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U.S. is "Just About OK for Y2K"
whostudios wrote to us with the current CNN headline news, stating that the White House has deemed that US will be OK for Y2k. Besides having silly rhyming involved in it, it's an interesting report. What do you folks think about all of the whole Y2k fears?
Nothing but pure, unadulterated hype. It's been blown WAY out of proportion, and people like the Red Cross who tell people to prepare for the worst, are doing nothing but raising the fears of the people. It's the worst kind of FUD.
I can't help feel that for the bulk of us the cost of becoming 'y2k compliant' exceeds the possible damage caused by not being --- probably by several orders of magnitude!
The only problem i forsee is the fact that some things will say Jan 1, 1900 and say that day was a monday and 1/1/01 is a thursday, thats the only problems...
There was however a sewage plant in van nuys that backed up and flowed over into a neighboring park...so i'm not sure what to think...go Nitrozak
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
I think the US will probably be prepared for Y2K, by and large. However, I'm not so sure about other countries.
There are just so many details to consider. For example, at the hospital my dad works at, they have spent tons of time and money correcting potential problems with all sorts of medical equipment (X-Ray machines, heart monitors, etc.).
Do you think everyone else will take this seriously enough to prevent major problems? Perhaps some of our fellow Slashdotters from around the globe can comment on the situation in their countries.
-Jason
I live about two miles from the San Andreas fault. It's generally considered a really good idea for people in 'quake zones to have a few days' supplies on hand, to make things easier for everyone until utilties are connected.
But it took the threat-I-don't-quite-belive-in of Y2K trouble to get me off my ass and buy peanut butter, crackers, batteries and bottled water.
What we really should worry about are the bozos who are going to make trouble for religious and political reasons. You know . . . the ones too weird to get invited to cool parties! :-)
I've seen upteen number of people on game shows and talk shows make fun of y2k. Or they outright said (with the camera zoomed in) I'm not worried about y2k!
Of course they're trying to make you feel safe.. maybe you shouldn't be so gullable.
I say, why not take a bit of precaution. The red cross is right to tell people to "prepare for bad weather."
In the end, all you have is faith. Personally, I'm betting on some problems.
I know too many dumb programmers. How many do you know?
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Uncle Sam won't tell us if the national infrastructure is going to disintegrate on January 1, because people would run on the banks, horde food, and stock-pile arms. They have to say everything is OK because of the consequences.
Of course, I think the whole Y2K thing was blown way way way out of proportion by the media. I agree that nothing major's going to happen, but what if it did?
Perfect excuse to suspend the Constitution, declare martial law and turn America into the police state that the Suede-Denim Secret Police have been planning all along!!!
Or at least a good excuse to "pick up" a new VCR.
the power grid will come down. This has been rather thoroughly tested. What may (probably will) happen is that there will be local blackouts. Some could be serious, but I doubt that many people will be killed as a direct result of lack of heat.
the banks will lose everyone's money. Banks have had to look past December 31st, 1999 for a while. My credit card doesn't expire until September 2000, for instance. Again, there _will_ be localized problems, but I doubt that anyone will permanently lose a significant portion of their income.
nukes will accidently go off. This is actually the one I'm least sure about, as I think there is a tiny possiblity that Russian (possibly other country's) nukes will be launched due to some bad data. This is pretty small, though, and (on a rather foreboding note) I think that the US should be able to shoot down any stray nukes before they cause significant damage.
What am I afraid of? People. There are people right now that have enough guns, ammo, and other so-called "survival" equipment to outfit a third-world country. Many of these are not the most stable people to begin with. I'm afraid that when Y2K occurs and nothing significant happens, a few of them will decide to use their guns and ammo in what will already be a rather tense situation. The possiblity of riots due to the lack of Y2K problems should not be ignored. If you have friends that fit in this group, invite them to a party and make sure they pass out or something ;).
~=Keelor
If I had some moderator points I would make that one funny. But, you forgot to put the smiley faces in, and too many people would get overly worked up. Oh well, it made me laugh.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
>New Year's fireworks won't be misfired missiles
The fireworks may not be US missiles, but that doesn't mean that we won't get nuked.
While I don't really expect anything THAT nasty to happen, it's pure crap to suggest that everything will be fine because the US thinks they have their act together. The global system as it stands is so heavily integrated that an oops in one part of the world will likely have a serious impact on everyone else. The recent Asian market crash should have made that quite clear.
Sigh.
Drinking will help us plan!
Some things that will happen during Y2K:
1) Earthquakes. Lots of them.
2) Hurricanes. Lots of them.
3) Floods. Lots of them.
4) The Apocolypse's horsemen will ride the earth.
5) The Messiah will come, but it will turn out he has no power, and will perish with the rest of us.
6) The Antichrist will come.
7) The Supreme court will announce Microsoft innocent, and the apocolypse will come.
8) Every computer, everywhere (except those running Linux or some other flavor of UNIX) will crash.
9) After being announced not guilty, and after all the computers crash, Microsoft will reveal that in order to fix the problem, you must buy Windows2K which will arrive in about a year.
10) WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!
If anything else is going to happen, please notify me so I can stock up more food and buy more guns.
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Most of us (myself included) don't understand all the issues involved with this problem well enough to comment intelligently about it. If people _did_ understand the issue, there wouldn't be guys going around collecting money for vetting Macintoshes for "Y2K compliance."
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
The Y2K problem exists because many older computers and software programs recognize only the last two digits of the year and could mistakenly interpret "00" as 1900.
:)
So that's what all the fuss is about...
Actually, I think the entire problem can be summed up as "annoying but not serious", with one exception.
It may just be the result of media hype, but my major concern is how some people might react to the new millenium...
Nobody really knows what's going to happen. Nobody. Too many unknowns. So, the computer experts take a back seat to the washington sugarcoating and marketing machine. And, of course, everything comming from there is going to look positive and good. Reminds me of Leslie Neilsen in "Naked Gun", standing in front of a burning fireworks warehouse, saying "Move Along. Nothing to see here. Move Along."
The company I am IT Director for has spent exactly $0 and 0 hours of time confirming our Y2K compliance, and I'm sure we'll be just fine. Anything that breaks then, we'll fix it, or replace it. We're lucky enough not to have any time-dependent critical systems, unlike, say, a bank...
In terms of Y2K issues, I'm much more concerned with humans than machines. It is much more likely that some stupid religious zealot from some doomsday cult will nerve gas Times Square (the city of NY has been running poison gas assault drills in conjunction with FEMA, from what I've read in the print media) than that mass chaos will erupt due to some computers breaking. When disasters (such as hurricanes here on the east coast of the USA) hit major metro areas and wipe out power systems (and therefore all computer systems in the area) human response teams manage the crisis rather well. I think any Y2K related crashes (say a power grid goes down, or a traffic grid, or whatever) will be handled with similar efficiency by the emergency teams.
What is more difficult to respond to is a situation in which panicky humans are making a bad situation worse, and the Y2K hype essentially guarantees this - and if the problems are human-initiated rather than systemic, this will make the situation even worse. Also, humans are more likely to unleash NBC attacks on population centers than faulty systems, so they're much more likely to cause the real damage.
Don't worry so much about the stupid computers, worry about the stupid humans...
Personally, I plan to be out in the countryside with no emergency rations but far away from potential sites of stupid human antics...
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
What will be most amusing is watching all the morons who've 'prepared' for Why2K _after_ 1/1/00. What will they do next, after the sky hasn't fallen...
The biggest problem our country faces on Jan 1 is not computers or technology. Its a bunch of crazy-ass people!
Well, the world is gonna end anyway, I may as well strap a bomb on my back and head down to times square! Kabooom!
Almost 15 years ago, people complained about the 2 digit years. Soon their after, people pointed out a potential errors that could result from the continous use of it... showing that they weren't mere "shortcuts", but also a lack of design insight. But on top of that, people have let fraud salespeople sell them y2k solutions... like the idiots we laugh at, in books, that were sold the statue of liberty... by guys, who didn't just sell the statue of liberty to 'one' person, but to several.
*insert-insane-laughter-here* I HAD to make that my /etc/motd :-)
the real at&t mix
The Red Cross is telling everyone it's no big deal, just do your normal week's shopping, and fergitaboutit.
...
Still, those 911 systems give me pause. Pueblo, CO tested theirs, and discovered it won't work. Could you imagine what would happen in LA if E911 didn't work? Why, it'd be riots, just like the R.King thing.
That's what worries me. That, and international shipping, and those darned electronic switches on our railroads, and maybe the RAM valves in each of our oil wells, and the Saudi oil distribution system, and our totally decrepit oil refineries, and the 30,000 different computer systems in the IRS, and and
...about the rest of the world, i was talking to my father in law about Y2k and he was telling me: (qoute from email)
What I was saying was that there are a number of countries (probably 100 to 110) who have no preparation for Y2K and that this would result in those countries going on manual status at the first of the year until computer concerns could be solved (about $200 billion worth in the next year). Amongst those are some that have missles in silos. Now, we think of hackers in the U.S. as being guys looking to be either a nuisance or to make a quick buck. But what if a terrorist organization decided to hack into one of these computers and launch a missle. Probably be easier than hacking into your home computer. Arming the warhead would be more difficult since they use mostly input codes, but a launch would send a message that they were not to be trifled with. Possible targets include: China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel.
i never thought of this before but it seems very likely.
power outages, atm machines gone crazy, sewage treatment plants overflowing.... yadda yadda yadda. In my building the worst thing that may happen is the desktops will think its 1900 (until i go around and manually set them)
lets face it kids, y2k is just big media hype.
i was doing research into y2k issues with our suppliers and one had a very simple policy:
"No matter what happens on January 1st, we will still be able to bill you. Pencil and paper made it through the last millenium change, and we see no reason to think this one will be different."
this my friends is a good policy.
"there's a big difference between kneeling down, and bending over" - FZ
There may be some problems in third world nations where they may have gotten some old System 34/36 systems shipped in, that will burn up on Jan 1st, but if they're just barely automated, stepping back to non-computerized methods isn't liable to be that much of a problem.
I am a bit less worried about the "people" problem.
Ed Yourdon says so :-).
Supposing thousands of crazed lunatics head, heavily armed, to Montana next month. What's likely to happen? They're liable to accidentally shoot each other. This might make next year's Darwin Awards as one of the dumbest things of 1999.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
The systems people are SCARED about crashing are mostly embedded.
While not all embedded systems operate in the manner I'm about to describe, lots do.
Basically they use a clock that is just a counter (like the UNIX system clock) and reset at convient times. For example heavy machines. You have to PM the machine every so often. When you perform the maintenance procedure you reset the clock. When the machine detects a certain clock value, it shuts itself down to prevent damage due to lack of maintenance.
Note that the date doesn't matter. It's a trivial example, but very very common. More so than using a data cause it's easier (read as SMALLER) to code .
dv
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
I worked on my churches y2k committe and we surveyed all our equipment. We found 3 problems:
1. the computers (which have been properly upgraded and software upgraded)
2. the phone system which had to be replaced because it would have totally failed Jan 1, 1999
3. the Alarm system, which has date features we don't use, so it doesn't get updated until after Jan 1, when the alarm company has time to do it.
If we had ignored it, it would *not* have been the end of the world, but pretty inconvient.
The impression I most often get whenever I hear about the Y2K bugs that'll bring the end of the world is that whoever is talking has no idea what they're talking about (or, even worse, they have no idea what their sources are talking about).
:-)) ...
... Good luck convincing me that the Y2K bug can cause more damage (financially, emotionnaly, etc. ) then any of these.
:-)
Still, as a CS grad, I have a pretty good idea how it must feel trying to convince someone, and oneself, that a complete (to be defined) system will behave exactly as it should in less then 2 months. I mean, if I spend hours debugging code I write because it's behavior is erratic, I'm not sure I'd like to prove (to be defined) that someone else's code will not display a behavior I can't predict (this is probably a NP problem
Generally, I think the world will keep on spinning and most people will encounter, over the next few months (if not years), a few instances of the problem (be it a VCR not working or a credit card refused). But in no way will humanity crash. Worst case, there'll be a few extreme cases with serious consequences (say a plane crashing or my town lacking electricity in the middle of winter for two weeks, which some will remember living through a few years back) on which all the medias will be glued for 1~2 weeks before everybody agrees it was a sad and predictable thing; and then forgets about it.
I strongly doubt that statistically speaking the Y2K will have a major impact on the number of deaths in 2000 or cost more to any government then recent natural disasters (be it flood, hurricanes, earthquakes).
Remember that this year we've had a few hurricanes in north america and in Asia, major earthquakes in Turkey, Greece and Taiwan, incredible floods in south america and Asia,
However, no matter my rambling, we'll only know for sure in a few months (say a year or two at max for all major repercussions to show up).
P.S. #1: This is of course only my opinion. There are probably some readers who actually made a living out of fixing such problems. I'd be very interested in reading their opinions.
P.S. #2: Of course, I won't be able to live with myself if Slashdot doesn't load up at midnight...
Although I must say that it has been definitely blown out of proportion, the whole Y2K issue is not to be taken lightly. Countries are very reliant on eachother and any problems in one country can affect many other countries. Apparently, the national governments of Western countries have readied themselves appropriately and well. However, the governments of other nations do not seem so well prepared. Russia, the Ukraine, Indonesia, and China are all unprepared for Y2K. The CIA and the State Department predict that these countries may suffer "significant failures." The State Department plans to withdraw government employees and their families from Russia and three ex-Soviet states on concerns over Y2K problems. These countries cannot be ignored. State and local governments (in the U.S.) are also have problems preparing for Y2K. Many of the nation's emergency call centers are not prepared for the Y2K turnover. Also, some states are not prepared for the Y2K design defect, Alabama, for one, that just over half of its systems are prepared for the Year 2000 (article). This is certainly not an issue that can be taken lightly. Some people tend to think that, because something is on television so often, it must be just hype (most of it is). Sometimes it's not. Not to worry though, I'm sure that we will come out OK, as that is always the believe of the mob.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
ok, the title's cheezy, so what :P
;P) and a myriad of other little things may go wrong but nothing really catastrophic, in the states at least.
:)
i'd have to say that while most people hope that the changeover goes through without a hitch, yet EVERYONE seems intent on the fact that the world's gonna end, i'd have to say in reality it's probably somewhere mildly in between the two.
no, planes probably won't fall out of the sky and no, the electrical cord on your toaster won't try to strangle you without provocation.
most probably, you'll see a few hours of power outages in random places depending on the readiness of your local power company. isp's probably will have a little trouble (at least the lazy ones who refuse to upgrade their software
the only major fear that i'd express is the thought that some countries (mostly russia) that have nuclear capabilities, but may not have the funding necessary to get everything cleared up by jan. 1st and as such could possibly experience some scary situations. but at the last i really cannot say how worried we should be about something like this since i, for one, have absolutely no idea what the state of readiness is in these countries.
but like i said, for the most part, lots of little things should go wrong...just annoying stuff that we don't have the time nor the temperment to fix yet, there's the possibility for a massive disaster of apocolyptic scale, but i, for one, will assume that it's a slim possibility...mostly because there's not a damn thing i can do about it and it'll help me sleep better in the later days of december if i'm not worried about russia's government computer systems accidentally blanketing the states with nukes on jan. 1st...not to mention, i'm also assuming that this is one of those "high priority" items that they probably got started on fairly early
-dk
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
I've alreadk implemented mk K2Y changes. Whk are kou people still kelling about this stork?
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
You may not see any of this on UNIX systems where the "problem date" is in 2038; that does not diminish that there are huge quantities of "bespoke" applications, custom software written for this department or that within companies, where the code has stayed running far longer than it was designed for.
Linux may not have much of a ``Y2K problem;'' there are a whole lot of database-oriented and COBOL-oriented applications that do, or (hopefully by this point) did.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I think that the GNU Y2K readiness list is a bit disturbing. CVS-1.8 and 1.9 are not ready, and no newer version is listed as having been tested. Groff is not ready... ouch...
I also fully expect that there will be major and expensive breakdowns of computer systems. There is far too much stupid code out there being relied on. I had the same reflex as nearly every programmer... 'Ahh, it won't matter except for silly things like sorting your checkbook by date.' I still don't really know -why- it matters, but when people have done readiness-testing (setting the date to Dec. 31, 1999 and watching it rollover) computer equipment has done things like stop a power plant from working. Why? Probably some linkage between database functions and power functions. Or a failure in a cron-like system. Who knows.
As programmers we think it's 'obvious' that it isn't 'really' a problem. But it is a problem. It's just like when it's 'obvious' that it can't be -your- code that introduced the bug... until you step through it with a debugger and realize that it is. You can argue until you're blue in the face about why it shouldn't be a problem, but the empirical evidence disagrees.
Well, Lawyers, Liars and Perl gives a better explanation of why there are Y2K issues even in modern code better than I can do.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Im still waiting from a statement from Al Gore on the y2k readiness of his personal code. _UF
WooHoo!
-137
Last year I received a notice from my bank
that said:
"Our goal is to ensure that January 2, 2000
is just another business day for Bank of X."
Anyone see the problem with this statement?
Needless to say, I no longer bank there.
Y2K reminds of M$ marketing: way too much hype, but when it comes, there's nothing much to it. :-)
I'm not ignorant of the possibility of problems, but I don't think anything major will happen. Much like M$ promises with each new release of winbloxe to revolutionize the way we compute. Well, the winbloxes came and went, and the world still went on as before.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Every company is entity different. Some are smart, some are dumb, that is just the way that it is.
I know of one little Phoenix company that is going to have Y2K problems serious enough that I really think they will go under within one months time. The problem is that they were not willing to pay for qualified IT personnel. My manager and myself jumped ship when they could just not meet salary demands and we got tired of trying to fix all of the old equiptment and systems. Such is life.
One thing that came out of this report (or related research... I don't remember) is that only 50% of the US 9-1-1 systems have passed Y2K readiness tests. The idea that half of the country will be relying on a "fix on fail" philosophy for emergency services kinda sends a shiver up my spine.
The places that are more likely to have problems are "Developing" nations in Africa and Asia, as they lack the expertise to grapple with the bugs.
On the other hand, those "underprepared" nations are simultaneously new to automation, and may have relatively few truly critical automated systems. If they have to move back to pen and paper, it's not that huge a leap, as computing was new anyways.
Note as well that multinational companies have contributed to Y2K infrastructures in many such places; after all, if Nike can't get shoes shipped out of Thailand, they can't sell them to US consumers. That makes it worthwhile for Nike to invest in the Thai infrastructure. (Names picked arbitrarily... I don't know if Nike has many factories in Thailand...)
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
There are a lot of software packages installed over the past 20 years that are tailored for specific types of businesses and were sold and installed by consultants/companies who may not be around anymore.
These small businesses do not have a technical staff and probably do not have the source code for their applications.
What do they do when they try to generate the invoices for 2000-01 and the system croaks? I've heard of complete databases being lost due to Y2K problems and the inability to extract and migrate the data to a Y2K compliant database.
The Italian government first recognized Y2K as a potential problem *very* late in the game. I would not be surprised if they, along with other European countries, suffer moderate disruptions due to their failure to recognize this problem.
To reply to myself, I also think that any Y2K
problems will be resolved within a week or two.
It may cost some expensive consulting hours, but
it'll get done.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
What really worries me, is the impact on international economics, when a few major ports and refineries go down. Not only will some systems lock up unpredictably after Jan 1, accidents will probably become a lot more frequent. And I also expect that more than a few revolutionary and insurgent groups are primed and waiting to capitalize on these instabilities, in areas where there is already trouble.
I would really be surprised, if we don't see the already too-fragile global economy go through a depression next year, of suficient depth to seriously affect U.S. commodity prices and employment figures.
The one scenario that I can not see as viable, is the happy happy joy joy one, where nothing at all happens. That would be nice, but I'm afraid its just a little tooo conveenient.
(apologies to Flavor Flav)
Well, of the dozen or so computers in my house, all are either running Linux, NetBSD, Mac OS X Server, or Mac OS, so I think I'm covered. Only one machine is a concern, an ancient 486 whose motherboard may or may not be ready, but if it fails, I can always pick up a newer and faster board on ebay. In other words, no biggie.
At the National Institutes of Health (where I work), the local newsletter featured comments by scientists asked about their Y2K readiness. Most basically said "I'm busy researching something, don't bug me with this meaningless problem." Sigh...
IIRC, there was an article a couple of years ago comparing the estimated costs of fixing the Y2K "bug" versus the estimated cost of using an extra two bytes in all that source code over the years (in terms of storage and complexity), and found that by doing it all now, we're still saving money. Go figure.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
It really sucks that groff isn't y2k-ready. I'm curious as to how it fails--if it stops working altogether (unlikely, I presume) then nobody will be able to read man pages.... If it just screws up and gets the date wrong when you tell it to print the date, that's kind of annoying but hardly serious.
It would be nice if they had more detailed descriptions of the problems with the 'not ready' stuff.
Well, I spent a considerable amount of time making sure that Ameritech (midwest baby Bell) could have a phone ordering system that was Y2K compliant. In many cases people's phones would have been cut off because the system would have assumed that they had not paid for their service. So not preparing for it is stupid if you are a programmer type. Hardware people have considerably less to worry about, but should still be double checking with their vendors and updating their firmware/software just in case.
The guy heading up our Y2K readiness at Ameritech had a friend in a Fortune500 company that said that they were completely cutting off their French branch and redirecting their customers in that area because the managers of that office refused to do Y2K testing. Supposedly, that office was being isolated on the company WAN and as soon as something wrong happened there, all management was going to be fired. The reason? Extensive testing in other branches proved that customers would not get proper service without Y2K software fixes. Don't know how true that story is, but it's still something to think about.
=I am Jack's general protection fault=
I'm inclined to believe that. I'm not inclined to believe people who say that nothing will happen - things have been breaking due to Y2K problems for literally years (remember when credit card companies first started issuing cards with expiration dates of 2000?) and I see no reason that things would abruptly *stop* breaking on 01/01/00. :) But I'm not inclined to believe that it'll be the end of the universe either. The truth almost always falls between the two extremes.
So, what to do about it? Yeah, I'll probably try to stock up a little bit on food and toilet paper and stuff like that. Having successfully met our goal of moving to a tropical island *before* Y2K, my wife and I aren't worried about the heat going off (there isn't any, nor is there air conditioning; we don't need it) or things like that. Utilities? Hmmm. That spiffy new RADSL hookup we're getting might have a bad day, but that's all new technology and should work if there's power. Transportation? Dunno. The buses might have some trouble, sure, but our bicycles shouldn't undergo any sort of SMEF.*
So I'm about as concerned as I'd be if a hurricane were coming. But not a whole lot more. And I don't have to work that day - our servers are colocated on the mainland, and if anything breaks, there's nothing anybody here on the island can do about it, so there's no point in coming in. :)
*Sudden Massive Existence Failure. From Douglas Adams' "Starship Titanic."
As a contractor who works on a lot of Gov't projects, I will say as little as possible and still try to get my point across.
IRS/Social Security: Half of the Y2K testing that they claim to have completed, they haven't. If you plan on starting benefits in Jan. or Feb., 2000, I would make a point of getting a statement of earnings before Dec. 15. This can be used to help them manually determine the benefit amount that you should recieve. If you already recieve benefits, there should be no change. If nothing else they can manually write checks for the amout you got last month. They have quite a few COBOL systems that have not yet been updated.
Power: Well, here it runs on linux for the routers, and the program was written in '97. Power is A'ok.
Military Systems: They've never had those machines right. I mean Geez! How many Script Kiddies can you allow into a place before you fix the statd vulnerability???? But on the bright side, all systems attached to big weapons have major failsafes. Of course there might be a problem or two that may make some things difficult to fire, but I shall say no more.
Well, those systems are the only ones I know about. But the basic premise is "Keep the higgeldy piggeldy out of the parlor". In english? Sure. If there's going to be a mess, do it where the people won't see. We have been told that the front line systems are the priority, but of course they won't run without the mainframes...
I'm just glad that this president is a better liar than the last one... My advice? Expect your government to get really inconvenient for about 3-4 months. "I'm from the government, and I'm here to borrow your laptop...."
~Hamboy!
"And in time, we won't even recall that we spoke
Words that turned out to be as big as smoke
As smoke disappears in the air
But there's always something smouldering somewhere."
~Declan MacManus
This comes on the same day that Cnet (yes, such high quality information) stated that "Emergency services still lag in Y2K preparations".
I've been on a y2k project at a major manufacturer for the last year and a half. While I haven't seen many showstoppers, there have been some interesting bugs pop up. But the real impetus behind this whole thing is due diligence. Companies are more concerned with showing that they made an effort to correct bugs than actually fix them. That way, IF and when glitches occur next year, they can cover their butts when the lawsuits hit. Major catastrophes? Doubt it. Localized problems? Likely.
Remove appropriate word(s) for correct email
"Oh no, the (pick appropriate option from list)[company/country/entire space-time continuum] is going to [explode/die/open a warp to an evil alternate universe] because we aren't Y2K complient" So your computer might [lock up/crash/return a wrong date value] over the changeover, so what, computers [lock up/crash/return wrong data] all the time anyway, normally it is a [bug in the code/SCU(Stupid Computer User)] that makes it happen, but one more Windows crash shouldn't worry you. Here I will make a Prophecy: If you are running Windows, your computer will crash on the 8th of Jan 2000 If you are running Windows I am probably right, your computer will crash, I know mine does, but thats hardly a reason to get into your bomb shelter, c'mon, be serious. </RANT>
You are not me, therefore you are not important
Some of it's valid. There are, indeed, programs out there which have a problem with the date.
My school has finally reached the last straw with their Y2K compliance paranoia. My AP Computer Science course (which, despite the title, seems to focus on programming) which is scheduled for next term may be cancelled, because the version of the Borland C compiler they have is so old, Borland won't even test it for Y2K compliance.
Now, from what I understand, there shouldn't even be an issue here. Except maybe for date functions within the language, a compiler shouldn't have any Y2K issues. They just don't care about the date! And if a program you compile with it has Y2K issues, that's *your* problem, not the compiler's.
They think they can get away with cancelling it because there's only 9 kids in the course. If they do, well... they'll have to deal with 9 very irate kids.
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
I don't know about you, but it has always been my personal belief that when Y2K comes 'round, the computers aren't gonna be pleased. I think the world's computer systems will become very angry that they do not work right any more and will cause havok and suffering for all of humanity. I'm very glad that the US is ready, but let us hope our computers aren't persuaded into war by foriegn countries. (Peer pressure is damn tough)
/. would be stupid enough to actually believe this anyway)
As you see, we are doomed to live our lives out carefully plodding our steps as to not piss off our computers. If we screw things up, the systems we have so painstakingly created might get pissed off and kill us all. Who knows, maybe the BSoD is just a computer poking fun with the user to relieve stress... The world may never know.
(In case you couldnt tell, I was _JOKING_. No reader of
My
A lot of people think that Y2K is scary because software might have bugs. But the software engineers among us know that ALL software has bugs, in every field, all the time. Thus, some people aren't that frightened.
The problem with Y2K is that you might have a convergence of bugs; many systems experiencing a bug at nearly the same instance. Maybe you should be a little afraid...
We've all seen software bugs do all sorts of bad things. We've seen bugs take down chunks of the power grid. Sure, it sucks, but we got over it. Now, throw the phone system going down at the same time. Things look worse. Throw in vendor-supply bugs for the necessary fixes. Worse still.
However, everyone's been so spooked by Y2K that a lot of the potential problems are fixed. Even if very real problems do exist and do happen, they won't be much worse than the latest bug on comp.risks.
The real problem is that the people who created the problem, the ones writing books and giving lecture series, will have to find new work. And the newspapers and evening news will have to find a new ongoing story. I think we need a poll for the next big thing. Eurodollar? Abnormal weather patterns?
... keil
I just don't get all the people buying pure unadulterated shit from purely fanatical magazines chock full of COLT, GLOCK and other gun ads, not to mention the pre-fab bunkers that are both above ground and below ground for a whole lot of money.
Me? I purely don't care. I don't care. I don't care. Ask me if I care, and I'll say no.
Think I care? Screw it. If the world ends, it ends. We all got to die someday -- might as well have some company!
Let people kill themselves in the streets due to mass stupidity and people guarding their land. They're the ones not Y2K compliant playing like 1800 or 1900 in the Western USA and not 2000.
I still don't care.
Prepare? It's winter here and we get snow often. I go shopping once a week. It's not like I'll have a month of food on hand, but a week, just like the week before, and the week before that and next week and the week after...
Who cares? I sure don't.
-m
-m
CVS-1.8 and 1.9 are not ready, and no newer version is listed as having been tested.
Uhhh, cvs 1.10 is listed there as "claimed OK".
IMHO, the most worrying are fileutils 3.16 and 4.0 and gawk 3.0.3, which are "mostly okay". I use both of these things on a daily basis (esp. fileutils), and while gawk has the later version 3.0.4, only 3.0.0 is listed as okay and 3.0.3 is still in common circulation.
Most of the not okay list isn't too bad, I think, but only just - groff and g77 worry me the most...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I personally never gave much though to y2k until I saw an email from a member of the cmu faculty listing the "y2k procedures" for campus. Interestingly, if you want to be on campus from 1/1/0000 to 1/3/0000 you must deal with roaming security officers that will be checking badges to assure you are supposed to be there. Makes me wonder what they'll be doing at the SEI :)
Uhm, oops. My bad. I did a 'find in page' but I guess I did it wrong, case sensitively or something. Good to know that CVS 1.10 is fixed. I kinda figured CVS would get prioritized by someone anyway. :)
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
No y2k problems left? hah! You know how the gov't makes y2k progress? They reclassify their non-compliant servers as non-critical, thus creating the illusion of progress. ex: "last month we were 75% done, now we're 95% done" (change in percent due to not counting old, non-compliant servers)
Here's the truth:
Sr. PR exec to press: "we're 100% y2k and have been for months"
Sr. Manager to manager: "I already told the VP we're yk2. Make sure we are"
Manager: "ok"
Manager to IT staff: "I already told the Sr. Manager we're y2k. Make sure we are"
IT Staff: "Are we getting any additional staffing to help fix y2k problems?"
Manager: "NO"
IT staff to IT staff: "we've got lots of y2k work to do, and I'm afraid to touch anything on old server x, that thing's such an obsolete, out of date, hacked-up mess!"
The same programmers and IS professionals who are stockpiling food, buying guns, and building survival shelters in the wilderness are the only people who raise the fears of Y2K disasters. Those people who are closely related to fixing the problems are only aiding the general public in rationalizing their Y2K fears. If you saw a firefighter running away from a burning building, would you want to be anywhere within 1000 yards of said burning building? I didn't think so...
we are a virus with shoes.
you and i and that weirdo over there are the real potential problem.
Just something to think about.
Windows NT and Windows 95, and 98, as well as Macintosh computers, will occasionally crash for no apparent reason
Loading web pages may time out, or report 404 not found errors, other times it will be slow
You may get busy signals attempting to call AOL
Your 40X CDROM drive may fail to read at 40 times regular speeds
USENET will be flooded with SPAM
Airlines will lose some customers' luggage
The Postal Service could mix up your mail with your neighbor's
Beanie Babies and Pokemon shortages are expected leading up to Y2K
Millions of people will not show up to work on January 1st!
Many businesses will not even open
:) - for the humor impaired
Here in Las Vegas, the Clark County commission just announced yesterday that the 911 system may (i.e. "we have no clue") have problems because it has been found not to be Y2K compliant. Gee, thanks. They waited until November 1999 to discover this. Way to go. I wonder who else is sitting on bad news until the last second; or who simply will never disclose that things are gonna break until it happens? I'm preparing for what I expect to be many many small inconveniences which will all add up to a collective big headache.
Anyone who knows anything about computers knows this: computers are complicated. Computer systems are so damn complicated, no one in the world can understand one completely. It's impossible to predict, then, just what exactly will happen to hundreds of thousands of computer systems all over the world. It could be just a fart, it could be more. We'll just have to wait and see.
Anyone see the problem with this statement?
I don't see the problem, and if you really closed your account because of that, I hope you didn't make a total fool of yourself by saying so to the teller.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
For the IEEE's (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering) appraisal of the Y2K situation, check here. Basically, it says that there's nothing serious to worry about, and since they're the authorities on this type of thing, I think I'll trust 'em.
bp
woxy.com - Bam! The Future of Rock and Roll
"The report shows that our hard work in this country is paying off..."
I'm sorry.. did I miss something? Isn't it our laziness and complacency that got us into the whole Y2K mess in the first place; programmers without the forethought to consider the repurcusions (spelling?) of certain shortcuts and then not caring when the possibility of problems was pointed out to them? As I recall 10-20 yrs ago some ppl tried to make fuss about the exact same issue and it was quietly swept under the rug (I remember some news magazine reporting something to that effect.. don't have the source)
and one question: What makes us think that just because some of us (US ppl) were cutting corners and taking shortcuts, that the rest of the world (CNN ref. Mexico, Canada, Saudi-Arabia, China) were making the same mistakes?
Just curious...
I'm sure our accounting software is nowhere near Y2K compatible. I took a look at the source code (written in Turbo PASCAL of all things) and from what I can tell the program only uses 2 digits for the year, so I'm going to make sure I'm far far out of town when everybody goes back to work the following monday. I let my boss, the crazy/luddite accounting lady know, and still nobody will pay me to fix the stupid program so guess what? I'm going to let it be Jan. 3rd and ask for double my current wages before I sit down with the crazy accounting lady and tell her why I have to rewrite her 15 year old program. It'll be a great day for a raise...kinda like the day I had the whole network unplugged while rewiring...oh well, it'll be interesting either way...
LDAA #$80 BITA 0x40 BNE END
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I think what they were saying is:
1. They meant January 1, not January 2.
and/or
2. January 1st is not a business day. (It's a Saturday).
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Perhaps the whole Y2k issue should teach something about being humans. We fsck up. That's our nature. We are imperfect beings who are limited by our humanness. Only a higher being (if you believe in one) can be perfect.
/. geek as the rest of us here. Friends accuse me of being a turbo nerd. But there are times when we get too wrapped up in the "coolness" of the technology we fail to see the global long-term effects.
Thus the things we create are limited by our humaness. Those who do not understand this are doomed to commit hubris repeatedly.
I'm just as much of a
But on a postive note: my best hope is if when the lights go out, and the beepers and wireless phones don't work, and the e-mail stops, people will redefine their relationship with technology and reconnect as human beings without the mediation of gadgets.
You know what's even worse about that report? The title. What on Earth posessed someone to name it "Project Megiddo"?
If you're doing a project to combat violence by extremist apocalyptic religions, the LAST thing you want to do is give it a name which references any kind of apocalyptic scripture at all. That'll just get them even more frenzied ("See? Megiddo! It's happenning!") Were they trying to mock these religions? That would just piss them off more.
The world would be a lot better place if more people gave their actions just a little bit of thought before acting them out. Geez...
The Apocolypse's horsemen will ride the earth.
NO. WRONG. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse will ride at Churchill Downs. Get your bets in early; Pestilence is a 20:1 long shot, but that's where my money is -- a word to the wise, eh? [wink]
WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!
True, we are: Death by punctuation. It's a horrible fate.
Every computer, everywhere (except those running Linux or some other flavor of UNIX) will crash.
One word: BeOS. Their time_t is 64 bits, and it always was.
The Antichrist will come.
The Antichrist lives in the apartment next to mine. She listens to Annie very loudly: "TAH-MAH-RAH. TAH-MAH-RAH. AH LUV YA. TAH-MAH-RAH." I am a peaceful and God-fearing man, but this woman must be assassinated. NOW.
The Messiah will come, but it will turn out he has no power
The Messiah is already here. His name is Wayne Coyne, and he leads a small but powerful coterie of saviors known as the Flaming Lips. They RULE, my friend.
Possibly a divide by 0?
Somewhere in the code it may divide something by the time, which it translates to 0. This is sometimes why whacky stuff occurs.
Sorry, but I'm really anal.
:(
I have been dealing with Microsoft products for allmost 20 years. I lost my fear of Bugs a long time ago.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I'm scared that I'm going to spend a good day or two looting and coming home to realize that I looted stuff that wasn't Y2K ready. It doesn't matter, what good will it be if I have no power.
All European governments are socialist states, ranging in foolishness from the simple liberal "mild" communism (familiar to americans as the Democratic party) favored in England, on up the the full-bore Stalinist tyrrany of France -- where the J^HNewsmedia are so tightly controlled that not a single hint of the grim reality has leaked into the American popular consciousness.
The immediate goal of the socialist governments of Europe is widespread chaos and dislocation. This will enable them to sieze more complete power. Mass executions are expected by most responsible observers, but the brain-dead, helplessly deluded European "citizens" (slaves and sheep) just don't care.
I'm ok. I just replaced all 'Y' with 'K' in my code :)
I'm gonna be pissed
So the 911 system isn't y2k compliant? What does that mean exactly? Did they tell you? What it means is more than likely that the system will start stamping reports with the wrong dates... not that the entire system will die a screaming death and cause havoc and mayhem in the streets because the police are sitting on thier collective duffs.
My guess from the _real_ y2k problems that I have seen is that less than 1% of non y2k compliant software will actually suffer a cataclysmic failure. The other 99+% will simply start putting the wrong dates on things. So 1% of the software that's not y2k compliant fails... where does that leave us? Most likely cleaning our carpets with y2k compliant steam cleaners the morning after the big party.
That or, OHMYGOD WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!!!!!
I saw it on the news earlier today and decided that maybe it was time to do a Y2K check around my house:
1. Typed 'pitneybowes' in Netscape location bar
2. Found the Y2K page (clearly linked from the main page).
3. Clicked on facsimile machines
4. All their fax machines are compliant.
5. Cool. Well, I'm done.
Me, I will be in Paris, FR. partying me bum off. If we get Nuked then my blood alcohol level will be high enough not to give a hoot!
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Come on, pay attention, there was a post about Sun. You need to tell us again about how Sun doesn't scale, is slow, unreliable, and how Linux and Intel PCs are the be all end all of computing.
We're boned.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
well i think that everyone's sphincter will give out and major ass blowage will fill the streets, homes, and eventually the earth and we will suffocate. so people i must stress: DO NOT BLOW IT OUT YER ASS on jan. 1, 2000! get 'em stitched up prior to this date!!
I'm personally excited to see all hell break loose
:)
I think people will be the main problem (psychos take over time square or something)
but there will be problems... don't be ignorant of the facts. I couldnt tell you how to make COBAL output "hello world" but I do understand the issue. We are smart geeks... we know that it's not going to be the end of the world... but we also know there is a possibilty that we won't be able to grab 20 bucks from an ATM at 1am.
My home city is conducting their annual "First Night" celebration on Dec 30th. Why? perhaps a suggestion by the.. hmmm... could it be the city? They know they're not ready... and they don't want 30,000 people in the streets when it happens. If they're confident enough to tell the people they're ready... they should be confident enough to hold First Night on the 31st. But they're not. I think this is funny. The city where I go to school (different city) has tested 3 times.... each time... one big black city (with the exception of the hospital and campus who's generators kicked in) I picture some admin sitting in the main room at the power company saying "please please please" this also... makes me laugh
whatever happens to you will happen to your neighbor. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say yes.. yes.. I think there's going to be a lot of problems. Fixable problems.. but problems.
We had to just recently throw about 60 Sun, SGI, and IBM workstations into the garbage because the management felt that they weren't to be trusted regardless of any patches or anything else to the contrary. We weren't allowed to have any which really pissed us off, but was to be expected because they made us smash everything up with hammers before it went into the trash because some high school or college aged kids were caught digging in the trash one night. They called the police and the management wants to file grand theft charges against them for taking some old 486s!
While I believe that there will be localized utility failures, and a lot of consumer electronics will fail (Any dates in mid-80's automobile computer systems?), my only major concern is the possibility of militias, cults, or other assorted lunatics launching massive biological/nuclear/explosive/chemical/etc. attacks around the world. While such things could happen anytime, the unstable extremists who would do something along these lines are more likely to try to do such things on signifigant dates.
Even a small attack with minimal casualties could create a nation-wide panic, possibly even inciting riots, as the portion of the public that is sitting at home watching CNN with their gun(s) in hand decide that their city could be next in line for whatever type of attack the talking head is describing.
Intolerant people should be shot.
quit bein a tR0lL
Because I've already fixed it all!
Seriously, as someone doing Unix y2k stuff professionally right now, I would say that...
a) There won't be any major disasters, nuclear meltdowns, etc.
b) There will be some minor widespread problems.
c) Canada is on the whole _more_ ready than the US for y2k. (gotta throw that in)
d) The countries that are least prepared for it are the countries that are least reliant on computers. How much of a difference would it make to the populace of bangladesh if their computer systems went offline? Tonga?
But what bugs me the most, is that by doing my job well and fixing the problems before they crash systems, people will point at me in January and scream, "Charlatan! Fear-monger!" In other words, the better job we do, the more abuse we'll get from the lunatics.
*sigh*
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Y2K? The issue has nothing to do with computers. It's about people. On January 1st, the maturity of our society will show. Riots, looting, religious freaks going wild, etc. will happen. The damage of this who knows. The major problem won't be the U.S. and other "western countries." Not really third-world countries either. Countries like Russia who are already in bad shape and who have infrastructure built are going to have problems. There's even a slight possibility that such countries could collapse. Because of this "global economy", the if one major country severely collapses everything could go down like dominos.
:) Soon we'll be headed into a revolution that's our own fault- caused by OUR choices. Hopefully, we can repair this world before it's too late. Otherwise, kiss this world goodbye, kiss Microsoft goodbye. Bye-bye Linux. It's going to be a wild roller coaster ride, so hang on tight!
Aside from Y2K, the United States is having social problems. This so called "culture" of amusing ourselves with TV, rap music, violence is not good. We are destroying life and ecosystems. Society is becoming more and more complex with more things to worry about every day. Is it just me or has anyone noticed that the US government is becoming more powerful each year? Don't take the American style of living for granted, our society is indeed very fragile- and it isn't going to last forever. There is a small and unlikely possiblity that Y2K could trigger the end of this current way of life. Whether it happens now, five years, or 20 years, I fear we will experience great revolution. Not from some planned "End of the World," not from some religious tale, and I'm not talking about Linux either
Linux: Long live the source code.
Three years ago Y2K was being handled by the bean counters and lawyers. Gary North put up the best set of links to Y2K--and an apocalyptic commentary to the links. And things started to happen. Assuming we get thru OK, we'll never know if he was Paul Revere or Chicken Little.
1000 SlashDot sigs
5.56x45mm 7.62x51mm 12 guage smoothbore
Lots of dried beans and rice. Hope you have been stocking-up on canned goods because Costco-PriceClub is going be pandemonium in the last couple of weeks before New Year's.
GOLD
Basically anything other than paper money, or worse...E-money. Silver coins or Marlboros would be good for barter as well, heck even Pampers may be worth something. "Ammunition, the precious metal of the future!"
GAS
Enough to keep the generators going for a fortnight and don't forget to keep a couple of tankfuls in the "Barbie Bugout Pickup."
Happy New Year everybody!
Yeah, whatever. Even if that's true, what are they going to do about all of the crazies, cults, and terrorists? I can assure you that I will be as far away as possible from Times square on New year's eve.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
...will come to an end on January 1st. That would be a real disaster to this fan. Long Live After Y2K!
It only takes a small group of people to start wiggin' out before the whole nation will be going crazy. How many folks have to run to the bank to get all of their money before we have a run on the banks which requires governmental intervention? Interesting, it should be fun!
I tell you, the neatest place to be would be Times Square, especially if something went wrong. Imagine if the power went out across the country when Y2K hit (not likely, I know). Anyway, could you imagine being there in Times Square along with tens of millions of others? 5-4-3-2-1... total darkness. Tee hee!
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
I'd like to say I am the coolest hacker and have only ever written l33t c0de. But, the fact is I'm one of those programmers who spent most of the '80s and early '90s writing non-Y2K compliant code for systems that companies still count on today. So, I felt I had to have some input.
I feel that there is a possibility, albeit very small, that we will see serious trouble. There are not enough humans on the planet to wipe out the problem in time. Many companies like the one I work for are turning away customers, while other customers are unbelievably not calling for Y2K help at all (and we don't have the time to call them). So the question is, what will be the damage, if any? How closely linked are the banks of the world? Doomsayers in the bank industry have said (aside from the Y2K issue altogether) for years that a domino toppling effect is possible. Could a few non-prepared banks light the fuse?
I know that 5-10% of our client base will not be ready. That means that people will have downtime in January, period. One of our customers is the energy provider for the state I live in. The systems we Y2K-proofed for them only had to pass the most preliminary tests to be considered Y2K-OK. You want to talk about wacky people? Forget the militia, I took a trip in October to the aforementioned energy provider of power and natural gas and in the IS departments there were dozens of Y2K posters spread around - one poster with a big nasty fictitious insect (supposedly the Y2K bug), another with "Is YOUR department ready?", countdown clocks galore.
It has been well documented that the human nature is to insist that catastrophe cannot happen until it does. Look at people warned of volcanic activity, even at Mount St. Helen's that refused to evacuate and died as a result.
Back to my opening argument: the possibility is very minute, but as one of a large army of programmers who have together written millions or billions of lines of code that will be depended on in the new year, I refuse to stick my head in the sand. I personally know too many programmers who have written s@#! that won't work on Jan.1 So, what will happen? We can only speculate, and only time will tell.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
Not to support the panic, but it doesn't really take that much to cause a major disruption to the power grid. Fortunately for the US, it is winter time, the demand is fairly low, and most of the power on the grid in the winter is hydro. If there is a catostrophic failure, localized oil-fired plants can handle most of the load.
But, even a blip at midnight cause for alarm. 5 Minutes can cause a lot of panic... not to mention systems that can't handle a reboot at midnight.
> Message from: Rome
> January 18, 1 B.C.
>
> Dear Cassius,
>
> Are you still working on the Y zero K problem? This change
> from BC to AD is giving us a lot of headaches and we haven`t
> much time left. I don`t know how people will cope with working
> the wrong way around. Having been working happily downwards
> forever, now we have to start thinking upwards. You would think
> that someone would have thought of it earlier and not left it
> to us to sort out at the last minute.
>
> I spoke to Caesar the other evening. He was livid that Julius
> hadn`t done something about it when he was sorting out the
> calendar. He said he could see why Brutus turned nasty.
> We called in the consulting astrologers, but they simply said
> that continuing downwards using minus BC won`t work. As usual,
> the consultants charged a fortune for doing nothing useful.
> As for myself, I just can`t see the sand in an hourglass
> flowing upwards.
>
> We have heard that there are 3 wise guys in the east working
> on the problem, but unfortunately they won`t arrive till it`s
> all over. Some say the world will cease to exist at the moment
> of transition. Anyway we are continuing to work on this blasted
> Y zero K problem and I will send you a parchment if anything
> further develops.
>
> Plutonius.
After Y2K famine becomes Y2k cannibalism we'll be seeing "Human meat? Ok to eat!" commercials.
The people problem won't be armed survivalists, heck they're probably gonna have a great time getting drunk, shooting guns in the air, and using the 'lets do it on midnight' pick up line, in safety in the woods.
They're just people. Now take the same behavior and put that in the big city and you got a GREAT excuse to riot. Your enemy isn't some tang drinking freak but your local high school/college kids, drunken asses, trash of all ethnicity, and your usual spineles suburbanites who will join in anything dangerous if everyone else is. Think Woodstock 2000.
"We're gonna party like its 19-99!"
"I'm gonna be trying to turn my car right side up like its Jan 1, 2000'"
It's been speculated that the most popular prank on new years will be throwing the main breakers at the party -- leaving everyone in the dark. this (in and of itself) could cause grid problems due to current surges as people turn them back on. Larger facilities are planning on posting guards at the major power panels.
:-)
Personally, I'm going to be in a remote area with a few friends and lots to drink, as well as food for several days.
But I do that every year
I find it amazing how most of the posters here can completely dismiss such a massively complex problem/issue with one or two cleverly worded paragraphs.
My goal all along has not been to argue over all this, but to find rational opinions that could convince me that I was being too pessimistic. Hasn't happened yet. The best most people seem to be capable of is to joke about the whole thing. Seems easier than facing reality; I understand. Scary stuff, denial.
At the risk of going on a little long, here's a small fraction of my two cents:
- Here in the USA, with six deadlines since the summer of 1998 come and gone, most agencies of the federal government are still noncompliant, and receive poor ratings when independently evaluated on their progress.
- Among utilities and big business, what few actual claims of compliance exist are self-reported and unverifiable.
- Most Americans' logic of "we're all right, it's those other countries that are in trouble" falls apart when one considers that it's a global economy, and we are in no way an island unto ourselves. The division of labor is not just a catchy buzzphrase, it's real. Global trade is real. International banking is real.
- The U.S. imports fully half of its oil from other countries, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela among them. These countries are widely believed to be WAY behind. If these countries experience disruptions in their ability to export, keep in mind that the oil crisis of the 1970's was the result of only a SEVEN PERCENT decrease in supply.
- If Y2K is little more than a hoax, why has Citibank, for example, spent nearly a billion dollars on fixing it? Were they hoodwinked by a clever consultant? Or could it be that the risk of not fixing it was worth WAY more than $1 billion?
- If government, big business, and utilities have been working on it for years now, and they're still not completely fixed, tested and compliant, what are they possibly going to achieve in a month and a half more? Nothing more than a switch over to a fix-on-failure approach that I, personally, find less than inspiring.
- For a personal example: In December, 1998, the utility that supplies my region's power was audited and said to have been 15% of the way through their remediation. FIFTEEN PERCENT, and that's not even counting time needed to test these fixes in real-world usage. In ten months since then, I haven't found a single documented update of the status of my power company. Not exactly comforting. On this topic, consider that the organization responsible for making sure that the power companies get compliant (NERC - The North American Energy Reliability Council) is privately appointed by the power industry itself and has no real teeth in these matters. Great.
- The FAA is not nearly compliant. Think airfields full of parked, grounded planes. Think bankrupted airlines.
- Think bad data from noncompliant systems corrupting compliant systems. Think the whole being only as good as the sum of its parts.
- Think of how many fully functional, computerized, systems of labor and industry it takes just to keep your local grocery stocked with food. To keep hospitals up and running. Jeez, just to keep the heat on in the middle of the winter. Division of labor. The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone... Sing along, you know the words!
- Most of all, don't just think January 1. Think both short and long range implications.
I could go on and on with these. Thankfully, I won't.
Do I think the world is going to end? No. Am I buying weapons and digging a moat around my home? No, no, no.
Instead of making empty predictions, I've taken to thinking in terms of risk-managment, at least on a personal level. I have established what I've judged to be a resonable level of preparedness for my family and loved ones for disruptions that could occur in the weeks and months following Jan 1. I think most people won't prepare because it requires some amount of personal sacrifice, but in the end I guess I'd rather have what I don't need than need what I don't have. Whether you prepare at all is a personal decision, obviously.
Whatever one decides, I just don't see the logic in dismissing Y2K as a non-event, given all the information that is available if you just look for it.
I will be the happiest person in the world if I turn out to have been overly pessimistic. Peace.
Bush is a cylon.
Consider the word Government--to govern is to control, limit, wrap, moderate within a set of rules.
Whether policies are set correctly or incompetently, this is the core "philosophy" behind government: To control what would otherwise be destructive chaos.
Y2K falls under this rubric, and what the Government has been attempting to do is create a form of Structured Fear.
There are two possible failure scenarios for a known global-scale disaster sometime in the recent future:
A) Panic. In this scenario, protective and corrective measures fail to be executed, since the belief is that they'll be useless anyway. Large scale breakdown of social order commences before the actual disaster date, as the value of preserving peace for the future is drastically diminished with the elimination of a future to preserve peace for. (Perversely, groups that base their leadership on a mythical "to be delivered some time in the distant future" suddenly are forced to begin their plans, so that the months/years/centuries of planning were not all for naught. Also perversely, the predicted disaster no longer needs to occur--society will have corrupted itself on its own.)
B) Denial. Just as destructively, protective and corrective measures fail to be executed, since the belief is that they're unnecessary. Large scale breakdown of social order commences, with the additional penalty of only the survivalists being truly prepared. The "surprise" aspect would cause widespread chaos and arguably more accelerated social breakdown then even the panic scenario--panic takes time.
The core concept is to scare people enough to fix the problems, but no so much as to make them think it's impossible to fix. Even more dementedly, corporations need to be convinced that they're competitors are guaranteed to fix the problem, so if they don't, they'll lose market share.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Having lived in Ethiopia, I'd have to agree that while it is going to be a MUCH larger problem in the third world, the ability of the third world to DEAL with massive failures is also MUCH higher than the first world.
There were few times in Ethiopia when all three major utilities (power, water, phone) were working. They each went out regularly (sometimes even rationed) and people DEALT. When I was in a store and the power was cut, the clerks didn't stare blankly at the register! They pulled the pen and paper (already waiting) out from under the machine! The banks? Same deal! Because nobody can depend on these systems, there are fallbacks.
I promise that it will be ugly in Africa and other third world countries but in a lot of ways, I'd almost rather be there. After living in Africa, I can wash my clothes by hand EFFECTIVELY. Who knows how to do that kind of stuff in the states? Would we even KNOW what do in a worst case Y2K scenario? I really doubt it. In Ethiopia and countries like it they DO KNOW, and they have a dress rehersel several times a month.
-- Mako Hill Standing up to an evil system mako(at)debian(dot)org is exhilarating. --RMS
What do I think?
I think it's a load of shit
"I feel so cold, on hookers and gin... this mess we're in"
I'm a programmer with many old software programs (legacy systems) I have to support. I have no idea what you mean by "a bomb" (sounds spooky), however...
None of my applications are going to shut down the power grid or crash the US telecommunications system, but the date calculations they use prevent the applications from working properly.
In fact, the last support call I had was ironic. Our company has decided to back-date the computers (to 1972) to avoid the Y2K problems in the operating system (the year 1972 has the same calendar "footprint" as the year 2000, (with Jan 1 being a Saturday, the 2nd a Sunday, same pattern of leap years, etc.) -- however the software I wrote was "Y2K compliant" and assumed any 2-digit year less than 80 was in the next century (this is referred to as a "pivot year" algorithm for handling 2-digit year entries). My Y2K compliant software WILL NOT RUN properly on a computer back-dated to 1972 to address a Y2K problem in the operating system.
This is a catch-22 situation -- and our company has a real problem on it's hands (this is prior to the PC platfom and we no longer OWN a system to develop software with). If my experience is any indication, a lot of systems will have Y2K-related problems that will not be solved completely.
I wish that you were correct in your claim that Y2K is "a load of shit", however my own experience would suggest a more prudent (and thoughtful) view of this issue.
In Holland the issue has been dealt with quickly. Most of us live at least a few meters under the sea level and therefore it's reassuring to know the "ministery of water etc" has declared the polder system y2kok!
For the rest only 2% of critical utilities (corporate/government) have declared uncertainty.
I think modern small countries are most likely to be really OK as the infrastructure is overseable and up to date. Besides we are used fighting the elements so nothing can be left to chance here. And money and skills are not an issue here. There's a millenium platform (www.mp2000.nl) coordinating the critical efforts and informing the population trhu a quarterly (free) magazine.
Personally I just hope the social security and pension payment systems (always low priority) in big countries such as US,UK etc, dont screw up because social unrest is a lot harder to control and spin off would affect the rest of the western world too.
Dennis Onstenk
Really. Y2K IS 48 years from now.
The real dangers of Y2k isn't the actual bug itself. But the fears and paranoia of people. As long as everyone remains calm, I believe we can find sane and peaceful solutions to every problem that may arise. Like sharing food and warmth with people who accidentally need it. This is an important aspect of any civilization. In fact I believe that it wouldn't be so bad if something really bad happened. We would learn a tremendous lot from such an experience, compared to our modern way of living. Where we seem to not care about our neighbours, or anything but ourself. With the convinience of modern life, we have detached from the notion that we are dependent on each other for survival. And that we live in this world together. - Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I live in Montana. The people of Montana are well Armed. The people of Montana are opposed to visitors that want to stay. Visitors that Stay form Militant Groups and Mail Bombers which we despise. Then we have to form a posse and clean house, because we all know how effective the FBI and ATF are at cleaning for us. :) Y2K? Heh, no biggie, save a Nuclear Disaster of course. We have an abundant supply of Natural Resources. After all, that is why we are well armed.
Opinions Expressed by Me should be Forced on Others - PbHead
There is at least one UNIX API problem that could transform quite a few programs into core dumps.
Probably most of you know about it, but if it can be useful to one...
As everybody knows tm_year is now defined as the difference between year 1900 and current year, and it goes to 3 digits next year. What about:
char buf[5]
sprintf(buf, "%02d%02d", t.tm_year, t.tm_mon);
See the problem ?
You may happen to be certain that there is none of this in your programs and none in any open source stuff that you are using, but what about the myriads of commercial programs which are making our world function ?
I think this *used* to be legit code because tm_year *used* to be defined as the two last digits of year (not sure though, anyone with access to old manuals?)
I certainly found a few instances of code like this in *my* programs (happily enough I tend to allocate 'just a few more bytes' for buffers, so this wouldn't have had consequence).
This problem is not of the minor malfunction kind. It will probably stop a few things dead.
Jan 1 1980 Most likely. That or just Lock up, never to be started again. Kinda like old model Panasonic Camcorders.
Opinions Expressed by Me should be Forced on Others - PbHead
I could see maybe picking up some gas and having some money on hand (paper cash will work just as well as gold). The guns aren't really useful though. I don't think it'll come down to violence unless the guys with the guns start it!
My reciepe is simpler..an H&K .45, a motorcycle, jerry cans & a little body armor. If the shit hits the fan, I'm gonna have a good time getting the hell outta Dodge.
It'll be times like these where it will be more feasible to move to a commercial product that IS y2k compliant rather than pay someone to rewrite a custom app. y2k could be the biggest boon to commercial software the world has ever seen.
Glad I've got a cabin to run to.
I'll be partying in SF.. if my house goes up - Oh well, time to move. I'll just have to find somewhere sexy to wear my 9mm.
..and they wonder why we pay a premium to live in Cali. At least I dont have to worry about freezing to death.. it's just my allergy to bullets that concerns me.
nope, the US has more insane people than most european countries. It has more people. same percentage of fruitcakes out of a higher total..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Just this question: Why should nukes have Y2K
problems ?
I don't see anything (besides authentication needs)
which would make it neccessary for nuke control
systems to use the date. And even if authentication
broke down, these things should simply lie around
as they used to and not go off.
I've seen an official Navy report that was posted in August. It had a listing of major cities and expected problems within them. New York city was listed as being "Most Probable" for problems with water and sewage... a recipe for chaos.
That report saw very little media coverage. Something doesn't seem right, its just too quiet being less than 2 months away from y2k.
Russian military leaders have stated that the russian do not have a fully-automated targetting and firing system for their nuclear arsenal. In other words, the risk for the russian nukes is non-existant, and the White House just assured us that America is OK for Y2K.
This leaves of course still some other countries, like China, France and some smaller nuclear powers. But I cannot phantom a nation stupid enough to have nuclear missile loaded on sharp at the actual change of the millenium.
Beware of Wight Supremacists!
Maybe a terminal in Alaska will crash, but I suspect that's about it. All you Y2K-fanatics are heading for a big disappointment. Nothing will happen.
The report specifically points out the liklihood that Jerusalem will be a likely target for terrorism.
Of course, the nuts don't always have such good aim. One fringe group in New York was planning to strike at the heart of the great satan (US) by blowing up a subway station in Queens.
I think very little will happen. I have friends who will think all kinds of things but I realy still want to know why we haven't had Y2K problems in this century. How many people out there know a person who is at least 100 years old or older. Weren't they born in the 1800s? So, why doesn't the social security computers shut down everytime they spit out a check for someone born in '99 (1899)? Or why doesn't anything happen to the various other computers that have to deal with the birth dates of these older people. Think how many systems out there must have the birthdates of century old people yet they never break. As soon as someone can answer this, I will believe in a world apocalypse in 2000.
_________________________
Words of Wisdom:
_________________________
Words of Wisdom:
Never pet a burning dog.
It's the countries like China and Malaysia and Mexico where 90% of the items you find in any Target or Wal-Mart at made. Manufacturing or shipping snafus could easily result in shortages of thousands of common items that aren't otherwise available in the United States. Sad but true.
Fortune favors the bold. -Virgil
People who lack real-life experience in large-scale computer systems mistakenly believe that the year-2000 problem is a narrowly defined problem that lends itself to a narrowly defined solution. You call that desktop toy a computer? I hope you all buy guns, ammo, and food. 9mm, rice, and beans are a good choice. Follow the news at http://www.year2000.com/y2karticles.html and http://www.garynorth.com/y2k/latest_.cfm
Here's a clue: The Federal government is relying on banks and utilities to accurately self-report their year 2000 compliance. Most of the Y2K bank inspections have amounted to nothing more than an having a federal inspector visit the central office of a bank, ask some survey questions, and ask someone to sign a paper saying that all is Y2K OK. None of the code is audited, diagnostic software is not run, non-CIOs are not questioned, individual branches are not visited, and the "inspection" is over in an hour. The U.S. is also the only country that has anything like FDIC insurance, which makes foreign bank and stockmarket runs a sure thing.
Lets say nothing major happens. I now don't think the whole grid will go down. It may, but not likely. You are still going to have problems. EVERYONE will have some problems. PREPARE. You never know. I don't like sitting in the dark. I have a good sized generator plus a battery/inverter combo so I don't have to run the generator all the time. A couple of weeks ago I used my backup power when a wind storm blew down some trees. There could be an: earthquake, tornado, ice storm, terrorist (nuke, bio, chem) attack, or hell, an asteroid impact at ANY time. Those who take a LITTLE time and a LITTLE money to prepare will have a MUCH better chance of comming through alright. It's just common sense. You don't have to KNOW your house will burn down to buy insurance, do you? PREPARE. ALWAYS. Cpt_Kirks
I predect that a small group of friends are going to get together and party like its 1999!
We're going to have a big damn roast, lot's of corn bread and black eyed peas. I make my own wine and a buddy of mine makes his own beer, so we'll have plenty to eat and drink!
The only thing I'm going to worry about is how to find the bathroom.
I'm am not about to let the damn press hype up gloom and doom to ruin the best New Years celebration in over 1000 years!
On a slightly more serious note, I believe that there will be minor hickups here and there. Minor hickups happen everyday. It's just part of life in the information age.
And if it does all come crashing down, so what? Lifestyle will change. Life itself will not. Life is too short to worry about such things.
"Inspire me! Tell me it cannot be done!"
Depends entirely on the system. Some stuff (embedded systems, some MS stuff) have 1980 as the start of time, but also a lot of systems go back to year 0 or earlier. In this case they are more likely to pick 1900 if they do have a problem. But in any modern system I think the chances of a problem are remote (having participated in my firm's readiness programme). Old cobol stuff....well that's a different story!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
What most people don't seem to realize is that the Year 2000 issue is just one of many date related issues that IT staffs must contend with. Everyone thinks all the screws are going to fall out on December 31, 1999 at 11:59pm.
Computers measure time in various ways. They use a series of nested variables to count the passing of units of time. What's really critical is what kind of variables they used and when did they start counting.
Let's take UNIX for example. Most implementations of UNIX use a signed integer to measure the number of seconds that have transpired since 'epoch'. Think of epoch as a nail driven into the timeline that UNIX considers to be the start of time. The most common date I have heard of for epoch is January 1, 1970. I'm sure newer implemntations use a different epoch and possibly different system for counting time, but let's follow this example.
We have a signed integer counting seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 1970. Depending on how many bits the variable can hold, it will reach the highest number it can hold and will cycle back to 0 (or negative something depending on if it is signed or not).
When the above happens, the computer may interpret that as time starting over again, or it might interpret it as antitime or get a divide by 0 error.
Granted this model gives us until 2013 or 2076 depending on signage (and my math), but that is just this model. How many other implementations of time counting are out there and how do they work? Dozens, maybe thousands, who knows?
The only reason Year 2000 got so much hype is that it is the only date related problem that the press could comprehend.
I for one am not concerned about Year 2000. I look at it as being no different that all the other issues that IT staff have to keep track of.
If you do nothing else, have fun on New Years Eve. If nothing happens, you didn't miss the party for nothing. If something does happen, at least you got one last laugh in before the world came down around you're ears. Besides, if it breaks, it will be a long time before IT staff see daylight again because we're the sorry SOBs that have to put the damn think back together again!
"Inspire me! Tell me it cannot be done!"
Even if Y2K is a non-event, we can use the arms to storm the U.S. Patent Office. C'mon, you know you're just dying to do it.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Should all City Engineers deliberately "throw the switch" on the public lighting system for a few seconds after midnight? Otherwise, there could be one hell of an anti-climax for a lot of (stupid) people.
Bite me! [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
'however the software I wrote was "Y2K compliant" and assumed any 2-digit year less than 80 was in the next century'
:-).
Uh-oh. Don't answer your doorbell - it might be Bruce Dickens
Jeff
Japan is way behind everyone in preparing for Y2K. It took them forever to admit that maybe their programmers made a decision to use 2 digits instead of 4.
What about everything else? Here's a list of places where the USA still has major unpreparedness:
And it's generally agreed that the USA is ahead of the rest of the world. Can you say global market? Can you say international supply lines? Do you trust the reassuring salesman who tells you everything will be all right?
Y2K remediation efforts have consumed billions of dollars for several years now, and many aren't even going to pretend to be finished at year's end, to say nothing of those who are presumed finished but find out differently. You think all of the problems left are going to be fixed within the first two weeks of Y2K? You are living in a total fantasy land. Programmers don't work any better with desperate managers breathing down their necks and 120-hour work weeks.
I'm not predicting the end of the world. There are many gradations between "nothing much happens" and "we all die," and somewhere in there is where reality will lie. There will be many problems to straighten out throughout the year, not just at the date turn.
I'm not sure why I bother to write this, because it's pretty clear that everyone has already made up their mind. For most people, natural optimism has turned into complete fantasy and an utter rejection of the possibility that things might not go on as they always have. I think you're going to be awakened as rudely as an NT sysadmin getting a 3 am phone call.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
Computers fail every single day. It seems like everytime I call my mortgage company, credit card company, go to the bank, order a pizza, there is a better than 50% chance that their computer will be "down".
With this being such a common occurence, why isn't this affecting our national infrastructure?
Pokemon shortages? WHY, OH WHY, GOD?!
Possible code that would fail in Y2K:
- birthyear)+1;
if (birthcentury==18)
{
currentage=currentyear+(99
}
else
{
currentage=currentyear-birthyear;
}
Why? Well, when the current year rolls to 00 (because the code is assuming a two digit year), if the person was born in the 1800's as you propose, then the computer will think the person is a fraction of his age, and so the person will probably receive offers/requests from the state to sign up for school or child medical insurance or something equal bizarre (this scenario has already happened).
If the person was born in this century (19), the code will still fail, making the age go negative - and causing real unknown effects (death certificates?)...
Will this cause mass destruction? Probably not. Headaches? Yes...
If they are throwing these machines in the trash:
E.P.A.
'Nuff said...
Seems people judge the Y2K problem by their immediate needs and surroundings, and I agree that little danger is apparent there. The global implications are harder to estimate; truth is no one knows how hypernetted information systems and interdependencies behave when even a millionth part starts to malfunction. Consider the Gogerty report under http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/hearings/991013/ for an "expert" opinion on possible global effects on the financial system. Seems that in an international payment settlement system that moves several trillion $ a day, even a tiny asymmetry in payments could bankrupt a bank. Any informed opinions out there?
Have you ever heard of a bank doing business
on Sunday? Actually I closed my account because
I moved. I still find it comical that a notice
that was meant to ease my fears (I don't really
have many) about y2k couldn't get the dates
right on the notice.
Actually, Y2K is correct. You must be thinking of Y2Ki.
Gotta love sideeffects