same as the jewish year for most of the year (9-10 months out of 12)
240 years + about 28 hours Eastern time as the time of this post.
As I opened my eyes this morning, I realized there was a suttle difference from most mornings. There was no Red glow coming from my alarm clock. Looking out the window at 5:30 this morning, the whole neighborhood was dark.
Immediately it clicked, "oh man, its 9999, and I'm low on canned goods". Phone still worked, so I called Southern California Edison. The recording said there was a wide-spread blackout in my area. I started having visions of looters and scenes from the movie "The Trigger Effect".
At 7:30, the power came back on. No word from SCE, but I had since fired up my laptop, and discovered all the "9/9/99 came and went" stories, so it wasn't a surprise.
Still spooked me, even though I'm a programmer, and know it SHOULDN'T cause a problem, I was convinced it had.
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
Yeah I just wasn't thinking long enough to come up with a YYMMDD format idea ;> Long day, trying to work round bugs in activex controls and HTML and so on
:(
Even so, what I was meaning (hah!) was that if there was no zero stringy thingy, then if you did Year/Month/Day, what day is 1999112 - the 12th of January or the 2nd of November, sort of thing. So it would seem insane to not zero-pad.
I'm absolutely sure I'm missing something though, I just don't know what
"When something seems to easy, it usually is"
Well first of all, IT WAS A TANDY! Oh, the humanity!
Just over 240, ya mean. :)
** This post has been certified to be Year 5760 Compliant **
"I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
I woke up this morning too and the lights were out. I thought about the 9999 bug. Then I realized that I should turn on the switch.
You have to have four 9's in a row though.
Minor correction to my previous post. The year would have to be BCD encoded (99), the month would have to be regular hex encoded (1-C) otherwise you'd need a second digit to encode Oct-Dec, and the day could be either, since 09 is 09. It's contorted, either way you look at it.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Geez, you'd figure the Antichrist could schedule a little better than "sometime this month". The quality of evil is really dropping off in the last few millenia.
Christianity isn't a religion. Roman Catholisim, Anglicanism etc are, but AFAIK, there is no "Christian Church"
Just this day ... ... COOL
9-9-'99, and the Dutchmen (those guys from Holland, Europe) took an entire day to test there computer systems for year 2k resistant.
The public services were no longer reachable so it seams the test failed,
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Belgium HyperBanner
http://belgium.hyperbanner.net
Linux hosting for $2.50/mo
Are you listening to us? Go back to the forun on MS's response to the NSAKEY. It made no sense and was dismantled. *When* it turns out to be nothing my foot. The only theory that stands up to all objections is that it is an NSA backdoor. People object to this on dogmatic "anti-conspiracy" grounds that have no basis in logic.
I think he's in the studio . . .
yes, yes,
Dan
Blame Canada!
Wings Rest. in Huntsville AL (went there for lunch) is having a bad date problem with 9.9.99... seems all their computers are/have crashed and wont revive. They still were able to take my credit card the old fashioned way though.... damn...
Looks like a valid year to me. It's a long way off, but it is valid.
I think he's in the studio . . .
yes, yes,
Dan
I compromise. I'll be in a medium-sized city. :)
"I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
There has been quiet reports that Carin auto navigation units have been affected by the 1024 week rollover bug. The only problem is that the initial acquisition of visible satellites has gone from the normal 20-40 seconds to a period of 5-10 minutes. This means people are driving around for a while entirely on inertial guidance.
:-) ]
The technical explanation had something to do with pre-calculating positions based on an almanac of known positions based on picking up the intial time signal from the strongest satellite. If you know which week & day & minute etc, you can make a quick pre-calc of where some satellites are supposed to be, saving you a bunch of time sorting out the signals. But the Carin's have the 1024 bug and the cheap-o GPS receiver eventually times out on the pre-calc and does a full calc of the positions.
A friend reports this as extremely annoying but still usable. He says when he complained his car dealership has asked him to come by for a free retrofit of the main unit in about 8 weeks, since they have been asked to replace all their installed units but to start with people complaining. I think these are made by Phillips in the netherlands or germany, so I don't know if any are in the U.S.
the AC
[obOnTopic: no, I haven't seen any 9/9/99 bugs today, but I'm about to get on an airplane in a blind show of faith
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
More to the point, no computer will represent today's date as 9999 internally. Two digits are needed for month and day, yes? So that would be 090999. And there's no "all 9's" magic quality to this number. This is truly a non-event from the code's point of view.
It's not the representation, but the input pattern that's of concern. I personally worked at one place where we were told -- for accounts that were never supposed to "come due" -- to just put in "9 9 99" for the due date. The software converts this internally to 090999 of course. But the point is, the accounts still (assuming they're still using this system) come due today, regardless of how it's represented internally.
The whole "end-of-file marker" thing was a big bunch of FUD, but accounting "shortcuts" like this could indeed cause headaches.
And don't say "but nobody would be that dumb." I had a boss who drove the accountant nuts one month. We mis-billed a bunch of credit cards (~1000 or so), ran the credits back when we found out, and then re-billed correctly. So my boss "helpfully" deleted the original invoices and credits and replaced them with the corrected invoices and credits. (Accountants in the audience may now proceed to the front for a stiff shot of whiskey. Move slowly to avoid sudden collapse...)
-- Old Man Kensey
"Well, my coven and I celebrate under moonless night skies, go to movies, and swap recipies. And we always get together to watch Ally McBeal."
--some witch in Oakland
My biggest Y2K preparations in Rochester will be to get another big propane tank, fill a few carboys with water and get enough home brewing supplies to make two batches. That way, if the grid goes down, I can still brew on my enforced vacation.
That's aside from the usual Rochester New York winter preps, food, candles, cross country skiis, snow shovels...
So remember, if the grid goes down, stop by the middle of January for some fresh homebrew.
George
Um, it's not the Full Moon tonight. It's the New Moon. You know, the phase of the moon when it's completely DARK.
The Full Moon is when it's completely.. well, FULL.
-- Shadowcat
kageneko@kageneko.net
"I can roleplay. I can frag. I can PK while you lag."
I still don't understand how this can be a problem.
If 9/9/99 is a date for a record in a file, and the software assumes that's the end of file, then you could have a problem, but today is just the cpu clock hitting 9/9/99, that doesn't mean that any records are going to read 9/9/99, unless an operator enters that into their database or something. So we wouldn't see this problem until the software started reading those dates out of the file. That may be more likely to happen to day, but doesn't necessarily mean it will happen today, and certainly doesn't mean that it couldn't have happened like a few weeks ago (ie. this account will expire on: 9/9/99, etc.).
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Not just that. We have to ensure that all software uses the long values. And there is the problem.
oh that was so funny. ha ha thatll get you laid
I actually don't have a response to this; I meant to moderate you up as Insightful, but mistakenly made you a Troll instead. Posting was the only way I could find to undo the damage.
:-
Sorry
I dunno about you, but I'm going to keep using my 486/100 until the sucker dies... and poke fun at all of the "keeping up with the joneses" folks all along the way.
Fnord.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
New slashdot Poll:
Favorite Gothic Folk Music:
The Legendary Pink Dots
Current 93
(Or should we just all sing "It's the end of the world as we know it....")
I agree! (I so _hate_ "me too" posts)
:) )
:) )
Only problem is, not _everyone's_ that way. I know a lot of very nice folks who happen to be both understanding and Christian. Heck, there's a few who actually know what I'm talking about and laugh when I talk about testing computers for Year 5760 compliance. (Which is coming VERY SOON, are YOU ready?
(You may now ignore my feeble attempt to bring this particular thread back onto the topic
"I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Unlike the Y2K problem, I've never actually seen code which would stumble on this one. I've always wondered if this started out as a joke among Y2K warriors ("don't worry about Y2K, we'll never make it past the 9999 bug"), which got sucked up by the mainstream media in the hysteria, much like virii hoaxen sometimes do.
Today is 090999, not 9999, and not 999999. Software which codes the date in a MMDDYY format must keep leading zeros internally, and only trim them for display. Or, software which trims the leading zeros must keep the MM, DD, and YY fields completely distinct, and only show them together for (again) display.
If dates were handled as badly as it would take to choke on 9/9/99, date handling would probably have failed within a month of the first run.
Ummm, what if the computer stored each number as
one byte instead of two ascii (bytes) characters?
0x09 0x09 0x63 = 9/9/99
The point is you can't possibly know how every
progam stores the data... Assumptions like these
are going to lead to problems 1/1/00.
Whoops I mean 1/1/2000. Shit I wouldn't want
slashdot to fritz out on the double-aughts. Doh.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
Must be something to do with 'I want to conform, everyone else is paniking, so I'll panic too' I dunno. I don't claim to understand mob psycology. Also pardon my atrocious spelling ;)
"9/9/99" isn't a number.
This is how "9999" is used(in psuedocode):
read data
while data is not "9999"
do something with data
read data
data "Bill,Fred,John,Larry,Bob,9999"
The string (not even a number) "9999" is used as a Sentinel Value.
What you and the media and all the other clueless morons think is akin to:
read data
while todays date is not "09/09/99"
do something with data
read data
data "Bill,Fred,John,Larry,Bob,9999"
or
read data
while data is not "9999"
do something with data
read data
data "Bill,Fred,John,$todaysdate,Larry,Bob,9999"
Neither of which is EVER going to happen!
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
Look people. You don't need to comment on the moderators in the discussion. The moderators are randomly selected users like you and me. As far as one person's reply mentioning Andover, they have nothing to do with it. Now there is meta moderation, and if the meta moderators (again, you and me) don't like how it is moderated, the one who moderated will be moderated down. Now stop whining.
Despite reports of "no probs" today, the recently-upgraded computer system at the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles went belly-up statewide on 9/9/99.
It's interesting watching CNN Headline News talk about a "hitch'free" day, when the local news here is all over the story.
- Much of the ignorant Outside World Of Endlusers(tm) is unaware of that, and
- Computers are still storing the date that way, no matter how arbitrary it might be.
So it doesn't matter if the date is meaningless, there will still be problems.(still trying to go back to some semblance of topicality as I see it... Conform to Vixie! Conform, damn you!
"I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Just when I was about to post "No Problem", slashdot told me "Internal server error". :)
Anyway, the 99999 thing was only meant to hit ancient databases anyway; and I cant think of any vital stuff that relies on one.
> I mean, even if 9999 is a common way to signal the end of input, who enters date data in that method?
That's just it. It wasn't meant to be a date at all. You would enter "9999" to signal the end of say, a list of names, or other scalar data. Dates have NOTHING to do with it!
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
The little icons on the top that always represent the "type" of stories that have been most recently shown, at least on my computer, are stuck on the picture of the bug. That represents this 9/9/99 story... Beware. O.O
I think this one is a dud; I don't know how it slipped past the "experts".
There was a Y1K bug,
that caused the dark ages.
Run for your lives!
But where?
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
He told us that 28,000 cops were deployed last night here in HK. During one of their planning meetings he had mentioned to his supervisors that he thought this was just general paranioa. "Sir, I have never heard of a computer nicking a criminal".
I agree with the posters saying that anyone who expected 09/09/99 to be a big deal is a bozo. No doubt 99/99/99 is a much more common "special case" date, and since it's not valid, one doesn't need to worry about it ever coming up. I've heard of other special case dates also using invalid months and days, like 88/88/88 and 77/77/77.
The 99 thing is sometimes more of a problem than expected, however. At the beginning of this year, SCCS on our HP-UX 10.20 machines mysteriously started failing. Apparently the HP-UX SCCS tools were using 99 in the year as a special value, even though the SCCS format makes no such specifications. Applying patches fixed this problem.
Actually today is a day of some significance for pagan folks (again, like myself.) Why? Not because it's 9/9/99...as far as I'm concerned that's just another day in the calendar. Rather, it's because today is a full moon.
Wiccans and other neo-pagans have holiday cycles based on both solar and lunar events. Solar events (the Equinoxes and Solstices, plus four other holidays that occur roughly six weeks after each Equinox or Solstice) are considered major holidays, especially May 1st and October 31st. Lunar events (full moon and new moon) are minor holidays, usually calling for a ceremony in the evening.
Just FYI - the ceremonies usually involve nothing more spectacular than calling on the four elements (earth, air, fire, water), invoking a god and goddess, and sharing some food and drink. It's a nice way for a pagan to get back in touch with his/her spirituality, and to be amoung friends. Sorta like Sunday services for most Christians.
Finding God in a Dog
Of course, the Y2K bug is more widespread, but it's much more simple to interpret. Last year, people (alright, not people, Y2K consultants :) ) were saying how bad 9/9/99 would be, threatening us with a Y2K bug before Y2K even gets here.
I'm willing to bet Y2K will go as smoothly, and all the news we'll have to read will be, 'Power is still up in xxxx'.
Y2K consultants, it's time to run to Argentina with the money you made, before the public catches on! :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
You guys are just throwing out numbers and percentages without any constraint on bias.
Admit that you pulled the "1% of americans will
riot" idea out of your ass.
Now the "withdraw all your money from banks?"
Well, these are Americans we're talking about.
They have $485.17 in the bank. They withdraw
it ALL every two weeks, a day or two before payday.
Way more than your bogus percentage
have less than two weeks reserve of money
in the bank.
If you were trying to come up with some useless
made up statistic for those with more than a certain amount of money in the bank, you should
have said so.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It seems most people, especially the media have no idea what the bug really is.
Where ive seen the 9999 bug is causing the biggest problems is in custom databases. 3 cases that I have had to deal with for custumers involved the health care industry. In each of the 3 cases (these happend months ago) it happened when an appointment was entered for September 9. Blam! Truncated database. Forget about backing it up, hope you've got a good previous backup, and then what: you can't avoid the date forever, can you?
This isn't only a problem with old COBOL. In small business in the 1980's lots of custom database applications were written in Dbase II etc. that were compliled for performance. Guess what, usually nobody knows where any of the source code is.
RING RING RING -- It's 8 in the morning
ME: Hello.
CUSTOMER: Hey, you've got to help me!
ME: Of course you realize that the charge
before noon is $200/hr.
CUSTOMER: We can't do payroll!
ME: I'll be right there!
This was months ago. All they needed was a patchfile, but without it they couldn't get anything to work after adding a temp. employee whose contact ran out after 2000 01 01. All it took was a quick patch, but woe to anyone who doesn't know anyone who knows that.
Oh yeah, one of the other companies tried messing around with their database blindly before picking up the phone. They're not in business anymore.
Well, since the Jewish New Year is in 2 days, making it 5761, it's actually just under 240 years :)
I was always wondering why they called this thing a dress rehearsal for the Y2K problem. In my eyes it really has nothing to do with it. It just so happens to be a few months before it. I didn't think anything would really happen? Does anyone know what actually happened to the Tandy that had a problem?
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
Happy birthday!
:)
"I don't believe that there is one, single, perfect spiritual way and, in realizing that, obviously you become a lot more open."
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
If the media printed in their papers, magazines and news specials "Y2K -- EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE OK!", would they sell many copies?
On the radio, the news shows are starting to sound like John Lennon chanting "Number nine... Number nine... Number nine..." And now its the web 'zines. [sigh] Give me a break!
--
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Even a Y2K non-compliant system was going to represent today, at worst, as 09/09/99. Date and Month fields need two digits, not one. I wish I could smack whoever tried to start the panic on this one...
So far we have two events. GPS rollover and "9/9/99". The total damage to date: A few Japanese cabbies got lost when the GPS rolled over to Week 0. December 31 is going to suck some, but I doubt it'll suck anyplace catastrophically.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
naw. I live in a small-ish college town (45k), right near a national guard base. I've already heard that national guard troops are going to be deployed in the big cities to be ready to act if there is any trouble. There are still plenty of national guardsmen left here, and also, TONS of local volunteers for doing things like watching stores after hours for looting, distributing stockpiled food and water to the elderly or other folks in need, etc.
The measures may be paranoid, but it shows that people around here care, and that it's not going to be "every man for himself" when the lights go out (and "I wasn't doin nuthin" when the lights go back on 30 minutes later). I feel MUCH more secure here than I would in a large city.
The only thing I'm worried about is the local prison, and the local state mental hospital. I'm going to be a little bit pissed if the doors click open at midnight 12/31/99.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
OH NO!!
News Flash!!!
Internet trading companies are in a panic! Red Hat Inc. (RHAT) stock is quickly approaching the dreaded 128, which many programmers fear will cause catastrophic system failures. These failures will be caused because Pascal programmers commonly use signed bytes to hold numeric values. These variables can only contain values from -128 to 127. If the value of RHAT increases to 128 stock market systems will fail and the U.S. economy will be thrown into a state of chaos.
Moonbear, who can't remember his password
I think you'd be surprised at how many places still use old COBOL from the 70's and earlier and/or do not want to use the "new" COBOL 85 features for some reason or another.
I love the fact that every news outlet I listen to in the morning had something about th "9/9/99" problem. There's nothing to talk about, everybody knows about "the y2k bug" and so they have an instant hook to lead-in. The problem with this, as we all know, is that it became 9/9/99 in the US hours ago and nothing happened (Look, ma, no missiles launched!).
The only reason this is news at all is because places like morning TV shows have "nothing else to talk about," although of course there's serious shit of global importance happening in Indonesia. (instability in Indonesia can affect the financial situation there, which affects the rest of Asia, which ... I think we know what happened last time).
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
The following is the response I got from the author of the article. Nice to see she can admit when she's wrong.
----------------------------------------------
Hi, You are absolutely right and I should have been careful before speaking
generically about pagans. You are not the only pagan I've heard from today.
I'm sorry and will do better next time. Michelle
> ----------
> From: The CyberGoddess
> Sent: Thursday, September 09, 1999 8:01 AM
> To: mquinn@sjmercury.com
> Subject: Your article
>
> said Jack Elder, a psychic reader at The Psychic Eye Bookstore in San
> Francisco. ``It's kind of a power moment. A lot of things could
> happen.''>>
>
> As an avid internet user and a staunch fighter for Pagan rights and
> understanding, I feel it necessary to clear up this misconception.
>
> Either this person is not a Pagan or is just trying to give you something
> you can use in your article. Pagans, in general, do not follow the solar
> calendar. The calendar used for basic time telling was developed by
> Christians and revolves around the premise of Christ's birth, an event
> which
> holds no significance in most Pagan faiths. While 9 is indeed a special
> number, only flaky New Agers, wannabes or psychic readers would hold
> 9/9/99
> as a "power date". Pagan holidays are actually lunar in nature. The only
> significance today holds is the New Moon tonight which is a symbol of new
> beginnings. The date does not affect us in the least. The mundane
> calendar
> is just that... mundane.
>
> Remember, one person claiming to be Pagan does not make up the Pagan
> community. Before you post a broad generalization such as the one made,
> please check with several sources to verify the information you've been
> given. It generally will prevent you from a barrage of angry people
> wanting
> to know why you misrepresented them in the public eye.
>
> Selena FireSinger
> National Co-director and Pennsylvania Contact, Pagans in Action Council
> for
> Truth - P.A.C.T.
> PA P.A.C.T. Website - www.cybergoddess.net/pact.html
> Sacred Earth Alliance Representative
> Sponsor, The Witches' Voice - www.witchvox.com
> Webmistress for Witches Against Religious Discrimination - W.A.R.D.
> Member of Witches' Anti-Discrimination League - W.A.D.L.
> Member of Summerland Grove Pagan Church, Memphis, TN
> Member of Sylverwood Circle, Memphis, TN
> http://www.pagans.org/~selena
-- Shadowcat
kageneko@kageneko.net
"I can roleplay. I can frag. I can PK while you lag."
Actually, if you'll look, several of us have already posted on said topic :)
-- Shadowcat
kageneko@kageneko.net
"I can roleplay. I can frag. I can PK while you lag."
Hmmm, only 51 mins till midnight so I've decided to wait it out in hope of witnessing the end of the world. /.ers in timezones after mine (gmt+9:30), i'll send you a post-apocalyptic postcard as soon as 9/10/99 ticks over.
Be assured all those
Should read something like
"Greetings from downunder, where we just can't wait any longer to start our armageddon-esque celebrations. As a glance out through the melting glass of my window, I obsevere that the land is engulfed in fire and brimstone and gravity seems to have been reversed.
... Wish you were here!"
It makes you wonder when you see the date...
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
- William Gibson
I mean, besides the fact that its 9.9.99, and besides the fact that its 55 days after the peak, there's a new moon today too...
OOOOoooOOOooo
Daemon
For the record, while yes many pagans do hold the number 9 as special (i.e. it is the result of 3 times 3, three being a highly magickal number) today is no different than any other day to most of us.
:)
*I* certainly won't be holding a special ritual or even observing any sort of holiday for it.
It's a day like any other. It's not a solstice or equinox or even one of our basic holy days.
Don't get confused by the hype. We aren't running around thinking the world will end and we're certainly not concerned with Y2K either.
Got it? Good
-- Shadowcat
kageneko@kageneko.net
"I can roleplay. I can frag. I can PK while you lag."
Few of the pagans I know (including myself :-) would be seen dead having anything to do with numerology. Today has no real pagan significance. I was discussing it with a friend last night -- it's based solely on a date system that revolves around some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Unfortunately, few in the media got this right. An AP story picked up by the local paper here thought that 9/9/99 would be interpreted as some sort of 9999 stop-execution command, never mind that dates are very infrequently interpreted as any sort of command...
-----
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Well, today is important to video game fanatics. The DC launches today as well as Final Fantasy 8
Some poorly written programms used 9/9/99 as an indicator that there was no date. Of course, they'd have unpredictable problems today.
Some old systems used the text string "9999" as an end of file marker, and if a program on such a system was written badly enough to not zero pad the day and month, the date would be read as end of file. Any sane programmer would store today at least as "990909", the ANSI recommendation for date storage has for many years been "1999.09.09".
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Drivers wrongly came to the conclusion that moderators are just randomly selected, normal users like you and me.
You fail to see my son. Though your small mind, at least compared to my genetically enhanced one, may not grasp the situation, I do. A normal user of Slashdot is a fair (not of complexion mind you), competant (well, competant if they don't try to interact with the outside world), and generally intellegent individual(with some exceptions). When they are picked to be one of the few however, they become evil human beings. They lie, they bitch, some even start using NT in mission critical applications! Their lives become utterly centered around their incredible power, their power to control the great force know as /.
This can happend to anyone. Your best friend could suffer from Moderationous Powrus as we speak. Maybe you mother, your father, or even YOU. Symptoms Include:
Constant and maybe even excessive reading of Slashdot.
The growing of a short goatee, and maniacal laughing.
They're favorite topic of conversation changes to "The many possibilities of being dictator and wordly god of the Earth"
Please, if you notice these symptoms apearing in a family member, a loved one, or an aquatance. You must imediately lock them in a closet devoid of any meens through which they could communicate with the outside world. Including windows, phone jacks, cable lines, power outlets, and musical instruments. People generally recover after 3 days or when ever their moderation points expire. This is a serious problem, and should not be taken lightly.
Unlike, oh, at least 90% of you kiddies, I *have* worked on mainframes (which, btw, are not antiques, guys - IBM, just three or four years ago, recorded its best sales of m'frames ever), as well as PCs and UNIX.
This *entire* scare is like the toilet paper shortage of the early 80s (yes, that was a joke, too).
First of all, the *usual* practice on mainframes was to store dates as computer-version *JULIAN*.
This means that today would be 25299, or maybe 2521999. Makes it a *hell* of a lot easier to calculate dates, and differences, y'know. Therefore, it'd be *real* unlikely that we'll run into the date 99999...unless we go to a calander that has > 1000 days/year.
Second, y'all folks that have been talking ignorant BS about COBOL...yes, I *have* written more than enough of it, and yes, I have a button suggesting that we can stamp it out in our lifetime...but COBOL has *other* EOF markers than "9999", does *NOT* read data as a stream, but is buffered, and reads only structures, so it won't "find a 9999 in the middle of a record and stop" (sorry, only DOS does that with a -z (0x81)).
Also, a reasonable "no cancellation" date would either be HIVALUES (which came in the version of COBOL I was using in '79, in school), or 99999...which, again, is certainly not a valid date.
Why do y'all believe the media's bs? Why do you think anyone who programmed before you started school was dumber than you?
mark
19 years programming experience
software engineer
m/f (DL/1), pc, & UNIX dba,
technical architect
configuration manager
UNIX sysadmin
I ran into some guy last night that administers rather old mainframes. He feared today. Really feared. I asked him who the hell would abbreviate MMDDYY to MDYY. I then asked him who would code September 9th, 1999 as 999999.
Now I ask you... Who the hell would do the above? That would make for some ugly code, especially the MDYY bit. With all the added code to accomodate MDYY, it would have been more feasible to store all dates as MMDDYYYY. Go figure.
Anyway, it's also the debut of the Dreamcast. Oh yeah, and MTV's Video Music Awards, if anyone actually watches that crap.
-mj
Hi there, :-)
have to write this from my windows box (shame on
me), but my Linux and FreeBSD boxes stopped
working today!
very big grin
The media are believing all the supposed computer "experts" that are coming to them and saying "oh my God the world is going to end".
Look at the Microsoft NSA story. Someone sees the NSA symbol in MS code, makes an assumption, and the media buys it hook line and sinker. But almost every media article quotes some "expert" as saying that it's a real - the media guys don't want to say that themselves. That way, when it turns out to be bogus, they're clean.
I think we could use some sort of trusted agency that would verify computer-related or security-related news stories. Actually we have this in the CIAC and similar agencies don't we? If a CNN story quotes the CIAC, and not "Security Expert Bob Fishpond from Funny Creek, Missouri" then I'd be a lot more likely to believe it.
On 6/6/66, I was little, I didn't know shit, and by
7/7/77, eleven years later still don't know any better
on 8/8/88, it's way too late for me to change
and by 9/9/99, I hope I'm sittin' on the back porch drinking red wine, singing
oooooooooh, french fries with pepper!
-- Mark Sandman, 1963 - 1999
I'm celebrating the way he would have wanted it!
--
Xenu loves you!
I mean, even if 9999 is a common way to signal the end of input, who enters date data in that method?
For example...
Input Date: 11399
Is that Jan 13th, or Nov 3rd? I mean, if people are really entering in dates in that method, they've got a lot of other problems. Of course you can unambiguate it by padding with 0 but then you'd get 090999 which isn't 9999 anymore.
Gee, no wonder nothing bad happened.
Oh, and today is newsworthy...Dreamcast man! DREAMCAST!
Despite this article, the date 9/9/99 has no significance for pagans that I am aware of. Most pagans (myself included) aren't interested in dates like this. OK, so they've found some nut who'll give 'em a soundbite about the supposed significance of the number 9, but as we all know, there are plenty of morons who think that 'first post' is somehow significant too.
I can't imaging 9/9/99 causing any real computing problems either. I read a report that said that some mainframe programs use 9999 as an end-of-file (or record) marker and may be confused by the date 9/9/99. But todays date couldn't be stored simply as 9999, since you couldn't write a parser to read dates in this format (what would 12399 parse to - 12th March 99 or 23rd Jan 99?)
So if anyone tries to sell you any portents of doom for today - either pseudo-mystical or pseudo-compsci, take it with a large pinch of salt.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
STATUS read_until_end() { //exit condition
bool bDone = false;
STATUS eNormalExit = false;
while (!bDone) {
read_all_info_including_dates();
if (day == 9 && month == 9 && year == 99) {
bDone = true;
eNormalExit = true;
}
}
return eNormalExit;
}
I think computers might be the least of our concerns on this day. :)
However, Pungenday, Discord 70, YOLD 3167 doesn't sound so menacing.
hmm...come to think of it, i'll be 23 years old for only the first 23 days of the year 2000.
I've seen quite a bit of discussion about this on the MIDRANGE-L mailing list, and so I thought I'd mention a few things. A lot of people seem to think that 9/9/99 as a special date is mostly myth, largely because the computer would store it as 090999, which doesn't look as special. Surely 99/99/99 would be better. Other people pointed out that this sort of thing tended to crop up when the users wanted to add extra information in a field the programmer thought would only be a date. In such a program, 99/99/99 would fail because it was an invalid date, so creative users might be tempted to use a vaild date, but give it special meaning. Two common dates for things like "no expiration" or "not applicable" were 12/31/99 and 9/9/99. The former would be the highest date that could be entered in a two-digit year field, while the latter was easy to remember, yet still a good ways into the future.
9/9/99 problems are likely to be fairly rare, since the necessary circumstances would be somewhat rare, and, hopefully, many such problems have been caught by now. Where today's date does cause problems will likely not be noticed by the population at large. (i.e. no power outages, no broken ATMs.) At a guess, the most likely candidates for problems will be billing software running on older mainframs and midrange computers, and I'm sure the companies will do their utmost to bill you for anything you might owe them.
--Phil (I know the banks with my loans have been quite diligent.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
We're much more likely to see problems caused by idiots rather than computers. Think about what's probally already started happening. People are going to be buying more canned goods and other non-perishables. People are going to buy bomb shelters and take their money out of banks. Banks are going to go under, food prices will sky-rocket, as will any other materials used in a bomb shelter. Then guess what happens when jan 1st rolls around and the world hasn't exploded? Well with all of those non-perishables people aren't going to buy food, especially due to the increased prices because of the limited supply the day before. People aren't going to trust the banks with their money, after all, many went under because they weren't Y2K (read: moron) compliant.
Oh and we can't forget the inevitable rioting that's going to occur. Americans will use any excuse to riot. Your favorite team lost the world series, riot. Your favorite team won the world series, riot. Y2K aka armagedon is here, riot.
God bless morons one and all...
-matt
the DATE type used in microsoft products is a double. So while you lose precision as you go on (in a couple thousand years it will not be accurate to the millisecond) it never wraps around until a "Very high number" (expect the universe to be ended by then)
I could be imagining things but when i went to CVS today to buy the essentials - pringles and coke - there were about 4 people in front of me in the prescription dept all with computers billing on one plan but not carrying over insurance or something. I'm not sure the details but it looks like they were all similar... maybe? Oh well - there's no date check on Pringles. I eat 'em too fast.
I'm awfully sorry to build up the suspence like that just to have it all fall through, but the world did not end.
my most humble apologies
Computer experts have just determined that, after extensive testing, that the date 5/23/2001 will only occur once. "No computers have ever encountered such a date before," a noted computer expert said. "Who knows if they will work when they encounter it."
Already, several major firms have been created to certify systems an 5-23-01 ready. "People are urged to ensure that their banks, hospitals, and every other business they deal with are ready for this unprecidented event."
.. If I started the calender 2 years ago and in 1998 years it would be 2000, should people feel that some great wrath would fall on all mankind? (plus the y2k should have been fixed by then by most software companies)...
It's silly how we sometimes take these numbers and see some hidden meaning inside them, silly when most of are geeks and believe in more realistic things.. in a positive note.. i'm almost done with my CD recoding tool (GPL), it does DAO perfect copies of all sony drives.. more to come..
--
Linux isn't a religion. Redhat, Slackware, etc are, but AFAIK, there is no "Linux Church" ...(until now :-P ) Sorry, sad comparision :P
- Chuq
The problem is not a 9999 date rolling, the problem is that the specific *date* 9/9/99 was used to indicate a null date in a lot of old databases. Stupid, yes, but it happened.
Laura
that's exactly the attitude that caused Y2K... you'd think people'd learn :)
Cris E
St Paul, MN
93
Actually most Pagans don't use numerology...in fact, I would say that more Christians and Jews do so.
As well, Paganism, being a recognized form of religion deserves to be Captialized when mentioned, just like Christianity or Judaism.
Most numerology is based up the Jewish holy books and the Kabbala. Christianity borrowed from the Jews (like they did most things) and created Christian Kabbala. In the late 19th and early 20th century, groups like The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn did a great deal of research and various members published a number of books that are considered some of the best references today.
One of the formost writers on the subject was Aliester Crowley.
93/93
ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern, Druid
Silver Fox Grove, ADF
Pagan for nearly 20 years.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Power failed last night. Wasn't back up when I left for work.
On NPR this morning, when describing the 9/9/99 hoopla, they used the phrase "some computer programmers believe this will affect" blah blah blah. But the problem is that I've talked to a lot of old mainframe programmers, and not one single one of them believed that a date would be mistaken for an end of field mark. The only people who believed this crap were non-programmer idiot bosses and "Y2K experts".
The end of field or end of file marks where they *did* use all nines where generally not dates. In the few cases where they *were* dates, the dates were fixed length fields. And guess how many digits it takes to represent a month or a day, boys and girls? That's right, two each. So if they were putting in an end of file mark as all nines, it would have been equivalent to the 99th day of the 99th month of '99.
I'm sure some devious Y2K conslutants are keeping that in their back pocket so when the Y2K money starts drying up, they can trot out "hey, in 8 and a half years it's going to be 99 days and 99 months since the beginning of 1999".
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Forget not the following important fact ... Not all coders are up on "today's" newest compiler releaase features, and many still use "old" habits in coding. (I suspect that fact will be a truism for a long time.)
Long, long ago, people actually used COBOL for something other than a conversation piece ("It took us 3 hours to add 2 and 2!") Anyway, back then, memory was expensive, and programmers thought up ways to use less of it. I don't quite know how shaving two digits off the date string would help, but apparently somebody thought so and did it (apparently!). ;). He said, "You know, I did it this way once... geez, everyone must have done it that way..." And so he told all his buddies, and they published it.
Apparently some inept programmer(s) thought that since we won't ever have four 9's in a row, we'll just make that the end of file marker. This means that ANY information stored in a file that their program reads will stop at that point and not see any more data past that. Note that this means IN A FILE, READING IT. The "code" shouldn't stop, depending on where the EOF marker is found. If it is in the middle of the line, for instance, it could cause problems unless the program handles an exception like not having enough data in the string that was read. All up to the programmer. But also take note-- the date could be in the file at any time-- in fact, its more likely that a database will hold information for something in the future (an appointment, invoice, order ship date, etc.). That would have caused trouble last week, month, etc., not necessarily today!
I think that this 9999 "bug" was thought up by someone in the press who at one time or another worked as a programmer in COBOL (can't imagine why he wouldn't be doing THAT anymore
Almost as stupid as the hoax going around that you must change Windoze "regional settings" so that the short date string has four digits of year displayed ("It's a STRING for _DISPLAY_, people!").
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
Last I heard, he was buying up shares in a Seattle-based coffee shop chain. :)
Can anyone provide a link to a story about the Tandy? Or a model?
(Not that I'm worried... hehe, just curious)
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
A load of tripe about numerology in that article. So what if 9/9/1999 => 9+9+1+9+9+9 = 46 = 4+6 = 10 = 1? Only about, oh, one in nine dates add up to '1'.
Sheesh.
--
This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along.
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
There has been a major event on 9/9/99, ... the evil Bill gates cartoon just took over After Y2K! Help us Nitrozac, you're our only hope!
I put up "flame bait".
The flame the posting recieves gets
rated a 3.
I like this new system.
I have seen a lot of people complain on this thread that everyone would use two digits to handle months and days (since months can go to 12 and days up to 31). However, when was the last time we had a month 99? Or May 99th? These do not exist, and it is possible that the programs in question had simple error-checking enough to realize that there could not be a 99/99/99, and would either force the user to use 9/9/99, or would simply change it itself.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I'm going to go about my day as normal, but if the world comes to an end or something, i'll post a reply to this to let you all know about it. Here's hoping the world's ending doesn't stop me from posting.
I'll keep you posted,
If 9/9/99 is the EOF marker, just saying that we can get to 9/9/99 alright doesn't mean we can get subsequent records. So i'd hold off celebrating (although there's really nothing to *celebrate* about Y2k)
Tom
The only way I can figure there'd be a problem is if someone were storing numbers-only as BCD instead of ASCII. dd/mm/yy becomes DDMYY, where each letter is BCD 0-9. 9/9/99 would become 09999h.
--The more you know, the less you know.
I agree, it's only to make people secure. I'm still worried about nuclear plants and weapons tho. Despite an inflated safety record, human error is the most common cause of nuclear accidents. Not to mention disgruntled, un-unionized employees...oops! better check my fridge for plutonium in the cheese (The China Syndrome)
Friends of the family are getting a second mortage in December. They plan on spending it all on one
big vacation. And thanks to Y2k,of course they feel completely safe that the bank will magikally forget that the loan happened!!!!
Myddrin
why would we give a rats behind about the date the christian calander says it is? ... just curious
-
if knowledge is power, the internet is god - me again
The Ancient Greeks (pagan) were also heavily into numerology, Pythagoras and his followers in particular. Many neopagan religions are based at least in part on the Greeks.
From what I understand, the Mayans were also very big on numerology.
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
9) Antichrist crashed party, demanded blood sacrifices to the Satan-spawn of Baal. :(
8) Panicing day-traders fleeing the inflationary wrath of Alan Greenspan caused a run on the dollar
7) Today's date actually expressed as 090999, thus disappointing a bunch of Y2K nuts hoping for a warm-up
6) Ricky Martin stole the MTV video award from Weird Al Yankovic, thanks to shameless ballot stuffing
5) Stayed at home working on computer to avoid superstitious fanatics, motherboard overheated, magic smoke came out.
4) Spilled hemlock all over myself at the coven swap-meet
3) "friends" is a re-run tonight
2) Couldn't play the new Dreamcast due to nuclear melt-down of national electric grid
1) That darn asteroid!
We want endless gardens of data, where the bits can flower, flourish and reproduce. -- Andy Mueller-Maguhn
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The worse thing about all this media hype is that there will be people will get hurt. Not by any Y2k bug, but by others panicing beforehand "defending" what is "theirs". It's gonna be nasty.
And you know what? When Saturday 1/1/00 rolls around, nothing will have fallen apart.
Not a bad idea to have some
survival equipment/food around.
Look at the earthquakes in Turkey and Greece.
Nature could turn on us at any time.
And hey, if Y2K doesn't end the world, you will
be able to pick up great camping gear for next to
nothing at garage sales!
This isn't even on the topic.
See what complaining about moderators get you?
The topic is the Y2K bugs ugly sister the 9999 bug
Basicly 9999 is used in very old software as a "stop here" feald.. it's also how some of those old computers will record todays date.
To those computers today is the end of the world as we know it.
What happend on this early Y2K? Nothing...
Yes the preview of the Y2K bug... Y2K bug Beta...
No 9999 tests.. no certifcation.. noting... and we lived.
Now that you understand the topic....
He was relaying what happened in HK where the 9999 has allready hit....
It's funny... laff...
They deployed the police expecting the world to end and.. it didn't...
IMHO more damage will be done by people playing a certen song by a purple musician than will ever be done by the Y2K bug...
Record players may be Y2K compliant but are they "Ug not that song AGAIN" people with hammors complient?
Naaa they all died with the 9999 bug
I don't actually exist.
While most posters have ballyhooed the 9-9-99 'bug', I have to relate the problem a company I have worked for ran into. They still use an document database running on an ancient 386. During Y2k testing for the 9/9/99 bug, the in-house server software that allows users to access the database remotely started to intermittantly dump. A bunch of the IS people sat down to discuss replacement / rollback / recode. While mulling over the possibility of rollback, one of the passing users chimed in. "You guys can't mess with the date, it would screw up our age number." There wasn't an age field. They made her show them. Some of the users were filling in the l_date field, intended for lease-end date, with the date the master lease became effective. As a result, a field that indicated days until lease end had a large negative number. When they had set the date to September 8th, one of the leases signed back in '82 managed to hit -9999 days until termination. Unfortunatly, when the machine rolled to the 9th, the field hit -10000, and it would no longer fit into the five char string. Every time someone looked at that particular lease, (which was often enough) the machine segfaulted.
The users were punished.
.sig: Now legally binding!
I make an off topic reply to an
off topic post and get rated off topic.
The original post still has a 1.
moderate this!
Heck, this one might piss off a Sony employee. Shouldn't it be flamebait too?
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
No, you fools! It doesn't happen until 9:99am. Oh.
ever wonder what would happen if this unix thing isn't fixed in time, which by 2038 i hope it would be.
Talk about a good day to take off.
heh
"If you can't make it good, at least make it look good." - Bill Gates
I mean, yes, there were problems somewhere on the planet today, but were they caused by the date? Probably not, but you know that somehwere out there is some "expert" who's saying to the uninformed:
If the date in a system caused a problem, fine. But don't blame the date, or try and create a non-existent correlation between the date, and any problems that occur today.
In short, all us /.'er's who know, must confront those who would use this as a tool to pry monies from the unwitting, and use the two words the "experts" hate the most: "Prove it!"
I studied COBOL in the mid 80's.
Some variables could only store numerical values, which were defined as a number of numeric digits, presumably using BCD as the internal storage value. It was necessary to use magic numbers to indicate special conditions, such as EOF or no more records. Since most files were indexed sequentially, all 9s was often used as special EOF indicator since it would always be sorted last.
However, by the mid 1980s, COBOL introduced a special value, HIGHVALUES, to which any numerical variable could be assigned, which was always higher than all 9s, and was to be recommended for such magic numbers. I think there was an equivalent LOWVALUES as well.
I do not know when these to keywords were introduced, but it was at least 15 years ago.
If 9/9/99 is a problem with COBOL, it must be using a very old variant of the language.
the 9999 issue is more to do with having high and low watermarks in programs useually COBOL,
where you set the minimum value to high watermark [9999]
and max value to low watermark
as you process all the data you check if the current value is larger than max then you set max to the current value
and if the current value is smaller than minimum you set minimum to current value
when you are done processing the batch the values in min and max have the largest and smallest data found in the dataset.
if min = high watermark then abort because there was no processing done.
I'll probably get marked down for this, but oh well....
Only live once.
Why would 9/9/99 be a problem? WHY is the year 2000 a problem? As far as I can see the public doesn't need to know about this stuff 24-7. I have a motherboard from 1994 and it's good till 3000, I run linux on the sucker so OS does present a problem. Everyone who cares about this stuff (who's not working at a nuclear plant) is safe from all "y2k" evils. It's a bunch of hype so you can sell $50 ISA cards people who don't know how to install them, and find you that they need to upgrade to the $65 PCI card. And charge them $100 to remove the case and $80 to install it. :)
I really have no understanding of how people are afraid of all of these dates effecting the electric grid. I've worked in the electric industry and can honestly tell you that the only computers involved are those for billing. Everything else is a mechanical system of some sort (balancing the load, etc.)
On the Indianapolis news last night, reporting about IPL, the IPL reps showed the Motorola two-way radios they use to report situations in. And they watch dials. And then they said this is how they normally do it. It's all very manual. Unless the workers go on strike at midnight 1 Jan 2000, I'm really doubtin' there's going to be a problem. And even then, there still isn't likely to be a large-scale problem.
Oh, and to keep it on topic, 9999 isn't even remotely an issue. Even my non-techie friends were able to grasp that if 9999 were a problem, wouldn't 91099 be a bigger problem (since it requires more digits). And if that's all the better that they could do, why wouldn't the programmer have at least used 13xxxx or xx32xx to avoid the issue?
-Derek
I'm going to make a Beowulf cluster
and put it in a fish tank full of
mineral oil.
Andover can lock me out, but they
can't shut me up. I'll find a
way back in.
So, according to the article, the antichrist is supposed to show up 'sometime this month.' Did he start today, or what? Anyway, my guess is that he's not gonna show up in Austin. How typical of him... bastard. :P
No /. for 3 Days?!?!? YOUR LUCKY!!!!! I wish i could do that but due to the devilish ways of the ever cruncy and spicy Taco im stuck here.. hmmm...more microsoft stuff to flame "I'm god... Or atleast thats what the voices tell me"
It seems Gary North, the Y2K doomsday 'evangelist' is selling grain now!
Jar Jar sucked... he ruined the whole movie.
i'm thinking that 64bit processors will be the standard within 5 years, then tada no 2038 bug.
that is the second biggest reason nobody is worried about 2038, the first being its 39 years from now : )
In the early ninties, desktop computers became popular items. Nearly everyone has "Windows 98" on their "Pentium" these days.
In the mid ninties, the internet became popular. Nearly everyone "chats" at "yahoo", emoticons are the new cool slang. Although I've yet to have someone in a real conversation reply to me with "colon hyphen close-bracket!", tempted am I to use such a line myself.
In the late ninties, computers have become so embedded in our lifestyle, companies are turning to artistic methods of selling their boxes, web site gurus are using "cooler" technology. Our computers now fit into our decor, our web sites customise the news to suit our lifestyles (and advertising to match).
We're all buying over the net, e-commerce is the future of all financial dealings.
And Y2K is the future of our news media.
The pathetic attempt-at-scare that is Nine Slash Nine Slash Ninty Nine was undoubtedly cooked up by some wannabe net journalist, looking for a story to tie in with this visually different, otherwise harmless date. Yes, there may be one or two problems reported. But they'll be limited to bad date implemetations in shoddy COBOL scripts.
Perhaps Slashdot should make a new category specifically for "media-tech-scares", so I can filter it out? :)
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
I think the only problem this "bug" has caused is excess fluff news. Do we really need to hear more news reports of all these 3rd world countries checking in that there are no problems? Boring. Very boring.
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
This just goes to show how myth and urban legend can be blown up into a big lifethreatening "problem".
Did any of these so-called reporters try and check their "facts" with anyone who had actually written code back then?
A couble of points:
1) Any program that uses 9999 to represent 9/9/99 will be pretty useless for tracking dates. Does 11199 represent Jan 1, 1999 or Nov 11th, 1999? I guess they did not think that part out...
2) If number of days from the start of the year is used for the "99" you can get that date, but that day passed sometime in April.
3) The panic-mongers are trying to claim that 4 nines were used for und of file markers. When I took Cobol back in the early 80s, it was nine nines. Sounds like someone took something they heard a long time ago and tried to make it fit into the Y2K scare as something else to panic about.
Date problems are not new. The Pick/OS stores dates as the number of days past Jan 1, 1970. Some reports and programs had problems when that date went from four digits to five. It was noticed almost imediatly, it was fixed, and life went on. Most people never knew it happened.
As computers become more common in day to day life, more news "storys" will be based on misunderstood and overblown rumor and fear. Don't buy into it.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
My "Domain Controlling" NT Server crapped out and no one could log into the network.. Which threw my boss into hysterics about the whole Y2K issue. Grrrr. So, because I didn't get all raptured or whatever, I celebrated and bought myself a nifty old laptop off of eBay! whoo hoo!
Doing that sum with the digits on a digital clock in the small hours is a really good way to get back to sleep apparently...
I wouldn't know.. I'm either working(dumb) or too exhuasted to suffer insomnia.
Star Trek rules!
I'm pretty much disgusted with the media hype over this 9999 date issue and Y2K.
Lets examine a few points the media and others have spewed out regarding this.
Firstly, 9999 and Y2K are completely unrelated. It's a simple coincidence that they are 3 months apart. 9999 IS NOT a dry run for Y2K. The last time I saw 9999 in a program was in '82 and it was Fortran on a PDP-8. Y2K pundits have never expressed *any* worries over 9999 crashing anything. It has only been mentioned as an interesting side-line to the current Y2K saga.
A self proclaimed "Computer Expert" declared this morning that 9999 is a non-event just like Y2K will be. "Your home computer will be fine, planes won't fall from the sky, yada, yada". Don Crabb, YOU ARE AN IDIOT, go do some research before you run off at the mouth on TV. Nobody gives a fsk about whether Junior will be able to turn on the PC and play Quake on 1/1/00. The real issue *I* worry about is embedded processors. The power grid and gas pipelines DO NOT run on PCs with Windows 95!
The Chicago nightly news ran a story about 9999 last night about ComEd using this as a Y2K test. Aaaaarrrgghhh! Again, this is Y2K unrelated. The problem with ComEd and other behemoth utilities is the scale of their infrastructure. They simply do not know what they have out there. ComEd has been operating in a "fix on failure" mode for ten years! They never spend a dime on new equipment until it is a replacment due to a failure. Locating all embedded processors with date problems (even if they started 5 years ago) is impossible. Also, if I recall correctly, a story ran about a year ago which stated that between the major Telcos (AT&T,Ameritech,GTE,BA, etc.) there was over $15 billion in unaccounted for equipment. Tell me that the public utility infrastructure in the US is "clean" of Y2K problems and I'll tell you that you are either uninformed or a liar.
The media avoids any real discussion of the potential problems by front loading their coverage with stories of the extremists. Any new information a viewer may get from the news would be completely drowned out by images of Survivalist and Apoclyptic Fundamentalists. This is not Y2K. Y2K is the local farmer I spoke to who expressed her concern over whether or not she'd be able to get fertilizer next spring since it's all imported from Russia (Anhydrous Ammonia). How 'bout talking to "real" people about potentially "real" problems that are issues for them?
Where are the "computer experts" that are actually doing Y2K remediation work? Why do all these "experts" who appear on TV seem to only be repeating Y2K happy talk? Why no stories on Y2K problems that have be found and fixed? Why no stories on the uncertainty of the situation? Many pundits now are starting to speak on the potential that panic (food stockpiling, bank runs) may be the real Y2K problem. Wouldn't a little bit of real information help calm fears?
Ok, all done now.
can you please tell me what this bug is/does?
Hopefully I'll have retired by then...and they won't want to wheel old Pascal programmers out it'll only be C programmers (and I'll lie when they ask that question ;)
Gotta have something for the kids to lose sleep over!
If the computers would interpret the numbers with just characters, then it'd be ordered as 090999 rather than 9999 which means nothing. This was never an issue... just media hoopla.