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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?
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
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.
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.