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Y2K: Fuel the Panic, the NBC Movie
JediLuke writes "Ok, I think that us geeks are somewhat sure that Y2k is going to go off without a hitch ... but NBC thinks otherwise. Sunday [tonight] at 9:00pm ET." Nothing like a nice TV "disaster" movie to stir up a little panic -- and to remind us that nothing, not even technology at its most nefarious, can lick a Handsome Hero(tm). From NBC's blurb: "Nick must use old-fashioned ingenuity if he is to save the day in this race-against-time action adventure."
Damn you have too much time on your hands :) Very funny though, I must say :)
"What is that, is that brain matter?" "No, I think that's ground beef" LMAO!
I think this calls for a massive ping flood at midnight, 1/1/2000 GMT. That would be fun.
Fuel the panic? Don't think that that the concept of Y2K panic being the worst part of the event is an original idea. Look at what the media's been doing in the last few months. I've seen no 'the end of the world is coming, just so you know' articles in this timespan; every article I see is 'x is certified Y2K compliant,' or articles about how it's a bad idea to stockpile food and water. In short, if we live in a society where fictional made-for-TV movies bear more credence in the average American's mind than the news.. then Y2K is the least of our problems. slightly disjointed thoughts courtesy of neil
Ugh, they can't even get the important details right:
What, this movie covers a whole year? Doubt it. NBC, here's a clue: The 3rd Millennium and the 21st Century both start on January 1st, 2001. Why don't people get it?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Now the most intelligent TV watchers wouldn't bother with the silly networks (except for maybe the Simpsons and the X-Files, and I have doubts lately about the latter), when there is such meaty fare as A&E, Discovery, the Learning Channel, the History Channel, etc.
:)
Don't forget PBS and NOVA
That's my $(2^4*3+1/7%3*2/100)
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
I wonder if Charlton Heston is in this movie. I can hear him now. "Get your bloody hands off that compiler, you goddamn, dirty, stinking product manager !"
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Oh no! My VCR only has a 2 digit year! But it works great otherwise.
Is that thing about setting it back to '72 real or just an urban legend?
Not that I ever really tape anything on the timer...
==============================
Windows NT has crashed,
I am the Blue Screen of Death,
Well the Y2K computer bug probably will probably be fine, but the year 2000 (or the distant future) will be problematic. I don't believe in any of the hocus-pocus crap, but many economists are warning of a coming economic collapse. The economy is blazing along at unmaintainable speed, people aren't saving enough money, the world financial situation is unstable, and this is a market largely based on speculation (.com's).
Why wouldn't anyone think this could happen? It's happened before, and it didn't take much. People are buying a spending at a staggering speed, never thinking of slowing down.
BTW I'm not an economist. If I'm totally wrong, say so. But I believe it's gonna happen.
You musn't forget that a Nuclear Power Plant is now a complex system. Last time I read on complex systems, I believe that they involved systems with unrelated variables that effected one another(i.e. The Weather). And since when is there such a thing as a Complex System Failure Analyst, did I miss this major at my school?
Allthough I agree that the movie is probably extremly stupid. (as has the general american response to Y2K been (yeah lets go buy lots of ammo to feel real safe)) Good thing I live in a different country. But its not correct to assume that Y2K will happen and nothing will go wrong. The extent of damages done is the intresting aspect. A recetn survey showed that very few cities in the US are prepared for Y2K, such things as traffic lights and other "small" items. While I agree a few car pile ups etc dont ammount to much, I think most of us will see a few effects of Y2K in the months to follow.
Counting point taken. Now tell me, when exactly was year one?
There never was one. Nobody said, oh, this is year one now. People in the Roman empire were saying it's 753 Ab Urbe Condita.
We are celebrating, I believe, the 2000th anniversary year of Jesus' birth, as calculated wrongly sometime in the 500s by a monk called Dennis. We're actually too late for the real thing since he was probably born in about 4BC. Not that anyone knows for sure exactly when, but it certainly wasn't 1AD. And even if it was year 1, Jesus would have had his 1st birthday in year 2. Totally un-birthday like, in which you do normally start at zero... (unless you're Chinese, I think) Oh, and too bad if you're an atheist, or a Jew or an Muslim, or a Hindu etc etc.
Bleah. What a schemozzle. There's no good reason for picking any year to be year one. It's just an arbitrary starting point. Why shouldn't we celebrate reaching 2000?
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
i just saw it. laughed the whole way through i wondered how they would make it seem that pilots wouldn't be able to fly planes after midnight 2000... actualy, i just lied. i didn't laugh. i watched with a kind of sick facination. i couldn't believe how irresponsible it was. the teasers for the LOCAL NEWS on that station (i live in baltimore md) used ACTUAL clips from the movie showing the power structure of the east coast going up in smoke in speculation as to what might happen to our city... makes me feel sick. if anything goes wrong, its gonna be biological, not technological. it has more to do with the easily "hacked" emotions in a captive audiences brain than with any mainframe. if anybody was to get hurt on New Years eve it would be due to actions of asses like the suits who thunk up this grand idea to promote thier news broadcasts
~clearcutting prevents forrest fires
Apparently, this movie is about as firmly rooted in reality as Hogan's Heros was.
Actually, not being able to drop the control rods wouldn't be the worst thing to happen if this occured. When a nuclear reactor is fed cold water (relative to the current water temperature), the reactor will produce more power. It has to do with the water's density, and the fact that denser water thermalizes more neutrons, causeing more energy to be released. The best thing to do would be to dump hot water on the reactor. Granted, all of my theory comes from Navel nuclear plants, but the temperature seemed to be off by an order of magnitude. Also, the reactor looked to be unpressureized. What happens to water at four thousand degrees at one atmoshere of pressure? The steam generated would probably cause a large enough explosion to level everything in the evacuated area (ten mile radius).
Oh well, I guess that it wasn't too bad of a movie-of-week. But then again, what does anyone actually expect from a movie-of-week?
-- Intelligence reports are useful only to the intelligent. -RAH
Should there not be a portal for reporting errors in Linux/open source software that crashes due to Y2K?
you can't make false statements about Power plants that are not true
Well, they can... but for those of us who are clued in, it certainly makes them look like morons, and misrepresenting such things to the general public is a pretty poor and unprofessional thing to do.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Guess you missed Deep Impact and all the camera panning towards the boxes of "Ensure".
including Newfoundland Time?!!?
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
> While we may be ok on the technology side, you just never know what people are gonna do. For
/so/ tempted to spend my new year's running around with an axe, insulated clothing, and a vicious hatred of power lines. :}
> example, if people think banks will collapse, they'll take all their money from the banks -- causing them
> to collapse. If they think phone is not gonna work -- everyone will pick up the phone to make sure
> it works, etc. etc. So in this way, the disaster becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And this is why I am
"As the millenium dawns in North America, most of the Eastern Seaboard suffers a major power outage. "
/oil rig people suddenly get wiped out who would replace them in time. A technological civilisation as ours is rather reliant on a relatively few people with specialised skills.
;).
It's not the US east coast which will get hit by Y2K first. There's NZ, Asia, Europe and a few hours then only US east.
If the North Americans keep an eye on the rest of the world they'll have hours of advance warning of things to come.
Of course people like me who are in 3rd world countries won't have much problem with Y2K, despite what those _anal_ysts say. Why? Coz we're used to things failing in the first place. Power outages, water outages, traffic light failures, bank computers going down- we encounter these often enough to know how to cope and how not to expect too much from technology. We're not like that US Judge who couldn't believe a defendant's claim that the traffic lights were all green. Our judges would go "Yeah, those set of lights are terrible".
When things fail, it's people you have to rely on to get things moving. If people in general don't panic or freeze up, then I don't think it'll be catastrophic.
I'm sure some things will go down. So pray for those poor people behind the power plants, water plants, working their fingers to the bone to get things back up.
I sometimes worry that if say powerplant engineers
If you think about it, it's a miracle how a million things actually work and I can read slashdot 8000 miles away
These [above] are all good methods...
Another is to ask people whether they will hold a large celebration on their 49th birthday (the beginning of their 50th year) or on their 50th birthday (the end of their 50th year).
The last day of this year may be a lot of things that are well worth celebrating (or being concerned about), but the end of the millenium/centruy is not one of them!
Hey, lightning boy was a god. Did you see the way that kid played video games? Incredible :)
Too late. Lusers don't need this movie to make them scared thier cars aren't going to run on January 31st.
.....*boggle*...
Back in march I left a job I had with a motorcycle importer. This company had been manufacturing fuel injected V-twins since 1993.
Since I was in the parts department I was usually the first line of defense for those owners who didn't get what they wanted from the dealer network.
I recall that one day early in February getting a call from a really worried customer. he had called his local dealer to find out if his fuel injected motorcycle was Y2K compliant
He wouldn't take his dealer's word for it and it took a great deal of time for me to convince him that 'No, we don't need to test your computer, it doesn't use dates.'
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
I work for a bank in Canada, and the movie has stirred enough controversy that banks and utility companies have bought commercial time to broadcast how they are y2k ready... nice way to make money, nbc
I think every thing on this list equally applies to the movie War Games. Of course I was about 12 when that movie came out and thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
Actually the rods should have been in the reactor itself, not the water tank (and if that was the reactor, then, um....).
I can't say as for the reactors in the US, but I asume the still use rods. And Chernoble was built the same way.
Actually, Chernoble was human error, they were doing a routine test (kinda like Apollo 13....) and the worker took out the rods a little too much (note: the reactor was already overheating, evidently the engineer in command wanted to get the test out of the way anyway).
Then again, I might be totally wrong....
That's my $(2^4*3+1/7%3*2/100)
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
Has anybody decided that buildings are not Y2K-compliant and that they will crash down? Who knows...
..No. Haven't they told you?
All matter is composed of Atoms. Every Atom (in the Relevant Market) has a K-shell. Since the K-shell can only hold two Electrons, the K-shell cannot possibly represent a four-digit year correctly.
Therefore, ALL Atoms (excluding Hydrogen and some Helium ions) are Y2K "NOT OK!"
THEREFORE, ALL ATOMS will crash, as the power necessary to keep elctrons in their orbit will fail, and they are driven towards their protons, resulting in millions of simultaneous atomic reactions that will reduce Earth to plasma by 01/01/00 00:00:00.00000012GMT
_______________________________
When I heard Reiner was going to be in Y2K:the Movie, I told him, "I'm laughing already." But then he replied, grimly, "It's not a comedy"
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
so they are apparently trying to dramatize every possible thing that does not need to be dramatized.
Oh well, at least The X-Files is on...
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My mom is watching the movie right now as I right this. Even more, she kicked me off while I was watching football. Oh well.
It's so fake it will probably have a fake ending, "YAy, the nuclear wasn't really mealting, it was just the computers sending false messages!"
Whatever. Take it easy. Have some food on hand for 2000. Couldn't hurt. Computers aren't irrational, people are.
The biggest problem with the "Y2k bug" is not computers, but people.
;-)
I know of at least three countries whose respective national guards have been told they won't be able to take recreational leave between December 1999 and March 2000. For fear of riots, crime waves, and armed militia cults who think that the Day of Judgement comes with the new Millenium (which if I'm correct, actualy begins in 2001?).
The networks aren't helping anything. These movies aren't based on reality and play on the fears of the majority of the population, who don't understand enough about what the "Y2k bug" is to make intelligent decisions. Some caution is warranted, obviously, but not this hysteria.
If you take all of your money out of the bank, the bank WILL fail. If you buy six months' groceries in December, obviously there WILL be food shortages in January. And if people start looting and sacrificing animals, society WILL fall into chaos.
A request to NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, HBO, and the rest: please save your crappy Y2k doomsday movies for Summer 2000!
Hackers are in an interesting position. Y2k may not be so bad for us if tons of poorly written software has to be recoded. Can you say 'stock options'?
--
I like to watch.
We all know that the clock is going to tick around and nothing is going to happen except maybe a few files on some Windows boxes will have the wrong date-stamp...
Argh! everyone panic!
Doesn't this Y2k think sound like part of the plot of Sneakers when Cosmo and Marty are discussing how to take down banks, commodities markets, even governments, etc? :-) The world is based on the perception of reality or something like that. :-)
The hacker didn't go "I know Unix" because the average viewer would say "What's Unix?"
I think in this context root == rape.. slang differs in different parts of the world.. Of course I may be totally wrong, but oh well.. :)
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
Have the networks no mercy (or intelligence?) There are reasons I stopped watching television.. *sigh*
Ha! I *loved* that episode... it was just hilarious, even for Simpsons. I think my favorite part was when the ball dropped and 2000 blinked on, and immediately changed to 1900. I just laughed *so* hard at that!
Had to see it, I guess.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
We will know afterward whether NBC made a wise decision about airing the movie, when the ratings come out.
I just hope this TV movie is stupid enough to not influence any people into a frenzied panick.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Bronte Park, TAS, Australia 22 Nov 1999 Some experts predict that various genetically engineered crops will become lethal to humans on Jan 1, 2000. This is due to a date-dependent gene sequence inserted into members of the legume family. To prevent this disaster concerned citizens should stockpile organically farmed beans and peanuts. Melbourne Zoo elephant keeper Joe Bloggs has expressed concern about this heretofore unmentioned aspect of the Y2K bug. "We go through about 300,000 peanuts a day and we simply can't afford to buy organic peanuts any more, not to mention the peanuts that zoo visitors bring to feed elephants," he said. So please, for your own safety, stay away from peanuts and beans on Jan 1st, 2000.
Y2Kymca:
K ymcaSample.rm
r ics.html
http://www.teleport.com/~botielus/index.html/Y2
The lyrics:
http://www.teleport.com/~botielus/index.html/Ly
Y WORRY 'BOUT Y2K
http://www.artbell.com/y2k.html
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
.... and all the rest of the TV news media as well. They seem to enjoy promoting paranoia in every form. Every news segment about the Internet is inevitably a paranoia bit. Better not let your children anywhere the net, it's all pornography and pedophilia. This Y2K thing is WAY past the buzzword stage, but they keep insisting on rubbing our noses in it, as though we might be made MORE aware of it. Admittedly, there may be a few, probably small, problems related to the calendar rollover, but I doubt that it will be near-apocalypse as this feature will almost certainly predict.
Yes, it is true the Roman number system lacks the number 0. It is also true that we begin counting _items_ from 1.
But from a mathematical standpoint, 0 is the obvious startingpoint when you are dealing with length. Thus viewing time as a dimension and projecting it into one of our 3 dimensions, leaves you with a timespan with a set length. Look at a ruler. You'll find yourself measuring the length by starting at 0. This is the mathematically sane way to go about it. Why make it complicated, just because we "didn't have 0 before"? Mathematically, we should start at 0 anyways. It isn't like there didn't exist anything before year 1 you know.
You may say year 1 is the first year of our history, big deal. That doesn't mean the rest of us are morons, idiots or obtuse. It just means you feel you need to pick on others to make yourself superior, which is really pitiful. You are probably one of those who'll look up the word 'obtuse' in one or more dictionaries, and point out why I shouldn't have used that word in that context. You are probably one of those who fails to see the obvious, and endlessly debates it. You could never be wrong could you?
It was a funny note though.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Just let Microsoft do their thing for a couple of decades, and most of these things on this list will probably come true... - Steeltoe d;-)
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
10: When the power fails, lights go off one at a time, in timed sequence. Ditto for lorge-scale blackouts.
Furthermore, why do they feel the need to make a movie/show on something that MIGHT happen? It's only speculation. Yes, I know that's what most movies are made of, but I can't see this having a good effect on the generally uneducated populace.
:) Some people did freak out and do weird stuff, but you have to admit that is what made it cool. I see no difference here. Scare a few people who don't know any better and it's fun for the whole family.
Reminds me of a little radio show called War of the Worlds.
-- Virtual Windows Project
I couldn't help but think while watching this X-files about the obvious Sluggy Freelance / Goats parallels as of late. Compare: Cannibals Anonymous and brains4zombies.com.
Actually, the astronomical millenium arguably does change one second after 1999-12-31 23:59:59 (ISO date/time format). Because the dating system used by astronomers includes a year 0, which is the same as the historians' year 1 BC/BCE.
Thus, one millenium changes in a few weeks, and another changes in a year and a few weeks, and several others won't change for hundreds of years (like on the Muslim and Jewish calendars, etc.).
When you restore power to a computer, it is immediately ready to go - no booting required.
Prudent preparedness is a good thing regardless of Y2K. In the northeast you get snowstorms, in California we have earthquakes, everywhere else is susceptible to some kind of nasty weather etc. I expect Y2K is going to be a swarm of inconveniences rather than a big nasty, but I don't want the minor crap like "oops this damn gas pump won't take my ATM card" to slow me down when our phone is ringing off the hook with last-minute customer demand. In fact for most of us the biggest effect of Y2K will be a 30% or more increase in our hourly rates (I'm a PBX tech; our firm is also heavily into linux, one of my colleagues builds routers etc.). So, a week's worth of no-cook/no-fridge food and water, a week's worth of petty-cash, a 5-gallon can full of gasoline in the garage, and some extra batteries for the flashlight & radio are no big deal. You'll use the stuff up sooner or later anyway, so get set up now, and then relax. BTW, the rest of the world will probably get it much worse than the US, so I think the ultimate effect of Y2K is going to be high export demand and further economic growth.
I am not a nuclear physicist or engineer, but I am pretty sure you are right. If the coolant disappears, the reactor should shut down. I grew up in Toledo, OH. Very near is Davis Besse nuclear power plant (between Toledo and Sandusky, home to Cedar Point, the roller coaster capital of the world!).
Anyway, Davis Besse was infamous at the time for having one of the *worst* production uptimes of any nuclear power plant in the country. We are talking bottom 10 worst. The main problem they seemed to continually have was with coolant valves in the heat exchangers.
Basically, here is one way a reactor works. You have your core. It is sunk into a big tub of water to help control the temperature. That water is "hot" in both senses of the word. It is thermally hot and radioactively hot. Since it is radioactively hot, it must be a closed system. This water is hot enough to be steam and drives turbines and generators for electricity. It is then usually run through heat exchangers before returning to the core. The heat exchangers interact with another water system which consists of a closed water supply like a pond where that water cools further before being circulated back through the heat exchangers again.
The important thing to remember, and where you need correction is that every reactor has graphite control rods. These are super hot because they are really what controls the reaction. The coolant is only taking heat away from the core. The control rods are basically like a throttle. Less controls rods, more reaction. The control rods are usually what is referred to when people talk about nuclear waste (as their usefullness as a reaction control mechanism has expired and they are hot hot hot!)
So the reactor at Chernobyl was not really designed any differently as it was poorly designed and run, I believe.
A really good site for info on nuclear reactors is The Virtual Nuclear Tourist.
Nothing can possiblai go wrong. Er...possibly go wrong.
Strange, that's the first thing that's ever gone wrong.
Tyler's words coming out of my mouth.
In the new millenium, the family has to face the huge bills for all the stuff they got in preparation for the non-event and decide to go into hiding anyway. Eventually, they have a stand-off with police, when it turns out that the son in the family went out on a killing-spree, because "the war had started".
Who Wants To Date A Norwegian?
That wasn't true in the old days. Not only were memory sizes small but CPUs were slow. Many did not have multiply/divide hardware. Conversions between ASCII/EBCDIC character strings and binary integers were very slow and avoided whenever possible. Most business oriented systems used some variant of BCD to store numbers. BCD can be converted to/from character codes very quickly.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Well the thing is that Y2K is going to hit first in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, then work its way west around the globe, the US is going to be one of the last countries hit by it. So there will be news reports of power outages in Mozambique, Turkmenistan, and other countries were they haven't spent as much/any money on solving this problem so people are going to start rioting and looting here in the US a couple hours before Y2K, cause the early bird gets the worm, or the new Sony widescreen, whatever trips your trigger. Then midnight is going to roll around and the power is going to stay on and there are going to be a lot of people running through the brightly lit streets of our great country holding consumer electronics that they don't own. The police will have to work a little harder that night rounding up the houdlums, but aside from that it won't be a big deal here in the US. In some other countries there will probably be some full scale uprisings.
Every new years is an excuse to get really drunk.
Heheh, Hanford?
:>
Y2K won't be a problem. It's the nuclear waste that will reach the Columbia in 20 or so years that I'm afraid of.
Pry isn't any worse than Boise Cascade though.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
From the commercials alone, I learned a valuable fact: computers (and, in fact, all other electronic devices of any kind) have two basic modes: "explode" and "not explode." When Y2K hits, many devices will get confused, causing the bits to flip from "not explode" to "explode" and thus, explosions everywhere. It's good information to have; now I'll know to unplug my blender.
Y2GAY
If memory requirements were so tight, they should have reduced the year to 1 byte and used it to store a value between 0 and 255. Or use those two bytes to store a short int, between 0 and 65536. Computers don't normally store numeric data as digits.
I've read something about that, where people would cause the power to go out because they all have to turn on all their appliances and stuff at Midnight, which than causes the power to go out because of overload. Same way with phones.
No, The pilots will be fine. The problem is that the wings will cease to generate lift. It seems that modern planes are designed by computers. And these plane-designing-computers aren't Y2K compatable. So if you're going to be in the air at Y2K, make sure you're in a DC3 or something.
he probably meant 'loot'...
..that the people behind the religious fanaticism which is the real Millenium problem, don't catch wind of the whole "You fools, it's 2001 that's the new Millenium." Because they'll think, "Oh, goody another year to consolidate our power." Remember, Left Behind was a best seller before NBC announced its contribution to uninformed Apocalyptic hysteria.
Besides which, didn't Pope Gregory (who I assume most non-Catholic Christian Apocalyptic Cultists would consider a tool of the Anti-Christ) eliminate a certain amount of time from the calender? Maybe it's the Eastern Orthodox new year that's going to be the Day of Judgement....
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
In all fairness to Pvt. Snuffy, he did have his back turned when "Waco Bill" discharged the shotgun. When he turned back all he saw was his buddy going down.
OC, a real soldier wouldn't have turned his back in the first place...
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Translation in C, C++, Java, or Javascript is left for as an exercise for the reader, but approaches the trivial.
Yes, it's possible they'll just use it without thinking, and yes, that's what got us into this mess. But if they use it without thinking, we'll be fine. And if they do think about it, then that's at least a step in the right direction.
Here's a couple questions for you: considering the struct tm's definition of tm_year in so many languages
In hindsight it was so-o-o predictable, and yet I nearly wet myself laughing.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I wouldn't have believed this if I hadn't seen it. At about 9:25, our local NBC affiliate (WCMH-4, Columbus, Ohio), ran a message across the screen:
This movie is a fictional thriller, and does not suggest that any of these events will or could actually occur. For information about Y2K-related issues, call 821-4444
I nearly laughed my ass off. They ran the message twice. Did anyone else see messages like this? If you are, I hope you're at least half as amazed as I am. I sincerely hope the general public doesn't need a reminder like this to know F-18s won't be crashing into their house.
Most of you are not qualified to have an opinion on Y2K. Make a little honest effort to be informed. Try to be prepared and not knee-jerk, ignorant, arrogant, arm-chair experts. I am system consultant for the financial industry. Relying on self-reporting was a mistake.
_ 2k.html
http://www.senate.gov/~y2k/documents/100dayrpt/
http://www.year2000.com/y2karticles.html
Even: http://www.motorola.com/General/year2000/prodport
I am watching the Y2K movie at right now, and at 9:40 the movie so far is realistic.
Perhaps a programming problem of this nature would have been taken more seriously if it did not coincide with the new millennium. Unfortunately, there are still some people that confuse this straightforward programming conflict with irrational apocalyptic fears of the millennium. Other skeptics are dismissing the year-2000 problem as just the hype of profiteering consult-ants and greedy vendors. This conspiracy theory assumes that several million programmers are all able to keep a secret. It also assumes that an equal number of companies and governments could all be hoodwinked out of $114 billion.
People aren't celebrating the change into the new millenium, its the changing of the numbers. It goes from 19 to 20.
If you ask me, it's just an excuse to get really drunk!
Yea, I noticed that, but did anyone look at the computer screens in that big government Y2K center? I could have sworn they were running Gnome. Or maybe I was just halucinating.
If everyone says it, that makes it so. This kind of thing has no physical reality, so it is decided by popular opinion. The year number in the date is counted from an arbitrary date. The dates have been fudged several times to make more sense, never mind that whole systems have been changed. We could easily do it again.
When people measure time, they start from zero. Go ahead, ask anyone how many years old a newborn baby is.
Accepted principles, my ass! They aren't accepted by the 99% of the population who will tell you that we're a little over a month from the change of the millenium.
Hey, I'll bet my car won't start on January first. Of course, it's an old car and doesn't like cold weather all that much...
Did you send a copy to all those companies that are listed? If not, it's not an open letter.
- Drew
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
I've been wondering for a couple of years now where I am going to be looking for real Y2K entertainment online on 12/31 and 1/1. I think I'll be here. I'm hoping to find a couple of good stories and threads going on what went down, what didn't and who is in a panic. My Linux box will be up and running through the New Year if I can believe the assurances of my friend over at the local power company. And the real problem with people getting online for the New Year is likely to be people picking up the phone to see if it is working rather than any technological issues.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
2000 should be the start of the 21st century.
Just because you say it should be so doesn't make it so. By accepted principles of the Gregorian/Julian calendars, January 1, 2001 should be the first year of the new millennium.
I repeat - you can say what you want, but saying it doesn't make it so.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
That was like the hospital monitor that went haywire in LA.
"Damnit, where did we get those monitors nurse?"
"NewYork Doctor! - It's already midnight there, I bet these things arn't Y2K complient!!!!"
--
James Michael Keller
"Linux is not our destination, it is simply the open road to tommorow"
For an excellent analysis of the types of failures experienced by loosely and tightly coupled dynamic systems read "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow. This was orginally an analysis of the TMI failure and then was expanded to discuss the types of complex systems failures that are a result of that very systems complex fault resilience. It is not a scary gloom and doom book but a thoughtful concise readable description of why dynamic systems break down and how failures are handled. For example - in a nukeplant does the status indicator light for the backup cold water pump system normally show 'green' or 'red'. If it's 'red' it may indicate that it's not working - a bad thing. But if it's 'green' it may indicate that it's running - a worse thing.
It wasnt a bad movie if you set aside reallity and physics. Hmm, lets drop freezing water onto a reactor chambor thats 4500 deg. Then go run and watch. What no steam? guess that would get in the way of the hollywood finish. Y2k went from lets watch the lights go out to let the computer nerd (a bad one) save the nuke plant. Oh and why didnt the "SUPERSONIC" jet the nerds fly have they same y2k problem every other jet have?
Jurassic Park, which judging from the computer screen the female hacker was sitting at didn't know what Unix was either.
I don't knwo how this movie is going to end, but I think I can tell you that the hero could save the day with oatmeal and silly puddy!
yup, my dad is being rather typical of americans in the next room watching it. it look pretty inane. i caught a few seconds of it, they've got some staff of young brainiacs who like set up wind up toys connected to an atomic clock to pop corks on champane at exactly 12:00. yeah, TV dribble. thrilling. if anyone takes this garbage, as i'm sure some will, i am ashamed to be walking on 2 legs, you think we should go back to 4? :) or mabye swim like dophins. but that'd make it kinda hard to type. oops, getting off subject... anyhow, yes, TV is amazing at how it sucks the attention of the weak minded.
offtopic, troll, what have you.. but funny I submitted this story last week.. the day it was summerized on NBC's site.
:P
1999-11-16 04:41:53 NBC goes Y2K nuts (articles,tv) (rejected)
I'm gonna have to go anonymous.. but my feelings are hurt slashdot.
I do belive since the big crash during the depression when this very thing happened (people taking so much money out of the banks causing panic) they have created laws so if people start taking too much money out they will just close the banks, and the banks for seeing this will have more cash than usual on hand. Or maybe we'll get another bank holiday. There WILL be special measures taken by the goverment for things like this... I hope -Brian
And this, sir, is why it was a TV Movie (as you said yourself) and not a documentary.
Why is this any different from, say, Hackers or The Net? Because they were in the theatre and not on TV? Sure, geeks everywhere complained about how unrealistic they were, but nobody moved to ban anything over them.
Or was it because this one was about Y2K, which is in just over a month? People were reminded at every commercial break that this was a movie and not a documentary, weren't they?
That's funny... it seemed to me to be a "flagrant attempt" at a movie. You know, entertainment. As in, not to be taken seriously. Perhaps you could say "a deliberate attempt to entertain the public."
--
"I personal[ly] think Unix is "superior" because on LSD it tastes like Blue." -- jbarnett
Any one here remember the /. article about the HERF gun?
It's quite obvious that most of the damage from Y2K is going to be the result of human insanity. Sure, a few pieces of antiquated technology are going to fail but the majority of all disturbances come the new year will be from people going paranoid, acting beserk, and inciting anarchy. It's all psychological. I would only be freaked out about Y2K if my bank lost my money, electricity stopped coming, and water stopped flowing. Other than that it isn't a big deal. Well, okay, if my cable service died yeah I'd be pissed off. But planes falling from the sky and out-of-control nuclear missiles launching without warning.. no way. Unfortunately, the majority of people are technologically illiterate and will believe that Y2K will somehow turn their toaster ovens into killing machines. Most of the deaths and chaos will be only the result of people flipping out at Wal Mart, fighting to grab the last flashlight and jug of milk off the shelves. Oh yeah, watch out for homeowners sitting on their rooftops with sniper rifles, shooting people that they think are trying to loot their houses. In the end, technology really didn't go bad; a large number of people were just Y2K incompatible. I'll be laughing in my room while doing work on my Macintosh (all of which are Y2K compatible since they were first introduced). I sure hope Photoshop isn't gonna crash!
-----
Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
If everyone says it, that makes it so.
Then I hereby proclaim that henceforth the sky is "puce". Afterall, colors are arbitrarily defined just like our calendar is, right?
We go by the Gregorian calendar -- it's our agreed upon standard for timekeeping. According to the Gregorian calendar, the millenium starts with 2001. Claiming otherwise is a violation of the accepted standard....rather like Microsoft "extending" common network standards. Just because 90% of the people use it doesn't mean it's right! ;)
-- JackCat
Heck, you just go down to the library and check out "Hiroshima", a detailed second-hand account from interviews with hundreds of 1st-hand witnessess.
(Kimono patterns apparently can be burned into human flesh by atomic weapons. How many people in modern America would wind up with scars of DKNY or the Nike swoosh on their chests? One more reason to avoid adwear.)
From what I've been told, most of _The Day After_ was completely random. They ignored some effects, they invented others, they exaggerated still more.
Honestly, we don't know what a large nuclear war would be like, apart from "pretty bad". We do know that _TDA_ was about as accurate about it as we expect the Y2K movie to be about Y2K, and probably about as accurate as TV portrayals of love and romance.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Next time NBC makes a movie they should get some of their facts straight.
Even if you accept the fact and basis that all computers in the world will have problems (which they won't), you can't make false statements about Power plants that are not true.
In the movie they mention that a certain Nuclear Power Plant may have problems... Their reason that they can't shut it down is because even if they did "It would have to cool down for five days...".
This is a load of trash.
There are numerous mechanical systems that will stop the system in an instant. In Canada's CANDU reactors, the control rods are above the reactor held by magnetic fields. If there is a power disruption then the fields release and the rods drop Immediately stoping the reaction. The reactor may still be "hot" and very hot at that, but there is not more reaction. Not only that but NO more reactions can occur. The control rods absorbe all of the neutrons so that the reaction can't possibly proceed.
My point is that you can't take everything that they put in this movie seriously. This is just on example of an error that I am aware of.
nachoman
cdail@email.com
... maybe they'll think twice before being so gullible again.
heh. We always think people will learn from their mistakes - unfortunately, it seems most people take a few rounds of getting smacked upside the head before they remember this stuff... As others have said, I expect most of the REAL Y2k problems to be strictly in the ol' wetware.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Did anyone notice the guy saying:
"Why don't you reset just to make sure?"
They proceed to reboot the system and everything
goes to hell.
The funny thing is, I bet most Windows users
didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.
My phone has been ringing for the past hour:
"Is this really going to happen?", family and friends are asking me.
I tell them no, but they may want to stock up on milk & tp as if a blizzard or hurricane was coming. Then they tell me I don't know what I'm talking about and they'll try to get me a deal on a generator. These aren't trailer park idiots I'm talking to here, folks. These are doctors, lawyers...
Will there be people trying to riot? Oh yeah, you better believe it after tonight. I never have liked the media, but this is mindblowing. I never thought the media would again have such power that they could force people to create them a more profitable reality... I thought American society had progressed in the past hundred years and since the Spanish-American War...
Maybe American brains have a Y2K bug? Damn reds, this is because of water floridation.
On the upside, Indianapolis Power & Light is running ads about y2k ending with the quote, "Will there be power outages? Perhaps. If the roads are slick someone may slide into a power pole."
Ok here is a place to list what your favorite part was!
I think mine was when the Fighter Jet Crossed the International Dateline and Crashed cuz Y2K got it!!! Feel the panic, your toasters and microwaves are going to make the ice caps melt and the nuclear power plants are going to blow up! (even though they melt DOWN!) get your water and bread parties together!
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Watching Y2K right now, and, to be honest, it's pissing me off... I believe what some people on here already wrote, the Y2K "bug" isn't the problem, it's the media and movies like this that are the problem - hysteria can be a dangerous thing... (usually is I guess)...
Bad movie, though... Obviously rushed... They're attempt to explain everything is soooo frustrating, since the character everything is explained to is a complete moron - how can he not know what's going on, -before- the day everything is supposed to go on? ugh... And planes dropping from the sky, why would propulsion and navigation be effected by dates? *Hadean shakes his head*...
Just said: "You won't believe it. The locks on prison doors are computerized." -- Yeah, and? Are they programmed to open on specific dates? Uh, no, most prisons I've ever been to, they're not... (all prisons).. non-stop stupidity for no reason but to cash in on the hype, NBC, you should be ashamed.
Oh, and don't get me on the hacker/rave thing... argh...
This may be offtopic... sort of...
Has anyone else noticed that Egyptair flight 990 went down right around 2:00am on the day that we switch from daylight to standard time?... Now isnt 2:00am when all the clocks either go forward or backwards depending on if its D or S?
Similarity between Y2K: What if the disaster was caused by electronics/embedded systems getting confused about stuff like latitude/altetude/direction/etc.. {dont most planes use a guidence system that depends on GPS type telemetry} [this could also explain the split elevator item]
Now for the clincher... when did flight TWA800 go down? What about the other 767s that had problems?
I'm not sure this rampant innumeracy is as annoying the rampant illiteracy of the Thousand Asses:
I was hoping that nuclear plant in Sweden was destroyed by Y2K spawned mutants (or at the very least a ragtag band of Mad Max style outlaws
They will find out that they can't (more money is in circulation than exists) and they will find that thier stocks will crash (a wise stock exchange will be closed for the week before and after) because most of the money in the bank is invested in mutual funds et al. Banks have made themselves too much of a market force in NA.
billon dollar profits and they still need to downsize?
My wife and I plan to pick up some extra food during this week simply because the media has created so much panic for people who dont know better. I suspect that two things will happen.
1) the stores will be fully stocked with food but with no customers because everyone will be consuming the stock pile of food they have at home.
2) Things will go on as normal.
3) food will have the wrong expiration date stamped on them and people will not eat that can of baked beans from 1900 because by now it must be moldy and they would rather starve then eat 100 year old can of beans.
;)
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
The hero is always called Nick?
For such a large group of obviously intelligent and thoughtful people, why do you stoop to this level of downright childish name-calling on what is obviiously an important issue?
We are all computer people. We know them, understand them, love them. We learned almost immediately the old GIGO rule and when we are faced with a problem that stems directly from the GIGO rule we simply make jokes and jeer at people who may believe otherwise. The incessant immature nature of many of the posters here honestly makes me wish for Y2K's worst possibilities to strike with impunity.
Right now I can go out and pull in pages and pages of testimony from experts in the fields affected by Y2K who say it will not be this cakewalk that so many of you stand upon your little soap boxes and pontificate upon. Listen folks, if an earthquake in a small Asian country can affect chip prices in the US and abroad, what would something like a small piece of software whose job it is to correctly manufacture those same chips do if it failed because of unforseen Y2K issues?
I am not saying Y2K will be a disaster. I am more talking about your blind assumption that because the majority of the world may fear it then they must be wrong. I am here to tell you folks that the majority of ther world does NOT fear it. In fact, they jeer it.
I have not seen one iota of proof from any of you that it will not happen, yet I can pull in reports from many people who work for the affected companies who have real concerns. Just because Linux will not suffer does not mean that others will not. No one here mentions the supply chain issues that will be the real problem. Sure, all of VA Systems may be compliant and may be open for business on Jan. 1, but will the companies who make all the parts they use be open? If one part becomes unavailable then perhaps VAS looks elsewhere for that part. What if that part is available at another company who charges more now that they know that they can. Prices go up. Tell me that you don't mind that.
All I ask is that the standard "here is another crazy, baseless Y2K thing to laugh at" mentality stop and be replaced with thoughtful discussion. This isn't theology here where we are discussing the existence of heaven or hell or the consequences of our actions here on Earth. We are discussing more tangible things that have an immediate affect. Stop playing Quake and take a moment to at least intelligently discuss the issue.
I challenge Slashdot to actually discuss the issue and moderate the baseless masses who just post "lAmEr" responses. Let's find someone in the know and submit questions to them. Sci-fi authors are great to read interviews from, but let's do something else for a moment. Don't be afraid to confront someone who makes it their job to study the problem.
Myxx
----------
Twisted Little Gnome - The Podcasting Network http://www.twistedlittlegnome.com
No, we are not going to see anything like the movie. At worst there will be things like rolling brown-outs and spotty system glitches. That's just in the US, though. Most of Europe is in the same situation but the rest of the world will see MASSIVE problems with power, communications, utilities, etc., systems. Nothing totally disastrous, just very annoying and inconvenient. (If you have money in any off-shore banks you might want to think about moving it.)
Anyway, it'll be an interesting time between Jan 1 and (probably) the end of March.
Oh, and for the record, we have 406 days as of 11/22/1999 'till the new millennium. That was probably the one good part of the movie, when the wife mentioned that the new millennium starts on Jan 1, 2001!
---
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Y2K Meathead Patch v0.9.0.1b
1. Pick up items
2. Shove down the throat of person asking you to count them
3. While he is still choking knock or trip him so he is on the floor
4. Proceed to stomp on his head until he stops moving
5. Enjoy the new year knowing that you've helped eliminate a petty minded moron from the gene pool.
This patch also applies to people who think similar events happened on the eve of 1000CE
On a more personal level:
-Christ wasn't born Dec 25th yet people still celebrate it as such (based on older "pagan" holidays),
-there weren't 3 wise men (the Bible never says how many there were)
Rant: A minority's desire for accuracy doesn't mean anything to the general public. A party is a party and you and your AV nerd friends aren't going to ruin it for the rest of us. This is a time of celebration and reflection on human endeavour, we should enjoy this time and not nitpick about how the math says it isn't. If we want the year 2000 to be the start of the millenium then it will be and you can't stop it. You can either join the party or sit in your parent's basement with the lights out cackling that you were right.
I have little doubt that, as you have written, "99% of the population [...] will tell you that we're a little over a month from the change of the millenium [sic]". Does one care? Returning to Galileo, the whole world can jolly well stand up and claim that heavier things fall faster than lighter things, but does that in any fashion whatsoever alter the nature of reality? Of course not. They'd simply be wrong.
Majority rule is irrelevant in matters of pure, hard mathematics. You cannot lobby your way into changing the fundamental laws. You can only deceive yourself and others, as so many appear to have done. Reality ignores you. There is no vote. There is no court. And there is no appeal. Cold, stark reality is no democratic institution subject to the superstitious folly of one's fellow moron. Thank God.
But then again, why should we believe people who can't even manage to figure out how to spell millennium, let alone understand why that difference is critical for discerning years from asses? :-)
Per your perspicacious suggestion, gladly would I inquire of a newborn's mother whether her child was now in his zeroth or his first year of life. (Mothers are quite sensitive to these things, and it was clever of you to make you witty proposal.) The answer all would give, of course, is that on his first day of life, that newborn has also commenced his first year of the same. You know this is true. And if you do not, you have but to ask. Try your own experiment.
I should be further delighted to ask a mother of a child of 24 months how old her infant is, and whether he's about to celebrate his second or his third birthday. And I hope you're there with me, for then would you see that each and every one of these happy women would be quick to report that her child was about to celebrate the completion of his second year, and thus would be celebrating his "second birthday". And in all likelihood, not just a few of these fine mothers would quietly or unquietly consider you a touch daft that you would even begin to imagine holding a third birthday party at the end of only four and twenty tender months of life.
The inability to reason has never been a trait hard to find in the muddling masses. This millennial matter is merely yet another clear demonstration of their collective inability to grasp numbers--or, given the profligate orthographic transgressions as evinced by your own posting, words as well.
And remember: The world wouldn't need so many nitpickers if there weren't so damned many nitwits.
I decided to sit through it just so I can say I did and didn't die of laughter. It was very bad. Disaster movies in genereal suck, but this was worst than any other I have ever seen (I didn't see Godzilla though, and I've heard horrid things about it). At least with most disaster flicks, they try to develop the characters so we have some reason to care for them. Not so in this case. It was just a hodge podge of characters that had nothing to with each other, an idiotic premise, ... I'll stop now. It's just bad. Be glad you didn't sit through it.
--
Deepak Saxena
Deepak Saxena
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers" - Picasso
I have found one possible-- but not likely-- Y2K issue with Slashdot. I don't think this will cause Slashdot to blow up, but I still wonder.
If you're using a Mosaic-style browser (Netscape, IE, etc.), and this article hasn't been archived, look at the "Location" bar. At the start of the query string, the first item, sid (which presumably is an ID number for the article), contains the date-- 99/11/21/1256222.
Now, I'm sure that's just something similar to a "primary key," so as long as it's unique from one article to the next, things will be alright. But, I haven't read the source code ("Slash"), so I can't be sure. The Slashdot scripts might use this date to determine when an article is to be archived, or if one article is older or newer than another. Sometimes the "sid" date doesn't even reflect the date the article was posted.
I hope none of you label me a purveyor of paranoia, but I wouldn't want Slashdot to have egg on its face. Anyway, I'm sure Rob has taken care of it, possibly using a "date windowing" technique or something like that. It's also possible that the real date an article was posted on is stored internally in a binary field (like the SQL "DATETIME" datatype).
Did anyone else notice a cameo by a certain beloved penguin? Someone at NBC must have a clue!
a bit lame, was that emergency broadcast text "This isn't going to happen" part of the movie or are people ringing in panicing?
:9
On another looks like Seattle gets wiped out, so it can't all that bad.
Our local station here continuly had a little box that would show up at the bottom of the screen that had a phone number you could call for Y2K information. They even had a "Y2K" call in center set up in the local studio.
:^)
The movie was ok fiction. But it was to hokey to me. Most of the hokiness has already been stated in other posts.
I am just waiting to see how many people go into mass panic and the this movie makes a self fulfulling prophecy. Bank runs, grocery store runs etc...
We can all then blame NBC!
Art Bell intervied David Isreal the executive producer of the movie and Art Bell's words were "It scared the hell out of me".
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Not counting your posting, there are 11 misspelled versions and only 4 correct ones. That means there are three times as many illiterates as literates. Surely it's much worse though with innumerates. I bet it's more like 10:1 or 20:1 or even 100:1 who can't count enough to realize that the new millennium is more than a year away.
I bought one gold commodity option last Friday (paid about $500). I'm hoping gold will spike tomorrow, and I'll make a few bucks. Ain't capitalism great?
The thing is, should we keep trying to convince the general populace that the next century starts in 2001, or should we just officially declare the 20th century to be a "pael" century (that's "leap" in reverse) that only has 99 years? I've been trying to do the former for some time now and I don't seem to be having any luck.
I don't know who wrote it, but he spelled 'methamphetamine' wrong
God, I can only pray Y2K causes MTV and Carson Daly to explode...
But reality is far far worse... I can see it now:
- The Real World: Y2K -
"Like, I don't get why *Trendy Name* is so cranky when he comes home at 4am. Computers jobs can't be that tough, I know because I use AOL *hold up disk*. I'm an internet queen!!"
so very cold... Maybe a complete y2k infrastructure breakdown wouldn't be too bad..
Oh great horny toads! Now we have a guy named Nick to save all of the United States, but we don't bother saving other countries, hehe they must have a Nick who saved them in the nick of time. I feel sorry for Nick and the guy acting as Nick, he must be a real winner. hehehe, sad, so sad. Y2K Monster: "The sky will fall and you will die!! Die I tell you, die!!!"
Why shouldn't they take money from the banks? If everyone did that, maybe everyone would REALIZE how screwed up the banking system really is!
Gee.. they don't have enough capital to cover deposits? Not even a small fraction of them? What the hell are they charging outrageous service fees for then? ALL your hard-earned deposited money is lent out at a much higher interest rate than you are getting.. and the bank would have you believe it is BAD for you to take that money out of the bank.
I for one think it's really funny watching this. Sitting in the other room typing this, I hear commercials about stocking up on food, y2k banking problems, on and on.. on the way in I saw a room full of McDonalds.. It's pretty funny. Of course, I can only imagine all the idiots tomorrow talking about it and asking me questions because they think I'm going to tell them something interesting (which of course I will.. )
The day after did what it was meant to do. Scare the daylights out of people. Unlike Y2K, a Nuclear war is genuinely frightening for good reasons. They could have done a better job on the effects though. After all they did have an actual nuclear holocaust for reference. I.e. your producing the remake of TDA and you just ring up Sony in Japan "Hello, Is there anybody on staff who can give a 1st hand or a detailed second hand account of what the whole Hiroshima thing was like ?".
Must... supress... rising tide of vomit... *barf*
While taking the time to watch the NBC cash in on the Y2K, I noticed something interesting that the local TV station was doing to cover its butt. After each commercial break, they would have a message across the bottom of the screen stating that this was just a movie and not a documentary of any sort. I am partially relieved that the local station is doing something pro-active to stop the spread of the hysteria, yet at the same time, I am disappointed in NBC cashing in on the bug.
Has anyone else noticed thier local station doing something similiar?
They could have at least used SQL Server instead of Access!
There are two things the public will never be told. The Y2K bug effects accounting data nothing else. If the computer dosn't do any sort of accounting it won't be effected. The second thing the public will never be told is we have to be ready for any sort of crash becouse stuff happends and in some cases it happends a lot.
Even for the havok the Y2K bug COULD cause... there are Sysadm making shure systems stay on-line and working all the time. It's not as if the Y2K bug is the only thing that can take down a system. Any number of things can do that. Bad hardware, bad software, bad admin, script kiddy, idiot user, time paradox and Microsoft features.
We have so many REAL bugs to worry about the Y2K bug dosen't really have a chance of wrecking any real havok.
Worse posable sinareo.. no one monitors anything and instead gets sloshed on the Y2K partys....
More damage will be done by rioters and script kiddys than by Y2K bugs.
"Fear is the mind killer" - Dune
"MTV is the Mind Killer, fear is a parasite that feeds on the results" - Me when in a really pissy mood.
In the mean time people are going to do what they can to make money off Y2K paranoia. Including TV news.
I like what one Y2K preparedness company had to say about it. They said at worst 3 days thats all you need. They sell survival kits and people asked for Y2K kits so they are selling 3 day kits. The other kits are for "Real" disasters and last for weeks and are far more expensive. They recomend getting the other kits becouse you arn't as likely to need it for Y2K problems as you will for other disasters.
I happen to agree and I'll order my survival kit in January when the demand goes down.
I don't actually exist.
...but there have been loopy fundamentalists predicting the end of the world every couple of years since Jesus and they always manage to come up with a good excuse when the world doesn't cooperate.
Besides, we all know the world will really end in 2038 when the epoch wraps.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Check out the above newsgroup for endless endertainment, and the occasional piece of useful information :)
Where's the written gurantee?
We do put it in writing... our clients are insured up to $25 million in each account.
And since when is a publicly held firm an "authority"?
I have already made my preparations, thank you. The champagne and whiskey is already bought!
A kid in my Heredity class is in the National Guard, and he says he will undoubtedly be called out on New Years...not beacuse of Y2K, but because of hysteria and riot potential. Mob mentality and all that. Only thing I plan to do is buy a carton of cigarettes and watch humanity degenerate into hair-pulling soccer moms fighting over the last Sara Lee poundcake.
"Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason." -Seinfeld
Wow. It is a rare joy to read a well-argued, eloquent reply to a well-argued, eloquent posting. Congratulations to both.
I personally agree with TheDullBlade here--quibbles about the existence or lack of a year zero are just quibbles; it all amounts to whether the definition of "millennium" is "a period of 1,000 consecutive years including and following the first year of the calendar, and each period of 1,000 consecutive years thereafter" or "a period of 1,000 years beginning with the change of the thousands digit of the calendar year."
Certainly the first definition is the more mathematically consistent, although the second is the one in more common use. Is one more correct than the other? Who cares? It's more satisfying to have a big party when the odometer rolls over, and that's all it boils down to.
Actually the movie Hiroshima was a very acount. It was a Japanese/North Americian colaberation and gave both sides of the story.
The half about Japan was in Japanese, and the americian half was in English.
It explored why the US did it, and what the Japanese Politicians were trying to do to stop it.
Re-read my post. Carefully. As I already said in it, the astronomer's year 0 is the same as what is called by historians 1 BC/BCE.
That means this year is still 1999, since the year 1 AD/CE and the year 1 by the astronomical dating system are the same year. But the first denarius was minted by the Romans in 268 BC/BCE, but -267 by the astronomical dating system.
Millenium means "1000 years". 1000 years from the year 0 (1 BC/BCE), the starting point of the astronomical calendar, is the year 1000 AD/CE. 1000 years from that is 2000 AD/CE.
OTOH, 1000 years from the start of the common calendar, which begins at 1 AD, is 1001 AD/CE. 1000 years from that is the year 2001 AD/CE.
I am frankly amazed that I would have to post this follow-up to Slashdot. Apparently the poster quality is dropping like a rock -- anybody who's ever done even a hobbist level of programming is familiar with counting from zero. Apparently we've sunk to the knowledge level of Wired.
I dread the day they show this movie, I work as a phone tech and I just KNOW that first call I get after that movie will be about y2k, hmm, I wonder whos sponsering that movie. Could It be the people making money off the y2k craze of stocking food for the next seventeen generations? (Of course, you realize I'm joking.)
Stupid is as stupid dies.
Yes, I am more afraid of the luddites and opportunists than the actual technical problems. I'm more afraid of crackpots who think it's the end of the world running around than anything else. This movie was in such bad taste. It's just going to get people all frenzied and hysterical over nothing. It is so blatently fud and hype.
"OMIGOD these sandwiches are not Y2K compliant! For the love of gawd call the CDC"
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
1......let's see, the movie follows the formula perfectly........first hour factual and sensible........then second hour hero rescues the nuclear power plant with minutes to go and at 4300 degrees or 200 below meltdown......yeah, right........stallone, arnold or bruce would be proud.........2....the only person to die was the paranoid guy with concertina wire around his bunker home when the benovolent national guard wanted to relocate him......hum....subliminals there............3.....the people at times square were calm after the lights went out.....yeah, right..............4.....no followups on the france deal..........5........the commercials for fast food and thanksgiving made it a feel good , just another boring disaster movie...........6.......the truth is that those who know for sure are not talking
Actually, they are divided approximately into time zones. Mountain and Pacific share.
After a major power outage (domino effect of a major storm, I believe) in the 1960's, NERC was formed and other similar organizations followed. The power went out for several days in Ontario, Quebec, and the Northeast States. I think it had something to do with the Epoch. All the computers had trouble with rolling over to 0 for 1 Jan 1970.
At any rate, when you look at the map (I don't know where an online copy might be.) it's very timezone-ish. That's largely because they broke the time zones and electric grids along same state lines and they've become part of American society (the east, central, and mountain/pacific).
-Derek
I work in the financial industry and I can tell you that of all sectors, the banking and financial industries are by far the best prepared out there. Our testing has been extensive, and just about every local and federal government has forced tests on us, as well as our own company, all major and minor stock exchanges and banks that we deal with.
What we and people in the banking industry are preparing for right now is the self-fulfilling prophesy; that people are going to run on the banks whether there are problems or not... just in case. So just about every bank is forbidding the majority of their employees from taking vacations at that time. The thought is also that a large number of people will be calling their banks, bokerages and checking ATM's right after midnight to just make sure everything is ok.
If they have a lot difficulty getting through, that might cause a bit of a panic.
Dear NBC, Mc Donalds, Trident, Burger King, Volvo, Mars, Revlon, Sprint, and Halls:
On Sunday, November 21,1999, the National Broadcasting Company showed a disturbing lack of responsibility by airing the TV Movie, "Y2K". This broadcast was clearly not purposed to educate, but to unnecessarily fill the average viewer with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. This motive was made plain by sequences in the movie where actors repeated phrases like "We've been preparing for two years, and we're only 85% compliant."
The broadcast prophesied a doomstay scenario including bank runs, cash freezes, power outages, abuse of military power, and a nuclear meltdown that would contaminate the entire nation. This was filled with more misinformation than Orson Welles' infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, yet, only Mr. Wells chose to disclaim his program.
Broadcasts like these serve no one. As a computer professional, I am not afaid of my computer failing as the new year dawns. I am not afraid of my bank, my power plant, or my telephone comany failing because of the conversion. I am afraid, though, of the millions of people who will short stocks, stock ammunition, and riot because of the fear incited by flagrant intimidation attempts like yours.
I challenge the executives of NBC and their sponsors to publish, and defend, their stock trading history for the six months proceeding, and the time pursuant this broadcast. It will be interesting to study how heavily stock was traded by the executives of NBC and its sponsors prior to, what appears to be, a deliberate attempt to intimidate the public.
I will aviod NBC programming in the near future. Further, I refuse to patronize the sponsors of this broadcast. Throughout the remainder of 1999, and the years 2000-2001, I will not purchase goods or services bearing logos from the following companies:
Mc Donalds, Burger King, Trident, Volvo, Halls, Mars, Halls, Revlon, and Sprint.
The First Amendment assures the right to free speach, however tat right does not extend to falsely yelling "fire" when there is none. I Defend your right to say any crazy thing you like, however, I do not appreciate your catalytic broadcast of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Sincerely,
Christopher Wallace
_______________________________
"When people measure time, they start from zero. Go ahead, ask anyone how many years old a newborn baby is."
/Age/ is absolute. A newborn baby is 0 years old until he reaches 12 months of age. At that point we will say the baby is 1 year old, HOWEVER, we will not say that it has completed its 0th year. We will say that it has completed its 1st year. So we /do/ count from 1, not 0.
This is a flawed analogy.
Enumerate your fingers for example. You have ten of them regardless of whether you use 1 or 0 as the origin.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
There WILL be special measures taken by the goverment for things like this... I hope -Brian Actually, the Government has prepared for things like this ;-) --> Civil Forfeiture Laws . Orignally, you had to report a withdrawl of over $10,000 to the IRS and to the DEA; but now, If you are carrying more than $2000, you are presumed to be a drug dealer. (that is the amount that basketball player was popped for in Indiana) Add to that the Supreme Court decision this last session that there is no equivalent to the Miranda in civil forfeiture. They are not required to spell out for you the procedure to reclaim YOUR money. I would say they have prepared for this quite nicely.
Did you all see the penguin! the young geek guy working for the government had it on his home made countdown clock that popped his bottle of champagne.
And hackers live in a minibus, run MacOS, subscribe to AOL and consort with other clueless, lame, AOL user/"hackers".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
That, dear DullBlade, was my point exactly. Popular proclamation doesn't change fact; blue is blue no matter what we call it...and as long as we adhere to the Gregorian calendar, the millenium turns January 1, 2001. Whyever is that such a hard concept for some people to grasp?
-- JackCat
Oh, I don't know. I think the pet rock tops this.
Really, though, this isn't anything new. Groups get pissed at hollywood all the time. Look at the controversy surrounding Dogma. I'm sure that the Catholic church thinks Dogma's worse sin out of hollywood since "The Last Temptation of Christ". Or take "Basic Instinct", where lesbian groups got steamed that the killer was gay (or bi).
Or how about the recent 2 volcano movies and the 2 meteor movies (why do disaster flicks come in twos?). I'm sure parts of the scientific community thought these movies would needlessly cause the general public to be misinformed and alarmed. It's just that this time it's our field of expertise (computer sci) - so "we" are outraged. I put we in quotes because I'm not outraged, I'm more amused (and somewhat ashamed) at the attitudes here -- it's like people want to censor the studio and slam them with lawsuits!
You know, perhaps it will panic some of the public. Good. When this happened with Welles "War of the World's" broadcast -- which caused widespread panic -- afterwords people felt pretty silly, and maybe they'll think twice before being so gullible again.
I love the Y2K over-preparedness here at Carnegie-Mellon (you can read an article published in The Tartan (the school newspaper) here). Sure, they're well prepared, and they don't anticipate any major problems.
But...you won't have the right to be on campus unless you have a special authorization... And if you do have this authorization, you'll need a special badge. Has anybody decided that buildings are not Y2K-compliant and that they will crash down? Who knows...
idiot #1: "The chinese have night lights?"
idiot #2: "Yeah, and the bomb too."
You might have problems if you try this little thought experiment with C programmers.
I had a professor who numbered his tests starting at 0, and after a couple years, the practice of beginning to count from 0 has rubbed off.
Of all the things to be worried about on Y2K, the power isn't one of them. I've watched the Trigger Effect, and I know how things CAN go. What worries me the most, is not the lack of power, heat, air, or anything else. It's the fear of Y2K that movies like this are propagating.
Every natural disaster, there's a select few who plan to take advantage of it. Rodney King verdict, looters/riots, every earthquake/evacuation leaves some whacko behind with the intention to take all of his neighbors' belongings and make them his.
To sum up, what I fear about Y2k are the idiots that are PLANNING on it. Maybe some things will go down, maybe not. But the people who've been planning to riot root and rob for the past six months, well, who's to say that the power staying on is gonna stop them?
Maybe there ought to have been more forethought in the making of this movie. I don't condone censorship, but its creators maybe ought to have thought better than to overdramatize a moment that's already going to have at least a few people in a far overdramatic state as it is.
Furthermore, why do they feel the need to make a movie/show on something that MIGHT happen? It's only speculation. Yes, I know that's what most movies are made of, but I can't see this having a good effect on the generally uneducated populace.
I'm done.
This sort of thing is a prime example as to why Hollywood should avoid getting involved in certain subjects. Broadcasting this less than a month and a half before the New Year is irresponsible. Most of us in the high tech world are fully cognizant of the ramifications of Y2K and the likely problems, and hence aren't really worried about anything other than a few minor (annoying possibly) aberrations that may result. Unfortunately, your average individual is not as technically savvy and is being pumped full of this nonsense, not just by the movie industry, but also by the news media, in what can only be termed irresponsible coverage. The reality of Y2K isn't what computers will do, but what people will do based on their perception of what computers will do. We already see evidence of people hording and going "survivalist". Remember that the Wall Street Crash and the run on the banks in the 20s was a result of perception more than the actual reality. I have faith in the intelligence of the average individual, but my past experience is that the collective intelligence of a group of people is equal to the average intelligence divided by the number of people in the group. In this case the collective intelligence approaches zero. Poorly done movies exploiting the ignorance of the masses, can make Y2K a self-fulfilling prophecy. Beware the herd mentality.
Yeah and they have every technical skimatic in their head...hehe
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2000 is in the 20th century. You know, every time I see or hear someone belabor the point this much, it makes me suspect they just haven't been invited to any parties and don't have any real prospects.
or were the movie writers totally stupid?
Arn't all nuclear reactors in the US designed in such a way that when your coolant disappears that the reactor is no longer able to sustain a reaction? (ie: emptying the water from the tanks shuts down the reactor).
The chernoble reactor was designed the exact opposite way (ie: you take the graphite like stuff out of the reactor and it speeds up).
Or am I totally not remembering things right?
While I hate to defend the movie, they did take this into account. The reason they "knew" there would be a problem at the Seattle power plant was that there was a problem at a Swedish one that had the same design.
i bet this movie has stuff like cars not starting. this is kind of crap is what is going to cause stupid people (practically everyone) to take money from banks and sell stocks.
Did anyone see that in the beginning of the movie? hehe It made me chuckle!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
When the lights go out, we'll all know where to go because of your generator...
:P
We'll be coming for you!
Sure...they're a pain... But let's forget about them... They take a little screen estate (but that's why you have scrolling bars), and moderators usually come in pretty quickly...
The other though a guy had something like the 20th comment and "FIRST POST!!!". I really hate this...
Y2kmart, a Dexter, Maine-based purveyor of gas masks, dehydrated food and other millennium supplies, said its sales tripled in the days after NBC began broadcasting promotional spots for the movie.
It seems that the most interesting aspect of Y2K will be to see how people react to it. (let's hope that's all that will be interesting)
People think banks will run out of money so they'll withdraw loads of cash on Dec 3x and lo and behold banks will run out of money. People think grocery stores will run out of food so they'll load up on food on Dec 3x and lo and behold stores will run out of food. Do you see a pattern here? Unfortunately I will be forced to join the loons to asuage what they will cause.
It was a disaster movie after all.
How come the hacker chick didn't turn up and go "Hey I know Unix!" and fix it?
At midnight on Dec. 31 all laws of physics will cease to be, and planes will fall from the sky. And don't forget that every pilot in the sky will go blind and forget how to fly a plane too.
McGyver probably has a good case against him. Where /was/ McGyver /anyway/? He should be saving the world.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
If I am not mistaken most banks actually have a policy where they require a month (or some anti-spontaneous time) notice for withdrawls over a specified amount. It was in place since the Great Depression, but is never enforced. The notice is somewhere in the fine print of a savings account agreement. Anyone else know about this?
ie. hackers, or is it hAKeRz. Got to match the, "I will use my laptop against your super computer to stop you from tiping over an oil tanker and getting away with 21 $us". Spare me. The same people that watch stuff like the y2k movie also believe everything the federal/state gov'mnt tells them. And those same folks vote to restrict everyone else's liberties, (see internet politick) So, "Look out for the smiling fool". -d
www.moviecliches.com
Oh well...Who wants to be on campus?
Everyone's going to be on 6th street anyway!
I do not believe the Y2K will go withot a hitch. Here is why:
While we may be ok on the technology side, you just never know what people are gonna do. For example, if people think banks will collapse, they'll take all their money from the banks -- causing them to collapse. If they think phone is not gonna work -- everyone will pick up the phone to make sure it works, etc. etc. So in this way, the disaster becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Here is an interesting historical fact:
Some time in 1500's it was predicted that the end of the world was coming that year. Thinking that the end is near, the peasants stopped planting crops. As a result, many people died of starvation. Does anybody else see the parallel with Y2K?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Take a look at these message boards for a good laugh. I love the smell of human stupidity in the morning! I'm xaranth BTW, yes, the very cynical one.
The greatest among us are those who have sacrificed their navels to the Potato God. -Terov
---
All your old jokes are belong to sigs.
Ooh! You're missing one: according to AltaVista, there at least 445 places where you can read about the millienium problem.
I'm not exactly sure what that is, but I'm guessing it's a million times dicier than the millenium problem. :-)
Babar
This is just another example of the media playing off the mass consumer's fears. Our society has absorbed an incredible quantity of technology in a relatively short period (40 years). Obviously there is fear in the unknown, and how much more so when the "unknown" lives in your own home?
:)
Y2K has and will become "popular" because it embodies a threat many consumers already feel. Yes, the potential demons live in their own home - on their kitchentops as microwaves, and in the sockets on the walls. Media constantly capitalizes on people's innate fears - so it is natural that a TV series would be produced around this theme. Actually I'm rather surprised there hasn't been *more*.
On the flipside the media portrayal is positive because although it shows an improbable (maybe) Y2K situation, this series seems to show human ingenuity triumphing over technology. This is what people really want to believe (and, is largely true - though human ingenuity with new modern techniques). So in a way I think this helps to aleviate panic, not perpetuate it. Yes, it may be innacurate, but I say anything is good that makes people feel more comfortable with technology
-Seth
I love Dennis Miller's response to Y2K.
Joe Morton ("The Astronaut's Wife" with Charlize Theron and Johnny Depp), Kate Vernon ("John Woo's 'Blackjack'"), Lauren Tom ("Friends") and Ronny Cox ("Deep Blue Sea," "Forces of Nature") also star.
Dick Lowry ("Mr. Murder;" NBC's "In the Line of Duty" movie franchise) directs from a screenplay by Thomas Hines and Jonathan Fernandez ("Crisis in the Kremlin"). David Israel, executive producer of last season's critically acclaimed NBC movie, "Mutiny," and the four-hour NBC thriller, "Pandora's Clock," the third highest-rated miniseries (behind "Asteroid" and "The Odyssey") of the 1997-98 season, is executive producer of the presentation from NBC Studios.
Steve Balmer (Olin) is a complex systems failure expert, an independent consultant working on the government's "Z2" (think zero, zero) project to insure that the new OS (W2K) is DOJ compliant.
As the minutes tick down to the new anti-trust decision, a concerned Balmer counsels caution, persuading his boss, the evil Mr. Gates , who heads up the program, to ground all planes before midnight because they are not compatible with the comapnies new operation system.
As Mr. Balmer watches and waits, clocks around the world begin to strike 12 a.m., bringing the United States closer to learning what the Micros~1 evil empire is all about.
As the millenium dawns in North America, most of the Eastern Seaboard enjoys major relief from the formely opressive molopolist. But the worst is yet to come.
Mr. Balmer must stay ahead of the unpredictable MS2K bug as it spreads across the United States threatening everyone, including his own family on the West Coast. While simple computer error is at the heart of the potentially catastrophic problems, Mr Balmer must use old-fashioned monopoly tactics if he is to save the day in this race-against-time action adventure.
I realize that, because this is most definitely off-topic and I didn't feel like posting under my name. I should have been more clear, I think that in order to post anonymously you must first register and log in. That way if you have something to say anonymously, fine... it won't hurt your karma, but perhaps /. could ban people that log in and post "1st post" garbage constantly. It would at least make it inconvenient for them to get a new email addy and register for a new /. account all the time.
Yeah, NA, specifically USofA, suffers from the 'technological nanny syndrome(tm)'. After spending a lifetime watching the stupid things people do when the 'TechNanny' fails them I would not be suprised at anything folks (USofA) do if their nanny goes on vacation jan 1st. Just live around the southeast atlantic coast of NA with the hurricans for a while - I have (45years). You can see some people do pretty-weird-things, empty stores of things they do not need, and worse. Last, I have fossil fuel lanterns and a pantry - duh - if it is electric it will not work all the time. -d
I traded in my cable connection for my internet connection;) I have found that not having TV doesnt bother me a bit. It gives me more time to concentrate on my classes and learning the 10 million computer things I always say I want to get into. In all I think TV movies always let you down anyhow because they usually suck.
Not withstanding the sillyness of this movie.
How y2k ready are your companies? I know we have a few old SunOS 4.1.3 systems that still need to be rebuilt otherwise our customer service people and a few customers wont be able to send faxs but, nothing that is gonna take us out of business.
We will probably have them done next week and then one more round of applying the latest y2k patches from sun.
How are ya all doing?
Mike
Y2K will re-write your hard drive. Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to
your computer. It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty. It
will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, screw up the tracking on your television and use
subspace field harmonics to scratch any CD's you try to play.
Y2K will give your ex-girlfriend your new phone number. It will mix Kool-aid into your fish tank. It will drink
all your beer and leave its socks out on the coffee table when there's company coming over. It will put a
dead kitten in the back pocket of your good suit pants and hide your car keys when you are late for work.
Y2K will make you fall in love with a penguin. It will give you nightmares about circus midgets. It will
pour sugar in your gas tank and shave off both your eyebrows while dating your girlfriend behind your
back and billing the dinner and hotel room to your Discover card.
It will seduce your grandmother. It does not matter if she is dead, such is the power of Y2K, it
reaches out beyond the grave to sully those things we hold most dear.
It moves your car randomly around parking lots so you can't find it. It will kick your dog. It will leave
libidinous messages on your boss's voice mail in your voice! It is insidious and subtle. It is dangerous and
terrifying to behold. It is also a rather interesting shade of mauve.
Y2K will give you Dutch Elm disease. It will leave the toilet seat up. It will make a batch of
Methanphetimene in your bathtub and then leave bacon cooking on the stove while it goes out to chase
grade-schoolers with your new snow blower.
Disclaimer: I can't seem to find the original author of this message, but s?he deserves a lot of credit. This is hilarious
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." -- John Lehman, Secretary of the US Navy 1981-1987
The movie starts with a plane going down because it flew over the International Date Line. (Never mind that planes don't use local time.) A bunch of guys at a computer center in Washington (including the Handsome Hero) start plotting Y2K failures. As midnight moves west, big red X's appear at random locations on the map, including the Sahara. Various people in America gripe about things like the ATMs being shut down.
A nuclear power plant in Switzerland blows up. The lights go off in France, one at a time. Jay Leno tells some awful jokes, and New York celebrates Y2K. The power failure must have been caught in traffic, because it took 30 seconds for all the lights to go off.
The Eastern seabord loses power, with a lame explanation from the hero. A hax0r chick talks to her friends on AIM, picks on her little brother, and then leaves for a party. The last fact is forgotten by the little brother because he has no idea why she left later on.
Something that looks like part of the movie turns out to be a Wendy's ad. The main characters obey the rules of computer cliches for a while. Some guy with weird hair points out that some nuclear power plant in Washington is going to melt down "and send jets of plutonium into the sky".
The news shows actual journalistic integrity and chooses not to report anything since they don't have enough facts. Washington is evacuated, except the chick and her friends are too drunk to notice. Random violence ensues during the evacuation.
They shut down the power plant, which involves pulling a scram switch which apparently has no effect because they have to send men in radiation suits to run around and look important. Alarms sound. The hero decides that he has to run through the radiation and turn some knobs, without a radiation suit.
The knobs don't work either. He runs out of the plant unharmed. He concocts a brilliant plan that makes no sense whatsoever, but involves blowing a lot of things up. He saves the day. He is reunited with his wife, as well as his daughter (the hax0r chick) who happens to be walking by at the time. A feeble attempt at a cliffhanger is made. The screen fades out to the executive producer's name.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Even the late-night talk shows have been playing on it. Honestly, I really doubt this movie is on TV for anymore than pure laugh value.
...isn't the stupid movie itself, but the people
who will watch this and believe it. The stupidity
of people never ceases to amaze me.
Just put this movie in the same category where
you'll find Cops or Jerry Springer: shows that
make me feel embarassed to be an American.
--- witty signature
I just saw this new James Bond movie, and the computer-related thing I learned from it beats anything from NBC's movie of the week.
Apparently bombs run Microsoft Windows CE.
Not to give away the plot but there's a closeup of a bomb's extremely colorful LCD information screen shown in this movie... and clearly displayed in the lower left corner of the LCD: "Windows CE" and a logo. Watch for it, it's good for a laugh.
The jokes just write themselves!
Let's face it. The most intelligent people are out changing the world or at least doing something truly productive. Most of the rest of us watch some TV.
Now the most intelligent TV watchers wouldn't bother with the silly networks (except for maybe the Simpsons and the X-Files, and I have doubts lately about the latter), when there is such meaty fare as A&E, Discovery, the Learning Channel, the History Channel, etc.
So who is left? You guessed it. Stupid people.
The networks have always targeted the lowest common denominator, but with cable, the Internet, and that perennial favorite of mine, books available there just aren't as many people watching any more.
Does anyone remember "The Day After"? Does anyone remember that they dramatized the aftermath of nuclear war without really showing some of the worst effects? Do we really expect any better from organizations that have edged out shows like "A Current Affair" and "Hard Copy" with their own Network News.
Do we really expect any better in a world where "Mystery Science Theater 3000" has been cancelled?!
Let's face it, it doesn't matter that NBC is showing some silly, wildly inaccurate story about y2k, because if people were interested in really becoming more informed, they would be. Most people are willing to sit back and be spoon-fed most things and the networks are happy to oblige (to wit: the tripe passing for news most of the time). After all, if the audience doesn't really care about the facts, why should they?
Oh, well.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
IGNORE IT
Let me guess, you went to public school, didn't you? Grew up in a trailor, didn't you? Had a coon dog named Zeke, didn't you? American, right?
Well, I will explain it to you very very slowly.
When you see a post with "FIRST POST" in the subject, IGNORE IT.
Nothing can bother you unless you allow it to bother you. You've living a very unhealthy lifestyle by getting worked up over things that don't matter worth a shite.
Hello Big World, B+ Lost points for no sex, no drugs, no lies? Sure wanted to see some two-step'n by the gang at the white house also Frank Ness ******** An on going entertaining parade of y2k hype, facts, and laughs. www.cobol-man.com
on the real millienium date issue: 2000 tastes great, but 2001 is less filling bugger the facts, sell what sings, baby! >:)
I am absolutely Floored that a network would even air something as inaccurate and bogus as this. The Government is going to have enough problems with stupid morons freaking out about y2k, they dont need a network television freaking people out even more. Now, all the other networks are going to come out with their y2k copy movies so they can ride the bandwagon.
I think back to the first time the "War of the Worlds" was aired over the radio. People started to freak out becasue they thought Earth was actually being invaded by Aliens. Mass Hysteria breaks out easily, and is something that can spread like wildfire. If things keep up as it is, I think that y2k could be interesting, not due to massive computer failure, but to stupid people having panic attacks.
I think we should all email/call/write NBC and tell them how irresponsible they were.
Conspiracy theorist approach:
NBC is affiliated with M$. M$ is using this to make people freakout about y2k. After people freak out Billy Gates is going to use this opportunity to push M$ solutions, and state that he needs totalitarian control of the country in order to fix things in a hurry. After that happens, he will ban any other software because it is not y2k compliant, and then persecute everyone who dares to use something else. He will setup "Windowization camps" where people are forced to use M$ software for 18 hours a day, and then are brutally beat until they claim Bill Gates as the supreme ruler of the universe. He will sequentially brainwash everyone in the world until he has total power over everything...
be afraid, be very afraid...
The best is the missle that lost it's trajectory, and *just* misses impact with the city. Great Stuff.
Of course, we all know Y2K is going to be MUCH worse then everyone is suggesting. (said with dripping sarcasm.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I just set my threshold to 1. Almost all of the childish first-posters are AC's, so this has been very effective for me. Although, it's the reply to "first posts" that annoy me, because they generally come from annoyed Slashdotters and have score 1. (No offense intended, just pointing out the facts.) :-)
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
This Y2K cr@p is being presented as "what will happen." If it were presented as a news story on, say, New Years Eve, it might have some of the style of Welles. Until then, it is worthy only of the garbage heap.
Otherwise, I agree.
Just don't compare this to a work from the Master.
Please.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Guess what? It's gotten a lot worse. Run your stats now.
Indeed, it would be a good thing if y2k actually did cause some havoc with the banking system. But you know, I actually thing the one accurate part of this movie was the fact that banks didn't get messed up. Then again, banks getting messed up by y2k isn't exactly exciting disaster movie material.
But speaking of banks, I suggest everyone begin by reading Murry Rothbards "The Mystery of Banking" and then we all work out a way to ban the federal reserve. The amount of money the government and the banks make off of what they do is insane. And then we have all these great laws in place to protect the consumer. All they do is allow the banks to get away with what they do. And the burden of all this is placed on those of lesser financial resources.
And although it'd be great for my college loans if the banks went away, I don't think y2k is even an issue for them... they've been having to deal with it for a long while now, what with 25 year long term loans and such...
I think my superpower of choice would be to be able to argue economics without a strong background in that field... oh wait, I already do that!
...with the ancillary things that may occur. If (not saying this will happen) some places lose electricity, it will be during one of the coldest months of the year. This could have many repurcussions. I'm also somewhat concerned about "cyberterrorists" planning attacks to coincide with Y2K. Isn't it a possibility that foreign terrorists could take advantage of the whole thing? This could add to the possible problems which may already occur only making Y2K seem more daunting than it is in itself. Also, what about other countries which are less advanced. Some third world countries that aren't as prepared may encounter some problems and these could have possibly serious repurcussions around the world food shortages and disease outbreaks are concerned.
Or am I stupid?
Wait, don't answer that last question.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
10: When the power fails, lights go off one at a time, in timed sequence. Ditto for lorge-scale blackouts.
This is because the speed of electricity is actually only about 70 mph. So we can watch as the buildings run out of electricity one by one, even down to running through a cooridor just as fast as the lights go out! >:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
They claim that, for one thing, the movie is a bomb simply because it sucks. The preposterousness of the subject and the chance it might cause lusers, er, ordinary folk, to panic only makes it worse. Read the Wired article here.
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
As far as I know, there is absolutely no Federal Law in place requiring a month for large withdrawals.
There is however, a law that a bank my hold a check from a customer for up to 10 days... just to make sure it clears and everything.
But this is left up to individual bank policies. While the FDIC is fully insurnig Y2K concerns for the banks. Banks and tellars are required to be open.
Here is a Y2K policy being taken by a bank I deal with a lot:
Withdrawals over $200 require a picture ID.
$3,000 maximum withdrawal for the drive through. For larger withdrawals, you have to come in and sign a special notice stating you are informed of the dangers in carrying large amounts of cash around.
For withdrawals over $25,000 they are requesting 24 hours to insure all branches will have enough. People who need it immediately are welcome to go to their home office.
People wanting to withdraw their entire life's savings will be heavily dissauded... but there is not much they can do about it.
Just guess some people can't learn from the past..
Recently a man broke into my home and came at me with a loaded 10mm automatic pistol. He had already killed one man and wounded another. I had received approximatly 30 seconds of warning from my neighbor before he kicked my front door open and turned down my hallway. I had grabbed my Ruger 10/22 and was waiting for him at the other end of the hall. As he raised his gun toward me, I sqeezed off two rounds. One missed and the other hit him in the shoulder. I ducked into my room and he ran out of the house. I strongly believe that I would have been shot and or killed if I hadn't had my gun there to protect myself. Maybe we would have been better off if guns were never invented, but they were invented, and I highly doubt that Mr. Badguy is going to give his gun up any time soon. If the bad guys can have guns, then we better be able to protect ourselves. From now on I will be prepared with a twelve gauge shotgun, and I recommend that you do the same. I'm betting that there will be many crimes happening as we welcome in the new year(Remember, the millennium goes til 2001). However, my point is not to get you worked up over Y2k, I'm simply stating that you should be prepared because that bad thing can and will happen to you!
no no no, for the first night, just go with a browning m-50 belt fed machine gun, then for simple defense go with the damn h&k mp-5, thats all you'l need, and throw a flame thrower in there for good measure
...great....what's this Handsome Hero(tm) gonna do?...Go around and yank the power cords on everything?
I distinctly remember the country being called The United States of Ensure in that movie...
I think most of the masses will watch this movie, the media and network TV love to make those "..Could this happen to you.." style movies Ex."Earthquake"(NYC earthquake movie) and the outbreak sort of movies. Me -I'll be watchin X-files with the rest of the geeks. -Kris
We all know that programmers write code that is so tight that QA departments have never been necessary, and that QA groups are so good that no product has ever been released with bugs. Right? And when fixing a bug, the new code never breaks anything else in the product. Right?
We also know that database code is so tight that no problems will result from importing data with an erroneous field that fits the range check.
Some companies are actually fixing the problem, by changing the size of the date field. Others are "fixing" the problem by making assumptions about dates and leaving the date field as two digits. Some countries are far behind in their attempts to resolve the problem and many small businesses will not have upgraded their software or data in the next month. All of these will be sharing data, to some degree.
The real problem is the short-sightedness of some managers, who are sure that no code will still be in use when their short-term "fixes" hit their magic dates. This mentality is what caused them to ignore the problem for the past 25+ years, despite the warnings, and even to develop non-compliant software products as recently as a year or two ago.
While I don't expect to see planes falling from the sky or the power grid collapsing at midnight, I expect to see y2k related problems for a long time to come.
--doc
Yeah, on one of the preview commercials I saw for
the movie there was a plane sliding sideways on
a runway....
I then proceeded to shake my head in disbelief.
At midnight on Dec. 31 all laws of physics will
cease to be, and planes will fall from the sky.
To quote Dr. Evil: "riiiiiiiiiight".
--- witty signature
What ever happen to the people saying there was more problems than people to fix them? have many of you done work for gov projects? I worked in the Texas-City(Tx) Y2K upgrade, They still use 486's and some new boxes, I know for sure that 70% of them computers (for police reports, people bond info, ticket info, you name it, won't work. Because they think everything is ok now. I know of Texaas-City/Houston, and some other cities around Houston area that won't be up to shape by the end of the year. So is it hype? If you have a 86 Ford PU With duralspark II int. You won't be able to drive. ;) Have fun guys! topdogg@anvdesign.net just in case ya wanna chat...
Anyone remember x-files series where some hacker stole super secret info from government about alien stuff, later he gave it to Mulder. The funny part is that while government tried to retrieve the tape (with digital data) at any cost, poor Mulder by some unknown reason was not able to make any copies of it and eventually lost the original (as it always happens on x-files). And after bad guys retrieved the tape, they did not even question themselves if there were any copies made of it. Maybe that's because you cannot copy/steal data if it is encrypted. :)
Imagine....everyone gets freaked out about Y2K for no reason. Investors sell all their stock. People take all their money out of the bank. Banks collapse. The stock market crumbles...we get a depression. That'd be pretty cool.
I just wanna know where MTV's hard hitting coverage of Y2K has been?
Hopefully they'll come out with a
"True Life: After Y2K" to showcase some more of their technical knowledge.
> When you restore power to a computer, it is immediately ready to go - no booting required.
:-)
A friend of a friend had a PDP-8 in his garage.
When he had it all put back together and powered it up, he didn't need to boot it - the operating system was still sitting happily in genuine magnetic-donut core memory
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
w-o-u-l-d y-o-u l-i-k-e t-o p-l-a-y a g-a-m-e-?
-> THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE
w-o-u-l-d y-o-u l-i-k-e t-o p-l-a-y a g-a-m-e-?
-> THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE
O-K.
O|X|O
------
O|O|X
------
X|X|O
-> NO! YOU STUPID FSCKING MACHINE! I SAID THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE! NOT TICTACTOE!
[WHUMP WHUMP BANG BANG CRUNCH CRUNCH]
-> THERE. SUCK ON THAT YOU OVER-GROWN TOASTER.
--
rJames.org - illustration
It's funnier when you realize that it's a russian nuke from the cold war...
heh
root% /mnt/floppy/patch --clatto --veritta --neckite
A horrible rumble follows and the blood curdling screams of the damned filled the office building.
Wise old man: When though misaplyith the patch the army of the machines awoke!
Just then a TV with toasters attached to the back (for propulsion) flys over the walls of ashes cubicle.
TV: I'll swallow your soal!
Ash: Come get some!
The butt of Ashes double barrel shot gun crashes against the face of the TV, which smashes against the edge of his cubicle. The gun spins around and Ash unloads 23 rounds into the TV set.
Meanwhile, somewhere in New York an old woman is listening to 'Puberty Love' with her earphones on. Behind her an answering machine bears its newly grown fangs. Wraping its power cord around her neck it moves in for the kill. Choking, the old woman thrusts her head back in panic, pulling the earphone jack from her stereo. The sound of 'Puberty Love' fills the room, the answering machine lets out a scream, catches fire, and explodes...
and so on and so forth...
Anyone want to bet that the hero is sued for saving the world by implementing a solution that is either copyrighted or patented?
i'm reminded of a past filler from suck.
http://www.suck.com/daily/99/01/13/
Hey I just thought of something -maybe everyone will freak after this movie and we could have some lawyer prove it's the direct cause of this movie...
Yeah sure..
-Kris
In last monday's weekly supplement of the most influential newspaper here in Mty, they ran a story intitled "Fear not, your freezer will still work on 01/01/00" or something to that effect. It had a whole lot of info on why your microwave oven , toaster and miscellaneous kitchen appliances should not fail due to the Y2K bug.
I thought at first that the article was ridiculous, until I realized that many people were relived (sp?) to learn that those appliances were not affected. Mexico isn't nearly as technology-dependant as developed countries, and most of our technology is fairly new (less than 10 years is the mean for computer equippment) . We're also listed as one of the 8 top compliant countries in the world regarding govt'ment compliance, but man! You'd be surprised at how naive people are regarding stuff like this...
+Raider of the lost BBS
Two Digits for a Date. by Paschal S Hammond. (to the tune of "Gilligan's Island," more or less)
can be easily found at http://www.hamline.edu/~math/ wnk/humor/twodigits.html, or at other places without the author's name.
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale
Of the doom that is our fate.
That started when programmers used
Two digits for a date.
Two digits for a date.
and a page or two more.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Didn't you see the Simpsons Halloween Special?
There'll be planes dropping on your lawn all day.
"Whoops! There goes the clothesline!"
And watch out for your applicances!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Don't forget that very old systems used tape drives for mass storage so that not only did long dates take up space they took up time to read them back into memory. I read somewhere that the original PL/1 ran on a machine with 1K RAM (probably core) and 5 9 track tape drives.
widespread misconception that 1999 is the last year of the 20th century.
So then, no party invites yet ?
>Y2K movie, or new X-Files?
This week's X-Files was just Brain-Eating Monster Of The Week. But the Preview of NeXT Week'S X-Files has them meeting Frank Black of Millenium, Chris Carter's Other Show!
John Walker's Millenium Screen Saver
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm assuming that somewhere in North America, some power plant will have missed something that matters - maybe not on Jan 1 (e.g. the oiler-widget that's scheduled to oil hourly is expecting to oil something at 12:30am 1/1/100 which is a long time after 1/1/00, but the valve it oils doesn't seize up for a few weeks), but eventually the plant will crash or degrade. The question is how much of the power grid it takes down with it, and how good each power company is at isolating its working plants from the dead parts of the grid. Northern California's PG&E promises it understands that, and has some reassuring words about how this isn't happening during the summer air-conditioning crunch so the system should be pretty stable anyway.
:-)
Does your power plant have good plans for that? Or only for not crashing?
I also expect some electic company's billing system to get confused, but shutting off people's power is almost always manual, and any power company that sends around trucks to turn off anybody's power on Jan 2 for non-payment will deserve their Darwin Awards
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Now, please, flames aside, I think they did a fairly good job on this. Ive been working on Y2K on and off for some time now, and I can guarentee there will be problems.
I would say that the nuclear plant meltdown is unlikely, but thats in the US/UK. What about the ones in china, russia, other places that just dont have the resources or money to impliment Y2K fixes. If one melts down, we all suffer, just look at chernobil.
Just look at it this way. When an OS is released (yes, and I include Linux kernel releases here) there are bugs. When just about ANY software product is released there are bugs. There are usually at least 3 or 4 patch releases even for something as simple as a game. What do you think the chances are that someone will have gotten EVERY SINGLE BUG out of the system FIRST TIME?
I think those that are thinking that it will be without a hitch have their head in the sand. I dont expect the end of the world, but I do expect fatalities. The question is just how many.
People have no education on the situation -- a special on things that WON'T go wrong....
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I hate to credit an attempt to make money off of the paranoia of the masses, but I'll only do it a little. The movie actually did mention, in passing, that the millenium begins in 2001. This was when Nick's wife was sorta complaining about his not being there for New Years. Other than that I can think of little to credit it with. for whatever reason it seems like they just sorta threw that last explosion in there for the heck of it. I don't see how blowing up the pump-house (or whatever it was) will help water to flow!
The most contrived, unbelievable plot I have EVER seen, 90 minutes to reset the system clock? The machine thought the tank hadn't been filled so wouldn't open? A man survives a pump explosion in a small enclosure and GETS NOT ONE SCRATCH, this movie was crap, start to finnish, top to bottom.
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
My own personal nightmare scenario for Y2K goes something like this:
:)
Everyone decides to phone their friends as the year clocks over.
Think about it for a second. It sounds innocuous, but it isn't.
The telephone system works the way it does because it makes the assumption that most people aren't going to be using the phone simultaneously. Once enough calls are being made at the same time, you get equipment-busy signals. If you get enough calls, you don't even get those - you just get a dead line. (It may even be possible to lock up phone exchanges in this way).
People, faced with as dependable a service as the phone going out (remember: not even power-outages takes out your phone service) will get very worried. They'll start hammering on the cradle (putting even more load on some older phone exchanges) after seeing it in the movies and on TV, which will just exacerbate the problem.
The word will spread - hey! the phones are broken! it's a Y2K problem! - and more and more people will start to panic. Even if people can get through to a dial-tone, they won't be able to get through to their friends.
Panic presumably ensues at this point, with some people taking advantage of the problem and going in for a spot of looting and rioting. The phone system stays down, as more and more people try to get through to their friends. People phone the 911 service, because they're scared by it. The emergency services (already overwhelmed) can't get through to the calls - and any fires which break out don't get reported automatically to the emergency services either - because the alarms need a phone line to do send the report in.
Fires begin to break out across a city; people see them, and panic even more.
And so on and so on ad infinitum. I'm not worried about technology going out of service - I'm worried about how people will react.
Still.. here's to having a happy New Year - if we're all around afterwards to enjoy it
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Re. the Washington State nuke dude: From what I've read in the nuclear industry forums, NRC plans to shut down any nuclear plant that's not 100% compliant including dumb stuff like employee drug test databases etc. And the nuke engineers are mighty pissed. Particularly because shutting down 20% of the USA electricity supply in the cold of winter increases the chances of localised brownouts and blackouts. More self-fulfilling prophesies. So, question: have you heard the same thing, or is your plant planning to stay online?
While it's hardly on the scale of global catastrophe, had the replacement software been delayed another month, this company's stock would have halved. Considering what that would mean to the people sitting around me's options, I could have ended up a Y2K fatality.
Expect minor problems with things like real-time delivery and order processing. Some companies are going to lose business when systems that take time to replace fail unexpectedly. Accountants will be beleaguered for months, but the apocalypse doesn't appear imminent.
Wow...NBC has a bottomless bucket of great films for us this season...First Atomic Train, now Y2K, and then the Mary, Mother Of Jesus movie. Remember that NBC targets the softheaded older folks, so this stuff'l definately increase the sales of depends undergarments.
Blar.
. . . but if you include a year zero, then today would be November 22, 1998 -- not 1999. The millenium idicates 2000 years since the start of counting years as AD - which, no matter how you number it, will not occur for another year.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
y2k is gonna kill us all!!!!! HELP!!!
Y2K has and will become "popular" because it embodies a threat many consumers already feel. Yes, the potential demons live in their own home - on their
kitchentops as microwaves, and in the sockets on the walls. Media constantly capitalizes on people's innate fears - so it is natural that a TV series would be
produced around this theme. Actually I'm rather surprised there hasn't been *more*.
More precisely, I think that "unknown" that people are afraid of (the thing that, innately, they fear) is what they cannot see. Now, if this is a correct assumption, then I know that others of you have already long ago realized this.. otherwise, I apologize for my incorrect generalization.
The thing is, people can't see what's in the sockets on the walls, they can't see what's being emitted on their
kitchentops as microwaves, and they can't see the code where those little "00" et al live. The "average" consumer - the ones experiencing these innate fears - don't think about things like that, the simple things.. the code, the microwaves (no, not the machines), the electrons scooting down those copper wires, and they can't comprehend how simple it really is. Everything complex is really just many smaller, simpler systems put together. They don't stop to think about that, and so they get caught up in overall appearnance of it, and allow themselves to be overwhelmed, and let panic set in.
It would take too long, too much patience, and too many physics teachers to explain all of this to them (not that you have to have physics teachers, per se, but people who'll teach 'em the physics of it all) so that they can be educated and stop and analyze the problem before they run from it.
Fish! They're all Fish!
Insert mind here.
Big deal. It's a movie. I have a pretty low amount of faith in people, but I still trust everyone that watches this to not think they are learning anything. They may believe whatever lies they're told when it is presented as fact (e.g. the news), but this is the least of our worries if they're going to start believing movies.
"They" being the clueless masses that will cause 99% of the y2k problems without any help from computers.
I'll put this movie on. Being a TV movie, I'm sure it will be poorly written, directed, and acted. I'm also sure it will be full of technical inaccuracies. But it may still be able to grab my attention.
>D: If one power plant goes down, the entire >eastern seaboard goes with it. Note that the >power grid is neatly divided into time zones: We >can't get help from the Central time zone, >because that would be cheating.
Actually D is closer to being true that any of the others. The easter seaboard does have a very low power reserve with a lot of its power being routed in from Canada. That is why in the big snow storms of '93 and '96 the power companies had to institue rolling blackouts. They didn't have enought fuel at dome of the power plants, and with a couple down trying to run the full east coast load would have overloaded the remaining ones and and knocked all power offline.
Theortically caught by suprise one big plant going down could overload a few more plants and when they go offline overload the rest.
...I seem to recall.
That's why there's no URL here or anything. But replace "Y2K" back to "Good Times" and ask Deja News for the earliest match it can find.
--
Xenu loves you!
Who needs to worry about y2k. I'll spend new years eve on a mountain farm bunker, 3 months of supplies, 8 months of ammo.
This is a subject more appropriate for that show, don't ya think? It turns out that the alien virus is a computer virus! (Just a thought.)
From what I saw, he blew up the pipes going into the pump house, which would allow ocean water to go into them.
OK, not to defend the movie too much (I thought it was pretty good - better than Goldeneye but not as good as Tomorrow Never Dies), but if I recall correctly, that display is actually from Ms. Jones' HP PDA that she was carrying with her. I think she hooked it up to the bomb (USB port on the bomb I guess) to display that screen.
I'm a contractor at Washington States only functioning Nuclear Power Plant. Apparently the others at the plant view the movie as a very bad publicity stunt. Our Y2K measures and expense reaches a very nice sum of 6.5 Million dollars and the critical aspects of the plant don't depend on a clock or date. More information available at http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/1999/1120.html# anchor596414
A lot like that NBC atomic train movie, actually.
Y2K and Atomic Train were both directed by Dick Lowry.
I watched the movie. I watched it for pretty much
the same reason most people watched it -- they
wanted to see a catastrophe, secretly believing
the biggest catastrophe would be the movie itself.
and I wasn't disappointed. the acting was pretty
lame, as befitting a cast of nobodies. the plot
was mainly just a string of disaster-movie
cliches: the cassandra-like hero predicting that
things are going to be much worse than anyone
imagined, the hero's loved ones inevitably being
caught in the disaster, the old guy providing
unexpected aid when things looked bad. there
was also the rather stupid way that factoids were
dropped into the middle of dialogues: "oh, by the
way, honey, the millennium really starts in 2001."
some of the commentary here, though, has been
unfair. the massive blackout, for instance,
wasn't that farfetched, since it happened once
before... but then, supposedly powercompanies
back east made changes after that blackout to
guarantee that one powerfailure wouldn't take
out the entire eastern seaboard.
also, the comments about how unrealistic it was
to portray "hackers" using AIM are way off. you
should complain instead that the dialog labeled
those kids as "hackers". from what I could see,
they weren't even *crackers* or script kiddies;
they demonstrated they knew how to use aol, and
they "hacked" a guestlist for a rave. sounds
like a couple of lusers, to me.
I was also annoyed by the resurfacing of the
"I don't think Y2K will be a big deal, but I'm
afraid of the people who *do* believe it"
comment. if you are afraid of that, you are
afraid of Y2K, so just admit it.
one tiny thing about the movie annoyed me more
than anything else: on more than one occasion,
characters in the movie said that some machine
would fail "because it thinks it's 1900 and it
hasn't been serviced | filled | whatever in 99
years."
excuse me, but if some machine kept track of
the *year* it was last serviced (instead of using
a counter) and subtracted it from the current
year, AND if it though the current year was 1900,
then it would think it hasn't been serviced in
-99 years.
my predictions for Y2K:
there won't be any large-scale problems
except in third-world cities
there will be a number of annecdotal
incidents (filler material for
the news)
Y2K alarmists will point to these and
say "see, we told you so."
I will be able to buy Y2K books for a
buck apiece in January.
Sounds like even within the genre cheesey made-for-tv disaster movies, it doesn't rank too highly.
-
<SIG>
"I am not trying to prove that I am right... I am only trying to find out whether." -Bertolt Brecht
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
I sure hope slashdot has its y2k shit together, 'cause I'm sure as hell gonna try to have the first post of y2k.
Also, I'd think twice about running such a neo-Luddite movie, if I were an executive at a broadcast network. Wouldn't this increase the risk of the Script Kiddies attacking them?
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
People have been preparing for years for this 2000 thing. The worst that is generally expected to happen is a power failure. Bleah. We don't need to worry about the two zeros in the date, it's the zeros that are people that will cause the trouble. After, during or before the 2000 party, there'll be riots. Maybe some not so bad, maybe some really bad ones. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there was virtual anarchy in places like Rio de Janeiro. But over here in our comfortable North America, we are _still_ going to have a lot of over testosteroned kids who want to prove their...size and go and create havoc. Think devil's night multiplied by... 2000.
The program director at TNT must think like I do. TNT scheduled Red Dawn to play the same day as Y2K. Is this because they are, basically, the same movie?
America is imperiled by a terrible menace which the wise have been warning us about for years. Foolish nonbelievers are rescued by good ol' American ingenuity.
But where else would you get all this brilliant commentary?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Don't overlook the fact that much of the "first world" is located in the northern hemisphere - and a prolonged power disruption in "snow country" will be *far* more disruptive in the winter than in the summer.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
9: It's perfectly alright to walk around inside the containment building of a hot nuclear reactor.
absolutely true! in commercial plants it is permissible and common to go into the containment vessle and do work. Why do you think they are called ``zoomie sponges''? They also refuel the reactors while at power.
Try that with a naval nulcear power plant and you are toast.
There are a lot of problems with the way that movie presented nuclear safeguards. My favourite part was how the core temperature was over 4000F and not a single bit of steam was coming out.
The first thing they would have noticed was the power excursion caused by the loss of the moderator (water) and the turbines coming to grinding halt and -all- the power going out.
Interesting how the lights stayed on everywhere. Probably due to a back up reactor. Most likely of the same design.
Kudos to NBC and the research they did for the movie!
--
It's kinda funny, I was watching NBC just before I came online and I saw the ad for this show and I thought...fuck, how irresponsible can anyone be. There is already enough panic and worry about what's going to happen without some network trying to make a bigillion dollars by inciting panic in people.
If anything does happen at New Year's and people do panic/riot I think NBC oughta be liable for inciting a riot. It's absolutely the most idiotic thing anyone has ever thought up.
http://www.vertigo.org/cliche1.html#computers
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
My favorite part of the Y2K movie: the fact that they saw systems crashing from west to east across the globe in a nice, neat, orderly fashion.
I would expect a sudden, dramatic spike somewhere around 00:00 GMT, as any real international system is going to be computing time based on GMT and converting for local time zones anyway. I also certainly would not expect all of the failures to be so _organized_. Y2K bugs have been showing up for decades now--they'll just become more and more frequent as the end of 99 approaches, rather than 24 hours of system failures followed by a happy ending.
My least favorite part: "Oh my god, Dad was right!" from the unnecessary stereotypical ditzy blonde chick. Actually I didn't like anything she haid to say, but that was her worst line by far.
"Nick must use old-fashioned ingenuity if he is to save the day in this race-against-time action adventure."
:)
Um, isn't it old-fashioned 'ingenuity' that caused the y2k problem?
"We can shorten the date by two whole digits, but the first two are completely unimportant."
Moderation is FINE. Surf at Score:0 or 1 and you'll be fine.
Talk. Talk. Talk.
Your mere words will be of litttle comfort if things go wrong. Where's the written gurantee? Where's the "we'll pay you 10x the dollar amount of any mistakes we make"? If your really up to snuff on Y2K, then why fear making such an offer? You should have nothing to lose since you're so sure of your preparedness.
The bottom line is that "authorities" will always say that "everything is under control" and that "there is no need to panic". Well, fuck you and pardon my French, but I'm gonna make my own preparations. I recall LA riots where LAPD officers were ORDERED TO DO NOTHING as rioters looted stores and set fires. I stood on my store roof, shotgun in hand, 5000 rounds at my side. No one looted my store. God bless the 2nd amendment. Remember, only "you" are ultimately responsible for your own safety.
Ideosphere is a reputational betting pool. There are several Y2K claims here and odds are adjusted in real time. The Y2K claims are generally trading at 15% or so.
While I agree that nothing good will come from
the movie, I'm shocked that the geeks in this
forum think that Y2K is no problem.
As a geek, I see the mass of dependencies in
our society, and I think it's quite likely
that Y2K glitches will cause Bad Things,
although I don't claim to know what.
We're prepared to hunker down at home for
a while: extra water & food, an alternate
heat source... No firearms and nothing we
can't use if nothing happens. A little
prep seems only prudent.
You confuse etymology with meaning and argue in the manner of the original sophists who boasted that they could "prove" any point, true or not.
"Eppur si muove," eh? What moves? There is nothing there to move. There is no fixed physical point from which we must measure time. There is no physical reality of any kind to the date system.
When you ask a person's age, you do not get a reply of which year they are in, but how many full years have passed since their birth. When you look at a clock, it tells you how many hours have passed since midnight/noon (with 12 representing zero, and replaced by zero in modern revisions). The only common counterexample is the days of the month. Most people measure year dates by the "obscure" astronomical calendar which counts from zero.
Popular errors of language are not errors. Language is convention, our system of dates is a part of our language. Popular use is correct use in the modern living language. If "experts" use it differently, then that is just their jargon.
In similar vein, if 90% of people spell it "millenium" that makes it the correct spelling (if it's more like 20-80%, it's a competing valid form), just as if people pronounce the word nuclear as "nuke-yu-lar", use "literally" to add emphasis to an analogy (I particularly dislike this one, but it has become so common that stopping it would be like fighting the tide), or say "snuck" instead of "sneaked". Any objection that "that's not how they used it (last year|100 years ago|2000 years ago)" is as invalid as a demand that the word "electron" be used only to refer to pieces of amber, and not these newfangled subatomic particles. These things belong in footnotes of reprints of old books and in dictionaries marked "archaic."
I believe the current popular definition of "millenium" would be "a) a period of one-thousand years or b) the thousands digit in the year date." So people are celebrating the Big Digit Rollover and correctly calling it the change of millenium. Similar definitions apply to century and decade.
I spit upon your kind, you pathetic nitpicker, pedant, and sophist, who sits there as smug and sure as the scientists who daily usurp words in common use and bully the populace into adopting the new meanings (calling them fools all the while), knowingly destroying the meanings of old texts far more quickly than the innocent mistakes of journalists, politicians, and authors.
If 90% of the people called the sky "puce," then "puce" would mean blue. For all I know, there is a language where "puce" does mean blue.
Would you also ridicule me for calling the sky "bleu", "aoi", "blar", or "synthva"? It would depend on which language we're speaking, wouldn't it?
Individual proclaimation is not popular use.
We are staying online, after a complete Y2K checkout we are very confident of our plant and stability. Washington Nuclear Plant 2 (WNP2) has achieved some very good goals and they plan to tackle any possible problems that may occur. At this time a full compliment of staff is expected on December 31st (Luckily I'm not critical enough to have to be out there!) The NRC has been very pleased with our efforts in the plants efficiency and stability. I'm not an official spokesman for the plant, but I can refer you to our media people if you would like. http://www.wnp2.com I have not heard of such measures of the NRC but I do believe that in the end they are out to serve the public and the Nuclear Facilities best interests.
I say everyone be a script kiddie New Year's eve, and take NBC out. If every /. reader attacks them some, it could cause some big problems, and might show the media to stop being idiots and start acting responsibly :)
The sheer number of people who see movies like this as one of their only sources of information are going to cause some problems because of their panic... Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.
Because not everyone has the time or patience to go to all the somewhere elses and sift through the banal stuff and find the slightly interesting stuff. I don't read Wired every single day, but when an article from there is linked on Slashdot, I'll go check it out. It might be a few days old, but if I didn't know about it before, it might as well be new. That's the whole point of Slashdot; find interesting news that's relevant to someone (not necessarily everyone) out there in a short and to the point format, and let everyone pick it apart and share their opinions on it. When Wired includes discussions attached to every story and limits them to a paragraph or two instead of a few informative scentences spread throughout pages of pointless analysis , THEN it will have the exact same stuff as Slashdot.
Pleas excuse the ranting.
ROFL!! This is about the BEST y2k solution I have heard to date! Yknow, I hope NBC blows up on 01-01-00 just for even ALLOWING this piece of shit to be televised! Jesus, BUY A FUCKING CLUE you TV execs!! How about showing something useful like Planet Of The Apes...at least it sends a SMARTER message than this idiotic y2k panic that they are contributing to. Morons!
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Hackers do too run MacOS, didn't you see that documentary on the topic 'Hackers". If you people really want to learn something check this out http://www.mgmua.com/hackers/index.html Christ am I the only one that pays attention to these things Oh yeah and "Hack the planet" -- Dade Murphy
But come on... When was the last time *you* saw a handsome COBOL programmer?!
am I really supposed to respect a network who's last miniseries was "Leprechans"?
.sig
matisse:~$ cat
Well, since everyone is going to be freaking out over the Y2K show, I'll be happily watching 4 back to back episodes of Law and Order on A&E starting at 8pm EST.
Long live Ben Stone!
The Movie Cliche List
http://www.vertigo.org/cliche1.html#computers
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
How can I tell if my shotgun and ammo will work for y2k? Anybody seen the new Nike y2k commercial? It shows a guy out for his morning run on Jan 1st with a city basically collapsing around him (S.F?). Nothing phases him and the punch line is of course, Just Do It. Pretty Funny.
A lot of first posters post plenty of valid, on-topic messages as well. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Slashdot would reveal itself as being hypocrites if it started practicing censorship after claiming to support free speech for so long.
If you don't like it..... ignore it. Don't try to declare what others can and can't do.
I should expand on my point.. The issue is not how good/bad moderation is, the issue is that Censorship is BAD. So don't censor, just filter.
That said, I don't entirely share the view that y2k will pass without a hitch. The interesting thing to me about y2k is that no one really knows what's going to happen. Those predicting widespread disaster and the collapse of civilization are bound to find the rollover anti-climactic, but the simple truth is no one knows what to expect.
I do think problems directly due to technology are likely to be the least of our worries. The biggest problems will be second-order effects. Some people worried about failure of banks or the stock market will take their money out, which is actually a pretty good way to stimulate the collapse of banks and markets. Even people who don't fear the y2k bug will have enough fear of the herd mentality that they join the stampede.
Since governments are increasing the money supply to deal with increased withdrawls, and presumably would close banks if things got out of hand, outright failure of banks is unlikely. Similarly, for every person frantic to dump his or her stocks there will be someone else grateful for the bargain (I will be one of them :-). So worldwide economic collapse seems unlikely, but there will probably be some effect. No one really knows how much.
Also a concern are all the nuts out there who expect the end of the world or the collapse of civilization, and opportunists just waiting for a good occasion to loot. Again, no one really knows what to expect, since most of the kooks are keeping their plans to themselves.
As for me, I won't be stocking up on ammo, but just to be on the safe side, my y2k celebration will be strictly limited to technology available in 1900. Anyone have an old Victrola I could borrow?
thresholds."
Then you won't have that problem.
I go to the University of Texas @ Austin (Electrical &computer engineering) and they are doing the same thing. The entire campus is closed to almost everyone, and you have to get authorization from the campus police and administration to be on campus. They say its because they are cutting off utilities to all buildings except where vitally necessary. They even have recomended (because of no ventilation) that if your servers are going to get hot, just turn them off.
dont forget the simpsons !
I remember a Wired issue about a year ago proclaiming how all the Y2K programmers were "scared shitless". In fact, that was the first I heard of embedded chips in power plants that were susceptible to the bug. It's interesting to see Wired pinning blame on someone else. I'm not surprised that any sort of medium these days resorts to doublespeak.
--
"I was a fool to think I could dream as a normal man."
This point was actually very well supported by the documentary "Sneakers" When what's-his-name was talking to that guy about causing runs on banks, and how the same could be extrapolated to his taking down the entire monetary system.
---GEC
Bow-ties are cool.
Given the rather low availability of original new ideas for hollywood movies, it is rather surprising that they haven't done more with y2k... It's a pretty obvious topic, many people are gravely concerned about it (for all sorts of far out reasons). One TV movie isn't going to sway people much either way. In a way, these kinds of TV movies are probably theraputic for Americans :-)
From what I'm hearing from the majority here, I suspect slash dotters would have harped on Orson Welles' radio production of "War of the Worlds" in a similar manner (although I don't mean to overplay the Welles comparison -- I highly doubt tonight's movie will have anywhere near the class that Welles did)
So what if we all know that the Y2K bug won't spell doom and disaster like many in the general public seem to think. I think the scenario is just too good to *not* make a story out of. I would have preferred a comedy, though -- I think the comical effects of random everyday items failing and causing distasters would have been quite fun.
Maybe we'll all be lucky and there will be a "heaven's gate" response among these same people when the light's DON'T go out and their cars still start. Life would be much easier
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
awww damnit nevermind, its football instead.
We've all heard about the Y2K bug in computers that is supposed to mean The End Of The World As We Know It. However, there's another more insidious Y2K bug that is widespread in the community. It affects the meatware in a large number of people and is responsible for the widespread misconception that 1999 is the last year of the 20th century.
This meatware bug will cause widespread problems in the community. During 2000, there will be a lot of arguments between people about which century that 2000 is in. It will cause riots in Los Angeles, shootings in the American Midwest, arguments on Oprah, a lot of bar fights everywhere, and general violence in many places throughout the world.
Sure, there will be a few computer problems during 2000 as a result of software not being fixed, but society will not come to a screeching halt. But the year 2000 will be a frustrating time for those right-thinking people who know that 2000 is in the 20th century and not the 21st, and who have to explain to the witless again and again. It promises to be about as much fun as banging one's head against a brick wall.
Meanwhile, I release under the GPL my patch for the Y2K meatware problem, thus:
Y2K Meatware Patch V.1.02
1. Grab a small number of objects - a few coins, buttons, matches or other small objects. Ask your subject to count them out loud one at a time. Note the first number they use; it should be "one" (1) and not "zero" (0).
2. Repeat once or twice for a set of different objects. They should use "one" as the first label for each.
3. Ask why they always start at "one" and not "zero" when counting.
4. Explain that years are counted the same way, and that if the first year of the first century was 1 AD, then the first year of the 21st century must be 20 centuries or 2000 years later, making the first year of the 21st century 2001 AD.
If that doesn't work, then here's another method to try:
Explain that years were (and in some cases still are) labelled using Roman numerals because Arabic numerals weren't introduced into Europe until about the 12th century. Ask them what the Roman numeral for "zero" is.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
it's called war of the worlds by orsen wells i think
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
"Mass destruction - hooray hooray"... Jim's Big Ego have a hilarous song about Y2k! (I am not affiliated with them, I just like this song. Also, check out the search engine at mp3.com - there are dozens of other Y2k songs there... and no, I am not affiliated with mp3.com, either.)
------------------
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You may like my a cappella music
Be sure to keep an eye peeled for these and other interesting things which NBC is sure to teach the public.
(I'm afraid I don't know the source of this list, so I can't give credit, but if anyone knows, then please speak up!)
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Amusing ...
This is dumb. There's no need to waste time arguing over when the 21st century really begins. In another year, it won't matter, and most likely not even the people who were "right" will remember the ecstacy they felt that time they got to be superior to someone for one, brief moment, by virtue of knowing a bit of trivia about our calendar system. 2000 should be the start of the 21st century. Now that 0 is a part of our number system, it makes more sense. Beyond that, it's really not worth arguing about - it's just a handy way to yell at people who hype the turn of the century way too much. ---GEC
Bow-ties are cool.
Hmm, I can't but help to question the intelligence and quality of tv programming anymore. Can't stand this Y2K crap either. NBC: "Make sure to watch out realistic film about what will happen when Y2K strikes, this is just an estimate. The movie will air at 12:00 January 1st."
hehe, and my friend was just making fun of this a while ago when he saw the advertisement.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Cool, thanks for the info!
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Just ignore it. Real easy. I think you're wound a bit too tight...
Blar.
Where there was a stolen bomb on a train, and "Oh No!", it's going to explode because the train's crashed and on fire. Nevermind that it doesn't work like that.
Shown half-way through the movie "Tom's Y2K bunkers! We have everything you need, shotguns, canned food, complete radiation protection for when that reactor has a meltdown! Can survive being hit by a 777, can survive the blast from a Russian Nuclear Warhead, yes folks, we have everything that you WILL need come Jan 1, 1900...oops, the bug strikes again! Order now, before our computers die and we won't be able to ship any more units!" Every software company should sue NBC for deformation of character :)
"Dad! Your hand's stuck in the toaster again!" (Different Simpsons episode, but funny as hell. Hope appliances don't take over when the roll over occurs.)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
When "Superman" was release on Network TV they used one of the false endings instead of the one the director intended. I mean really, how can hoards of police and rescue works find Superman's fortress of solitude.
Tom Clancy must have been desperate when he gave the movie rights to Network TV for one of his movies. They made an otherwise really good suspence thriller into what amounted to a love story and removed all the real suspense. The only suspense left was, when will they kiss?
So what can "Y2K, The Movie" really hope to be? Nothing more than opportunistic trash that is trying to score on the fears of those less technically savy than us. In reality most people with more than half a brain usually avoid any movie that is "Made for TV" or what was a good movie that has shredded to make room for commercials and non-existent plots added.
Oh yeah, and in case you didn't know, "Y2K, The Movie" isn't about technology problems, its a love story. So if you do decide to watch, don't look for the plot line (there isn't one), and keep asking yourself, "When will they kiss?"
If people were meant to go around nude, they would be born that way!
Hmm... 8pm... Y2K movie, or new X-Files? I think
the choice is clear.
despite the fact that i probably spelled canable wrong, i'm going to try and post anyway... I caught a little bit of the Y2K movie during the X-Files commercials and let me tell you something. I have rarely been offended this much by a movie. Its not so much that its a reactionary piece of garbage clearly written by people who dont know what they are talking about. well.. no im full of shit. thats exaclty why i dislike it. of course the INCREDIBLY bad acting didnt help either. i couldn't stand to watch the whole thing... I will give them one thing though. I clapped when whatshername went off about how the millenium doesn't start until 2001. if anything comes from america watching this movie i hope it's that they stop calling Y2K the New Millenium. (fat chance right?) oh well. X-files was good though... almost as good as the lighting boy episode. yum!
//Insert Meaningfull Quote Here
Help! It's getting to me already!
Tux? Darling? Where are you? I must have you now...
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
2: The control rods in nuclear power plants care what year it is. The SCRAM button doesn't work anymore in 2000.
3: Ditto for the cooling pumps.
pi: All the gauges in the control room might think everything's okay, but that doesn't matter because "the computer might also think it's 1900." What, nuclear reactors were built stronger back then?
4: When in doubt, tap the gauges: that will make everything ok.
5: 31337 hAxORz use AOL Instant Messenger.
6: 31337 hAxORz like to listen to music that says "I hate my life" over and over.
7: They fixed Apollo 13 using nothing but a hammer.
8: Acetylene and oxygen burn in a 1:1 ratio.
9: It's perfectly alright to walk around inside the containment building of a hot nuclear reactor.
A: Water can cool a nuclear reactor from 4500 degrees without boiling or even getting warm. A corollary to this is that no matter what the core temperature is, the rest of the containment building stays at a nice, cool 72 degrees.
B: Altitude gauges on aircraft care what date it is.
C: Trig calculations can be performed simply by drawing circles on a sheet of notebook paper.
D: If one power plant goes down, the entire eastern seaboard goes with it. Note that the power grid is neatly divided into time zones: We can't get help from the Central time zone, because that would be cheating.
E: All soldiers are too stupid to tell whether a shotgun was fired into the air or directly at them.
F: When in doubt, blow something up to save the day. You get extra credit if there are a lot of big sparks.
Well, that movie was fun _and_ educational! We should make it part of the science curriculum!
Was watching the James Bond: License to Kill movie last night at work. Villain cuts air line on semi tractor trailer. Brakes fail. Odd, because air brake systems work because the air holds the springs back that apply the brakes; loss of air pressure to the system would completely lock the brakes.
Damn! I was hoping to watch the mushroom clouds rising over the mountains to the east
as the clock hits midnight. I guess I'll have to settle for listening to loopy fundamentalists
drop dead when they realise the world hasn't ended.
Evil Overlord X.
Coming to a third world country near you!
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.