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?"
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
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.
You only need 30 minute's worth of gold bars.
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
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.
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Open mind, insert foot.
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.
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
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.
Obviously Sony must have used COBOL when coding for the Playstation 2.. see Playstation2 delayed.
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."
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..?
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?
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
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.
Apparently 9999 was used instead of an EOF marker. If the software came across it, it would assume that there was no more data after it.
I think this one is a dud; I don't know how it slipped past the "experts".
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".
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.
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."
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
9999 was supposedly used as an 'end of data' signifier - especially for data entry programs, which would loop (asking for more data) until a '9999' was entered. So when today's date rolls around the program could interpret it a signal to end. I don't know how many 'production' programs actually used this but I have text books with coding examples that do. I would have thought that a production system would have been a little 'smarter' than using 9's.
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".
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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.
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!
On the other hand, it could be moderated down as "Bad spelling". But then afain there is no such an option.
Well there you go again, assuming I'm speaking english. - note: that was supposed to be funny
Its called Binary Coded Decimal or BCD. You use four bits to encode each decimal digit, not a byte - although people may do that too, but if you did that you could just use ASCII.
You can use ordinary binary arithemtic to do BCD arithmetic, but you have to add fudge factors to get it right.
Its used in accountancy applications because you know how many digits accuracy you have, and can use decimal rounding conventions etc. I think it probably matters legally.
The first versions of BASIC used BCD, since its less likely to produce 2 + 2 = 3.9999999 in the
way certain BASICS that used floating point sometimes did.
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
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."
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
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!
The "all nines" convention was to deal with hardware limitations; some devices wouldn't signal end of file, or worse, would abort if you read past the last record. Using nines as EOF gave a safe, platform independent way to handle the problem.
But as others as pointed out, Sept. 9 is 090999 and should not cause a problem.
Old COBOL programmer
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.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Little known fact: Revolution 9 was by Paul and Linda, who were trying to be trendy and avant-garde, not John and Yoko, who were living in a nice cottage in the countryside.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
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
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!
The place where this is going to be a big deal is in billing. Sure, today's not a big deal: everyone you're printing an invoice for was billed on 9/8. You're not going to notice that you missed 3 bills that should have printed after midnight. But tomorrow, when you should have 75 bills printed and you get none, you'll notice.
As for the "the date would be stored as 09/09/99" argument: You mean your integer reading functions don't strip the leading 0? That's interesting, and possibly useful, but possibly braindead also.
The "9/9/99" sentinel is NOT that old. They were teching us to use that in school less than 7 years ago.
I think there's a little backlash by younger computer people here. "Those old people" lacked the "vision" needed to plan for their programs to be in active use in 1999 or 2000. Get real. I'm not an old computer programmer, and I was taught that 9/9/99 was a good value to use, and I've seen several programs use 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.
From what I understand (and I bet I'm wrong) people used to store
9999 as the end of file marker. And people are thinking that dates will be stored the same way? Or was EOF 9/9/99, which would just be blindingly stupid (why use a totally unnecessary slash when you can zero-pad the string - at worst you lose nothing, at best you save two bytes)
So surely if it was just 9999 at the end of a file, dates would be handled a different way (consider 99111 - 1st of November or 11th of January?)
I could be totally mistaken here, I just don't get what the problem is supposed to be
-- Andy
(feeling very clueless today)
No, since the first 9/9/99 order would have kicked it off. The other time it would have kicked off is at the end of the day, when records get checked, etc.
Since that didn't happen, it's safe to say we're okay.
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.