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When Does Y2K Begin?
The popular perception of the "Y2K moment" is based on local time, with Y2K starting in the Pacific Ocean and gradually sweeping West, hour by hour, time zone by time zone. But is this correct? Most large, critical systems run on GMT. Air Traffic Control and most military systems certainly do. So is it possible that H-Hour for Y2K failures is GMT, not local midnight? Instead of local glitch after local glitch, are we more likely to see a single giant "galoomph" at GMT midnight, which is 7 p.m. US EST and 4 p.m. US PST - and 11 a.m. on January 1 in Sydney, Australia?
Just do what I've been doing today when bored:
zdump Pacific/Auckland
... assuming a relatively modern box, you will get a listing of the furthest ahead timezone that I can find. If there's one beyond that, I'd like to know it, and quickly.
It would appear that New Zealand is about 11 hours away from midnight as I write this.
Why didn't we think of that sooner!
You are such a stupid shit, everyone with my intellect knows the Millennium starts next year.
funny..........NOT
here are my two cents
JESUS IS COMING AND HE'S PISSED!
We're all gonna die!
What's with the funny AM/PM date style on the article postings? I'm having trouble looking at 07:00 PM... How about something like UCT 19:00? ya!
Please, people... let's think about the less fortunate at this holiday season. Contribute to TROLLS FOR TOTS and with each anti-Katz post, a needy child will have a Christmas present. Do your part for the kids.
KATZ BLOWS! HOT GRITS! FRIST PSOT! NATALIE PORTMAN PETRIFIED! LINUX SUX! WINDOWS RULES! BILL GATES IS GOD!
Well, as a computer programmer, I have to admit that computer programmers are generally much more optimistic about time to ship a software product, etc., than the actual numbers show once said product is shipped. By that rationale, any computer group saying that "Y2K is no big thang" is suspect, in my opinion. So I'll save my water and food, and keep my handgun nearby, thank you very much. It's not paranoid, it's just covering all the bases.
Isn't Sydney, Australia GMT+10 .. making it 10am the Jan 1?
..
anyhow
You might want to check your quotes, too.
No, you're a nut. The issue is that people start counting with one. It's the first century, the first decade, our first year in California, etc.
The 3rd millennium starts on 2001 (there was no year zero).
Binaryheads will no doubt be celebrating in 2048, if they're still around after Unix dies in 2038.
So, anyone wanny but a "Fuck Y2K" T-Shirt?
Wrong. UTC is not French. It's a dumbass compromise. English is "Universal Corrected Time" (UCT) and French "Temps Universel Corrigé" (TUC). There is no expansion of UTC. It's just a dumb French complaint because they fail to recognize English as the lingua franca (yes, I realize that's ironic) of our times.
I thought we were safe for another 48 years? BTW what kind of computer problems did they have during Y1K? I'm sure we could learn from history... D. Galloway
daylight savings make it +11
Third world shouldn't have much of a problem, as they don't have many computers. First world, of course, has lots of computers and the money and time to fix what minor glitches there are. It's the second world that might actually be impacted in some relavent way. There may be a couple of power outages here, because they have the computers, and no money to repair them. Yup. Y2K = "Attack of the killer 'Bad time/date stamps'" -Ballade (who's account got screwed up somehow?)
Third world shouldn't have much of a problem, as they don't have many computers.
First world, of course, has lots of computers and the money and time to fix what minor glitches there are.
It's the second world that might actually be impacted in some relavent way. There may be a couple of power outages here, because they have the computers, and no money to repair them. Yup.
Y2K = "Attack of the killer 'Bad time/date stamps'"
-Ballade (who's account got screwed up somehow?)
Oh, and you need to learn how to spell.
I hope it will be totally off-topic, so these fucking moderators will be teached a lesson!
It doesn't matter what your stoopid eurofucked laws say. Popular opinion is that a kilobyte is 2 to the 10th bytes; to wit, 1024 of them. Likewise, a gallon is one kilodram, because there are 1024 drams per gallon.
Nobody, dumbhead. You fucked up the spelling. Do you like, not even know what the word fucking means?
Oh, didn't you hear about why we English are being dragged kicking and screaming into the metric system? It's because "computers work in powers of ten". I kid you not.
The indellible mathematical truth is counting of any array starts at ZERO
I hope youre kidding, 2^10 (get those calculators out boys and girls) *is* 1024.
That is when I fixed my first hundred year design flaw.
:-)
:-)
Yup it is not a bug!
It has nothing to do with the year 2000 (except it endded with 00), 2001 or the century or millinneum.
And yup... 20 years ago. Some of us do business programming and NOT STUPIED A/R or PAYROLL systems. Or limited scope Airline Systems (try booking a flight of July of 2001
Get over it!
Geeks with half brains... are dangerous.
Would you hire someone, who hasn't learned to read a calendar, to fix a date problem?
As the day approaches I'm getting nervous. I work in the IT dept of a large bank in London and we've had a host of problems in the last couple of days. That's not to say we don't usually have a host of problems - it's generally managed chaos. I always say they only way they get through the day it through an army of Australian accountants on short term contracts.
The biggest problem may come from somewhere completely unexpected. More than a few applications have had their y2k problems identified, fixed and tested but not released into production. Some apps have had shared libraries fixed but have had subsequent releases regress the fixes. These aren't small apps either - we're taking settlement systems for one of the biggest banks in the City. I would be surprised if it was limited to my bank.
I agree. I've witnessed localized gravity shifts occurring for years. You know they happen when you stumble while you walk or when you or a friend is just standing around and suddenly falls over or at least has to take a step to catch themselves.
y2k will only worsen the problem because my couch won't stay on the floor. I sure hope it doesn't get stuck in the stair well.
2^10==8.
Don't tell me, let me guess.. you were in charge of that Mars lander that crashed because you couldn't convert metric to imperial, right?
PS: And what's a "dont"?
How often does this happen? I think it has geek relevance, you know, electronic things breaking & all. It's theory at this point, mental masturbation..something it sounds like you could get behind.
(orig. poster replying)
Oops.. Well, even mispelled, I'd rather see it then Y2K. The term 'Y2K' is getting annoying.
- First, you will never convince a FORTRAN programmer of this.
- Second, you will never convince a child that the initial anything starts at 0, not 1.
- Third, there's no such word as "indellible". Do you even know what the word means? Do you ken its provenance? I suggest you look it up. Or stick to small words.
Sucks to be dumb, doesn't it?I saw a weird bug last January 1st. We had an HP9000, running HP/UX 9.x. On 1/1/99, SCCS suddenly refused to allow us to check in source code (although we could check it out fine). Turned out that it had been fixed awhile earlier, but we had never bothered to keep up to date. It was a couple of days before we got the patch installed and were able to check in our latest source code changes.
The date line is basically at Fiji. The timezone or server that will first roll over is the one closest to it to its east.
for example, eastern Asia.
Then you have the dates that data suppliers use, which is mostly EST as a standard.
Your own timezone, the timezone of your target data, and the timezones inherent in your input all need to be considered.
Personally I need to look at most of Asia, a couple of zones in Europe (obviously GMT), and then obviously PST and EST.
Don't be dumb.
There's a lame joke: ask any man on the street to count, and he'll say "1, 2, 3...." Ask a programmer to count and he'll say "0, 1, 2...." (Take a look at the GPL for an example.)
Well, the 2000/2001 thing is the same thing, except this time it's the man on the street who is counting from zero. People who would never think that the first day of the year is January 0 are convinced in their hearts that the first year A.D. was 0 A.D, not 1 A.D.
Fencepost errors - they're not just for buggy code anymore.
I *wish* I were joking. I really do. But I've heard this. I really have. People believe it.
It starts whenever I take my medicine.
What're you gonna do, kill cockroaches with that? That's worse than -no- gun... Hell, I'd take you on with a knife if you pointed that thing @ me. Then I could have your TASSSSSTY MRE's. Uh, nevermind, carry on.
UTC is the same as Zulu is the same as GMT. UTC stands for Co-ordinated Universal Time (although I still don't know why the acronym doesn't properly reflect the description. Most people don't know this, not even the Wing Commander of our Station (who started flying Lightnings very early on!). Season's greetings from Glasgow, Scotland
As long as we're being anal...
Why do you people care?
(Hideously offtopic, and I damn well expect to be moderated down).
ENOPROB: long long time_t typedef salvation
They can go right back to social security.
B1ff, get off your big bro's computer. You know he loves that C-64 more than life itself.
Anybody who manually hits reload instead of just writing a Perl program to do it is a complete fool.
line 48 of cookie-lib.pl if (! defined $expires) { $expires = " expires\=Wed, 31-Dec-1999 00:00:00 GMT;"; } # if expiration not set, expire at 12/31/1999 Now that's one of the stupidist things I've ever seen in my life. If you wonder why your cookies don't work.. oh well we hate cookies anyway.. Hah
What's a milleNium?
i think that the buisnesses all know it's 2001, and they're not telling anyone so they can do all this millenium crap next year and make even more money.
There's that dumb millenium shit again. Why don't you just write milenium, or xyzzy? It's just a correct. Don't you even know what a millennium is -- AND WHY?
and whats the big deal about this number? I can't believe people even talk about that year 2038 bullshit. I seriously doubt you will using the same computer with the same 32 bit OS 38 years from now.
Why sp4? its seriously outdated. sp5 or sp6a would have been a much better choice. I always wait a few weeks after a service pack is released to see what problems people report. If its all clear then I install.
Great, Fine. You gave us DATA. Now if UTC (Co-ordinated Universal Time) is what we should use, where / how can the average Internet User get access to it (correcting for latencies / delays in networks etc? Now the answer to that question would be useful information not just data.
Actually, you are wrong. It is because there was no year 0, not because they didnt know about it, but because it went strictly from 1 BC to 1 AD, there was no 0 between them. It wasnt because they didnt know.
and whats the big deal about this number? I can't believe people even talk about that year 2038 bullshit. I seriously doubt you will using the same computer with the same 32 bit OS 38 years from now. I believe the same thing was said in the 1970s about COBOL.
A kilobyte is 1024 bytes. A kilometer is 1000 meters. Y2K is the year 2000. Anyone who is confused by this is a moron.
...do rely on the printed output of other programs. These are the major problematic programs, I think, except from old Cobol ones, of course. So your cute little backup-script won't work tomorrow. So what? The worl will still be going on as allways, except you'l have to work overtime doing the backup by hand, just as in the old days! :)
Anyway, my system still thinks its 2037...
Oh, and we'l have to face
[root@mini src]# date -s "Dec 31 04:47:00 CET 2037"
Thu Dec 31 04:47:00 CET 2037
[root@mini src]# date -s "Dec 31 04:47:00 CET 2038"
date: invalid date `Dec 31 04:47:00 CET 2038'
[root@mini src]#
(That's Linux)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA That is good, real good : )
Thanks for the tips and thanks for taking my post in good spirit. Now I'm off to investigate NTP Time Servers. Compliments of the Season from Glasgow, Scotland.
Slightly off topic, but what the hell are they doing?
what the fuck.. oh.. wait.. forgot.. doesnt agree with slashdot propoganda..
Bwahahahah, don't they have sarcasm where you come from?
East coast is atlantic.. SG
read the first half of the first word in the subject you inherited from the start of this thread. (after the "re:" you pedantic assholes).
pascal arrays start at zero too, if you declare them that way. Or 100045045045 if your compiler can handle that many bits.
Go sen nen da. Minna siteru no, nee Akari!
That depends... 10001.01 according to the fandom formula 53003 according to the TNG system
2000 is the age of stupidity. We will all aparty harder this new years' than we will next year. You may be "right" about the millennium, but the idiots _make_ the celebration what it is. Party with us ignotant boobs or wonder next year how your own intellect made you miss the party of the millennium.
Don't forget about the problem with 2038. That's when the 32-bit second counter from 1-Jan-1970 rolls over.
I hope we don't wait until the last minute to fix that one!
We have over a year to wait for the 1st post of the Millennium.
JESUS - THE MAN WITH THE HOLY PISS.
Right...but I think the reason that it's not the M-word in 2000, is because there *is* no 0 A.D... the calendar starts at 1.
Hmmmm..Credit Cards seem to work fine in the US still. Surely we would've seen something similar by now like the UK. Or did we and it's fixed & done???? Anyone? Bueller?
"Everything else will just go over to "00" and not know the difference."
Bzzt. The problem is that some microcontrolers
don't roll over. They reach their maximum counter
number and generate an error that hangs the chip.
No, its just that C, unfortunatly, turned into the language taught in schools.
LISP IS YOUR GOD! ALL BOW!
A lot of components used in electronic equipment has build-in clocks even though they are not needed. Some of these clocks might not be so accurate since they haven't been synchronized for several years.
ManyGB=5.84942417.4K;
But this whole mess is *about* computers!
Where did they get this fucking idiot roblimo? What are his qualifications? Did slashdot do a talent search to find one guy stupider than hemos?
Some legal docs that i've read take the form "in the 1998th year of our lord".. so the first year is year 0.. so the next millenium is in 2001.
of course, you also have to recompile everything, and if the program stored a time_t to disk anywhere, you have to fix the saved data too.
On the plus side, we get to find out how many linux boxes in the closet running vital services that people installed and forgot about exist.
Oh, and for the record, midnight local time I plan on pouring hot grits down my pants.
- cow
woohoo, it's y1.99999726k!
No. There was 1 B.C. and then there was 1 A.D. the next year.
Interesting, particularly when taken with the other story that may just be an urban legend; ie that James Cameron invented the term Y2K in his script for Strange Days. But hey! He's king of the world, so why expect less? iain
As we all know, 1K = 1024. So, Y2K will commence 2048.
the above does not make sense, besides being a complete waste of time (who cares about minor spelling mistakes or strangely spaced quotes: stick to the topic at hand, say something substantitive: like, for instance, ... so there's 1 A.D. and 1 B.C. ... could 1 B.C. be described as 0 A.D., or is there a zero B.C.; um, does this all have something to do with religious-types not recognizing zero as a valid number: if God's everywhere, is He present where there's nothing ... is He inside zero?, etc)
that ^ will mean modulus...
why?
because I just want to WASTE pointless BANDWITH on a STUPID conversation about NOTHING.
Man, why would ANYBODY even waste their breath saying 2^10 = 8... C is plain wrong here. Any math teacher would tell you... (no not the ones that teach CS, the _real_ math teachers).
It will be at 00:00 Zulu, _one year_ from tomorrow night. Man, if coders can't count, we are all in trouble!
Anyway, Tony Blair the other day unveiled GeT (Greenwich Electronic Time) which he hopes will set the standard across the world. This has backing from firms including Microsoft.
naaah.
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ pico oj.c
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ gcc oj.c -o oj
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ oj
Y2K will begin on December 31, 1999
The millenium starts in 2003. The first year was year 1, and the monks skipped years 666 and 1666 because the numbers are paganistic.
hmmm, think about all the insightful karma you could have gotten if u posted as a registered user, those comments were very... abstract
I'm living over here in Japan this year. Y2K hit here before it hits any other major countries. I can't believe what I'm seeing here on TV - lights out everywhere, explosions, whole city neighborhoods leveled! And there seems to be some sort of hunter killer robots wandering around shooting everything human! No, wait... it's just The Terminator on my VCR, I rented it last week. Never mind.
And... there's no 0 A.D. because when the calendar was made there was actually no 0 in their math! What's 0 in Roman Numerals? The Romans didn't get 0 until the Arabs brought it a few hundred years later.
No, you're a nut. The issue is that people start counting with one. It's the first century, the first decade, our first year in California, etc.
No, you're the nut. There was no 0 at all to count with.
IBM's AS400 requieres users to put in 100 instead of 2000 as an interim fix. Supposibly the programmers decided 1 would stand for the 21st century, and thw other two digits would be just as 01, 99, etc... kind of dumb since the 21st century doesn't occur till the year after (2001, or 101 in IBM's current case)
So for that system it is just a matter of telling people to put a 1 in front of all 2K dates... pretty bogus, but then, the AS400 has been around since the 1970s...who knows what kind of monster it is *VBG*
regards,
Anonymous Wimp
Before 01/01/2000 - tell everyone you know that this whole Y2K problem is nothing major to worry about. Although we all know this, have we all formally told our family / friends / boss / cat etc? I know I haven't because it didn't seem important. Well I've just realised - big lost opportunity on my part. Make sure you tell everyone you know otherwise you will not be able to pat yourself on the back (with justification!) later when you say to them : 'Told you so! Y2K problem, what Y2K problem?'
The U.K. Goverment has set up a one and only website to be the focus of information about Y2K related problems or the lack thereof.
Now as we all know, a few weeks ago the sysadmin in charge of the Government webservers said he was keen on Linux. Well you can guess the rest.
Too exited to turn this post in to a fancy, formatted html post but here are all the URLs you need :-
http://www.millennium-centre.gov.uk/
and according to http://www.netcraft.com/ the site is running --- drum roll please ---- 'Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) on Linux'.
Surely Billy boy must realise MS has peaked? - A few days ago a Slashdotter helps put his online service back together (Hotmail / Passport) and now the U.K. Government is running its most mission critical / on-show web server on Linux.
Obviously Christmas has come twice to me. Just make sure you tell everyone you know whose OS is being run by 'Her Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland' - LINUX!!!!
Could it be because you were a minor at the time of receiving your passport? My first US passport was for five, second, as an adult, is now for ten. And I've dual citizenship too. Maybe you just need to prove your loyalty. :)
AC
(A better title for my post would be "Another 2 nails in the coffin for MS")
The U.K. Goverment has set up a one and only website to be the central focus of information about Y2K related problems or issues for the general public (read - tens of millions of people in the U.K. alone). Not only that but the site is being advertised on the BBC's web pages.
Now before you all kill the site with the Slashdot effect READ THE FOLLOWING :-
To mirror the site you need to be able to create a directory hierarchy - I can't do this on my ISP-provided website - anyone else help?
Anyway, here are all the URLs you need :-
The U.K. Government Millenium Web Site
and according to Netcraft the site is running --- drum roll please ---- 'Apache/1.3.3 (Unix) (Red Hat/Linux) on Linux'.
Surely Billy boy must realise MS has peaked? - A few days ago a Slashdotter helps put his Hotmail / Passport online service back together (read all about it and laugh ) and now the U.K. Government is running its most mission critical / on-show web server for the moment on Linux.
Obviously Christmas has come twice for us. Just make sure you tell everyone you know which OS is powering the U.K. Governments most important (for now) web server :- Apache and LINUX!!!!
Pouring Hot Grits down his pants I would guess.
You must publish your current IP (and that means staying online if you dialled in) so that we can traceroute you and DNS lookup all the nodes to check your geographical location (maybe with a little help from one of the geographical databases on the net for different nodes / routers. As you can see, Slashdot records all posts in U.S.A. EST.
For all of you who thinks the millennium begins on Jan 1, 2000, you're not being consistent with your logic. The 1st moment of the 1st year of the 1st millennium was 1/1/01 at midnight, yet you pretend that one year had already passed. To be consistent you need to do the same thing with the months. Therefore on Jan. 1st of this year one month had already passed and on Dec 1st 12 months had already passed. Therefore the new year began on Dec 1st -- except that you have to be consistent with the days too. November has 30 days and to be consistent with your logic those 30 days were over on Nov 30th at 12:00 a.m. Fortunately the hours and minutes and seconds start counting at zero so we don't have to move the millennium back even further. Therefore the new millennium began on the first instant of Nov 30, 1999. Did you remember to celebrate? BTW, if you think this whole argument is stupid then you know how the rest of us feel when you say that the millennium begins on Jan 1, 2000.
Hamanga boo tranti set hrangdenga!! Botcho! Botcho! Botcho! Teleqgnologie, byn fromage u hamma isa goote sanjwija! Hamatchau; lotenga u entebbie weir a njasti business { choto ue beft damangrateft-scsi baj GMT }. Eurma es adum hore; u melangiboleshi'. Es nebe yar abscrei, "Obucho Millennuym!!!!!!!!"
COBOL certainly isn't the only language with a problem, in this case - plenty of FORTRAN code uses dates, and formats the year as I2.2 - works great for 99, but (probably prints "**" when you shove a 100 in there. And in C the date logic can be made so obscure, there are plenty of things which can go wrong. also, i don't expect to be sitting in the dark when the new year begins, but i'd suggest everyone carefully check their jan electric/gas/water/etc. bills. that's where the problems are.
Boris Yeltsin has resigned. This can mean only one thing - someone told him that his rusting old electronics and valve-powered 'komputers' are not going to make the Y2K transition. Obviously he wants someone else to be in charge when the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles start to fly. (Hint - don't look at the white flash and stay as close as possible to a load-bearing wall in your house if you do not have a shelter!!
You left out a word in your first sentence. You meant: "Hey nitwit, *ARE* you an American or just born dumb?" He only left out one letter; you left out three. Furthermore, if you're going to put a comma after American, you have to repeat the subject and verb. So your sentence should have been : "Hey nitwit, are you an American, or were you just born dumb? Actually you HAVE to repeat the subject and verb since the verb is of a different tense. Your sentence actually is: "Hey nitwit, (are) you an American, or (are you) just born dumb?" You sound 10 times stupider than he did.
Programmers did not deliberately write their programs intending them to fail in the year 2000. Not having your program logic cover all potential situations is a logic bug. If I declare a DayOfTheMonth array to only hold a maximum of 30 values, then my program has a bug. It doesn't matter that I intentionally (and mistakenly) chose the array to only have a maximum of 30 values. It's still a bug!
Happy New Year from New Zealand! We're GMT+13 :-) cheers Stu
People keep saying that Christ was born in 3 B.C. according to our calendar. That is just an educated guess. NO ONE ACTUALLY KNOWS WHEN CHRIST WAS BORN!
The charm sealed gates of R'Lyeh have just opened and sleeping Cthulhu has awoken! Nyaaa! Shub-Niggurath!! Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Past, Present, Future. All are one in Yog-Sothoth.
From New Zealand at 00-00:52, Just wanted to Say: Party On, the world ain't dead yet... :-)
but what about the inode timestamps. int32_t di_mtime; This will me the hassle of filesystem conversions again.
We switched to the Gregorian calendar in approx 650 a.d ( or to be PC, CE ). The date chosen for the start of the calendar was based on the death of some Roman ( Pilot, I think ). It is now thought that Jesus was born in 7 B.C. So we've all missed the big Y2K ( or is that Y2k ).
Why should anything break? Its all taken care of already.
The rollover that will happen 2038 in the time() function is no problem at all if you use the damn thing correctly. gmtime() and localtime() can all be changed to know how to behave with stuff like 100 seconds when the time comes. Also, there are functions to work with time() returned seconds, like difftime() and so on. So as long as you do not use stuff like time0 - time1 directly in your system, all will be fine since newer unix releases can then just do a few changes in the time-functions and the problem is gone.
- Fabian Thylmann
Christ was born we know not when, but at least we haven't forgotten his name (like that other one known only by the Tetragrammaton)
Or Pitcairn??
Did you ever notice that you can expand the Tetragrammaton like this: YaH-WHo
What's a "milenium"?
You *admit* to using pico? Do you put little left and right labels on your shoes, too?
There can't be `millenial madness', because the word is `millennial'. Let me guess: you don't really know what the word means, right?
So much for leap seconds, eh?
No, that's only the ones who lie to make you think there's more. 2 to the 20th is a megabyte. Check with df.
What's that apostrophe in the title for?
We (the europeans of that time to be exact) used the roman julian calendar from 44 bc (709 after foundation of rome) or so until the seventh century when the christian julian calendar took over ... the gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582
There's no such thing as `two milleniums'. You've got at least one spelling mistake, and perhaps two.
Am I the only one who plans to celebrate the millennium by shooting his wad off at exactly midnight? I don't know whether I'll manage to get my girlfriend off in a simul-O, but I intend to try. And I sure won't miss it.
I'll have my Ruger P90 40 Caliber and 1000's rounds of ammo by my side for the next couple days. -jic-
The ANSI C standard defines: - long as 32 bit, on any machine. - int as the 'natural integer size' of the machine, hence 32 bits in a 32bit one, and 64 bits in a 64bit one. What M$ is doing is to also define the int type to be 32 bits even on 64bit machines.
There wasnt a year 0 because those medieval monks didnt know C yet, so they programmed in Cobol. Everyone knows that array indexes in Cobol start with 1 instead of 0. Just my $2
I was never any good at math for a reason very similiar to this. The question of is 0 1 or is 1 1 always plagued me and endlessly screwed up my calculations because more often than not I forgot and screwed up by 1. Why not just get rid of ZERO!!!
Hey Folks, I'm in the Ukraine on a sabbatical and we just lost water pressure. Don't know how widespread this is yet. Will post updates as more info is available. Eric Halmstead
Some things start at zero. Some things start at one. Deal with it.
For me it started 2 years ago. I had a credit card that expired in the year 2000. Every time I went into a store with an older POS system, the card would be declined and the clerk would have to call up for a telephone authorization. I remember it took almost 2 months before it quit happening.
In all actuality "We" don't. Alot of people do but that's not correct. At one point.. the collective "We" thought that the Earth was flat. Does that make the Earth flat? --No
Actually Power grids could come offline for a variety of reasons. For instance, Computers check for maintenence on machines. If they see 1900 instead of 2000 they'll take everything offline because they think nothing has been maintained for 100 years.
Im alive
No problem here, three of my mutual funds in my 401(k) went up an average of ~10000%. I like this new milenium! I can buy a house now! the link: http://quicken.excite.com/investments/quotes/?defv iew=FULL&symbol=PSIFX+PCVAX+TEMWX
Actually if one was born at the start of year one, then after year one completes they would be one year old. So if you wish you can state that the years started at year zero, but the first year that completed was year one. Perhaps if 01/01/2001 was restated as 2000 years and one day it would be clearer.
The CSC web site decided to skip Y2K. It now reports that it is Jan 1, 100. I guess that is one way of dealing with the issue (see http://www.csc.com/ :)
Why do people write about things that they nothing about? ANSI C doesn't define long as being any size and the only qualifing size definition goes something like this: sizeof(char) = sizeof(short) = sizeof(int) = sizeof(long) This lack of qualified size types is why they are introducing the inttypes.h header with types such as int32_t, uint16_t, ... As far as porting goes if you define long as 32 bits like NT did, you can make a lot of 3rd party (and likely internal, which is probably why they did it that way) porting work easier. For large peices of code this still is going to mean a good chung of porting work as people (unless they were particularily good coders ) are going to end up making bad assumptions, do pointer math with (int) and (long) casts and all sorts of other goodies. Having ported a large piece of code (millions of lines) to support both the NT64 and the UNIX64 models I speak with some experience. Peeter Joot
There was no 0 because the years were dated on a roman numeral based system. Any intelligent person knows there is no ZERO in roman numerals. This was because the romans had no concept of zero.
So, define the "First Millennium AD" to begin 1 Jan 1 BC. Thus, 1 Jan 2000 will be the first day of the Third Millennium.
But on 1st of January 1900, everyone pretty much agreed they were in the last year of the 19th century, apparently. So we still have to have pedantic arguments with our ancestors.
I run the NOC for a major american bank and I think that tomorrow night, right as I pull the power at midnight, just for grins, Im going to broadcast a giant galoomph over the NOC loudspeakers.
Thanks Hemos
You would be surprized. There are a number of systems at MCI in their revenue ops environments and with the older MCI Mail systems that were written with 3-digit date formats. From what I saw it looked like an early attempt (mid 80's) to code for the Y2K problems. Pretty stupid though, they had to port them all anyway.
Yes well if you want to follow the bible it's a year 2004 crisis we're going into.....
I found that I had to be quite intoxicated to kiss your SO too.
We don't count a one until something is finished. You're not a year old until you've been alive for a year, and 2000 years isn't finished until the start of 2001.
..Yawn. As far as things go, and it's been shown, Millenium Bugs (what a bad name for it) can really start kicking in anytime. I hardly think every computer does every calculation based on Here&Now. Calculations for the future are done, and theoretically, should have already encountered some zeros in the date.
So who cares? Whether it starts NOW, at midnight localtime [12:30 in Newfoundland (;] or at 00:00 UTC, it doesn't mean fsck all. If it happens, it happens. And all I've seen point to it not really happening.
And for a smile, see the newest UFIE here as they poke fun of the Y2K paranoid.
Thank you for your support.
A millennium that doesn't 'N'?
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
There's a very good World-Wide countdown clock at Time and Date (they also have a non-java version). The year 2000 starts in the Christmas Islands less than seven hours from the time of this posting.
:-)
For those who are sticklers for detail, they also have a countdown to the new millenium
----
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I have to get laid before the world ends, so I'm gonna try the old fasion way and if that dosen't work about 1 hour before the world ends what ever time it maybe I'll have to find a house of ill repute.
I guess I should probably just find a house of ill repute cause it'll take me quite a while in Fort Myers.
But since "Komedy" sounds like part of K-Office or something else that's going to be included in KDE-2, and this thread is about Y2K, not KDE, I hereby declare your post off-topic.
Unless, of course, the KDE crowd secretly plans to release something called Y2KDE Saturday, in which case your post is the only one here that is ON-topic, and I owe you a most abject apology. ;-)
- Robin
Frankly, this is one of the most concise summaries I've read on slasdot ot date. Bravo.
Godamnit Slashdot.
Can we *PLEASE* consider refraining from being totally Y2K smitten for the next 72 hours?
Shit. What happened to the "Y2K Pledge" that someone (Hemos?) posted a while back.
I am *so* sick of Y2K.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The other one I mentioned also was "fatal": it was (is, actually, because to my knowledge it has not yet been fixed) a project database that would say "internal database error" when one tried to enter a project with an end date in 2000.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
Some of it was written not more than 1 year ago (yes: 1 year, I too needed to sit down when I ran into that baby). Some of it dates back to the AT&T UNIX days, is present in all major UNIX vendors' distributions, and yet still turned out to be buggy. Don't believe it? Ask (for instance) HP about the Y2K-1 bug in unpatched SCCS versions that hit on January 1, 1999 at 00:00:00 (while I was watching it, no less).
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
The US Naval Observatory has some interesting stuff - including a decent discussion on the location of the "sunrise for the new millenium".
From http://astro.nmsu.edu/~lhuber/leaphist.html The Gregorian calendar is thus based on a cycle of 400 years, which comprises 146097 days. Since 146097 is evenly divisible by 7, the Gregorian civil calendar exactly repeats after 400 years. Dividing 146097 by 400 yields an average length of 365.2425 days per calendar year, which is a close approximation to the length of the tropical year. Comparison with Equation 1.1-1 reveals that the Gregorian calendar accumulates an error of one day in about 2500 years. Although various adjustments to the leap-year system have been proposed, none has been instituted.
----------------
Have you read my journal today?
...It happened to me last year. I had just received a nice shiny new ATM card from my bank. Everything was fine until I went travelling on business. Upon arrival, all the ATM machines that I tried told me that my card had expired(Exp. date: March '01). Upon return, my card worked as before. Subsequently, during another visit to the same customer, the ATMs(at least the first one I tried) worked properly.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
And the power's still on, my computer stayed up, and the modem stayed online.
(Yes, I have probably had the singularly dullest New Year's Eve 1999 of any living person between 5 and 50 who observes the Christian calendar)
a pin ewe ear to you all!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
People believe worse than that... ten years or so ago, in church, I overheard a woman stating seriously that computers are the Beast (of Revelation) because they use 9s and 6s to represent data. (666, get it?) Computers use 9s and 6s because a 6 is an upside down 9.
:-)
This is true, I swear I am not making this up. And I've yet to hear a clueless luser story that tops it
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
My university (in fact, the entire university system) is shutting down for fear of "hackers" (their term) not so much for the Y2K bug.
And I, like the pathetic slave I am, have to be in on Saturday just to post a "We're OK, the sky failed to fall" message to the web site.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Yes, but did your announcement email arrive in your mailbox at 4am on the 31st of December? (GMT+11)
Redhat just put out an update for sharutils.
Anyone else see any last minute updates?
Well from what I have seen most people dont have their clocks set right anyway. I figure just as much might happen next week as will happen at local midnight or 00:00 GMT or whatever.
Well, looks like we're all well prepared.
You can pat yourselves on the back and take those enormous paycheques home now..
Deleted
12-31-1999 00:00:00 :-)
That's Komedy.
Y2K is a scam.
;)
g htwouldhappen, I'd be happy to receive donations ;)
Sure there must have been problems in the banking/insurance/financial sector with the old Cobol code, but computers hasn't used the decimal numbers for keeping track of time since sometime in the late sixties. Y2K is an application-software-only problem, and it occurs mainly with either _very_ poorly written software or with software written in a language/environment that has the problem (Cobol).
All modern software (from early '70s and newer) uses other ways to keep track on the time (eg. seconds from 1.jan 1970), it's almost entirely written in C, and it will not have a problem. (Even software written in other languages have the language compilers/environments written in C, and therefore doesn't have the problem either).
So why were there BIOS updates out ? Well if enough customers believe there is a problem, the manufacturers better do _something_ (eg. flip a few bits, insert a nop here and there) to give the customer the impression that a problem present was fixed. Marketing and crowd-of-lemmings stuff.
I would be willing to bet a beer with anyone on this. However, there is the _slight_ chance * consequence equation that makes me sort of reluctant to bet with all of slashdot, despite the incredible amount of beer I would receive. (This is a small country, I wonder if it would sink in the ocean once I won
My 1996-BIOS dual PPro keeps on running with it's vintage BIOS until it gets replaced in a few years, or until the apocalypse caused by the aforementioned crows of lemmings makes computers a little concern.
Happy new year !
(Oh, and if anyone has stocked up a few too many of those cal. 50 with IR scope and they figure they won't need them for looting/rioting/protection/whateverthehellyouthou
Countdown to the Millennium
A "zeroth year in the reign of the current Emperor" is obvious nonsense.
I could never understand this argument. How could anybody claim to have an intuative understanding of something which was decided upon two thousand years ago?
Is this 1999, or the one thousand, nine hundred and ninty-ninth year?
From my limited resources, the current calendar is set upon the birth of Christ. This was calculated in approximately 70AD by counting backwards on the Roman calendar. This and the calculation was later found to be incorrect, neglecting the reign of a particular emperor thus pushing the birth of Christ back to around 4BC.
Regardless, to counter a frankly silly argument that it is "obvious" that there was no zero; was Jesus, an infant like any other, ever zero years old?
Yes!, but nobody in the modern world would call him "Zero years old", they might say it is his first year of life, but most would say he is "minutes old", or "months old" or whatever.
Who's to know what was being thought of 70AD as to when or if there was a zero. Nobody I know of has stepped forward and claimed to have documentation to say that that monk fellow intended the birth of Christ to fall on zero or one. Though I'm sure somebody does have this information. I don't care enough to find out. Saying the new millenium starts in 2001 is saying that Jesus was one year old in year two and that by all modern numbering conventions, this is the one thousand nine hundred and ninty-ninth year, or... year number 1998.
Right or wrong, I don't really care all that much, but it is not "obvious" nor is it "nonsense." Pointless perhaps... but not nonsense.
Y2K will begin on January 1, 1900!
Bruce Perens.
I like "Zulu" better anyway.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I heard the rumblings of fireworks 20kms away, I guess it must be January
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Pick any date line. Next one around here is the Western Australian Border :)
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Who cares? Every organisation worth a damn has people on call for days after the rollover. I don't believe anything serious is going to happen in countries like Australia, the UK and the US. If it does, well, I welcome the oncoming of our new insect overlords.
Factoring GMT into the equation just gives me an extra moment to watch for this nothing to happen.
I'm on call for the whole thing - I won't be paged, it'll be a cruisy night.
I'm just concerned with stocking up on alcohol and pre-booking my stomach pumping.
I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
Because back in year 0, people did'nt even know 0 existed! That's right! They had no idea! It's a bit like, until someone discovered oxygen, people could'nt breath! All hail Lavoisier! /millenn?ium/ must start in 2010!
Now, you may ask, did people in year 10 knew they were in year 10? No, they did'nt! So the
But wait, did people in 863 knew they were in 863? Damn it, probably not, either!
Fuck, that's really much more complicated than I thought!
What would that be in Star-Date?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I work at a Municipal Utility / Cable Modem ISP. What the Power Side of the operation (and the entire MAPP / Midwest Area Power Pool - Canada to Misouri) fears is either people will use too much electricty or not enough. The generators that are part of a power pool can only generate as much electricty as is being consumed. When you turn a light on, a generator somewhere produces a little more electricty.
:)
Now, the problem with this is:
At midnight, everyone turns every single electrical appliance on. Since it can take up to 8 hours for a plant to come fully online (and most are not black start plants and require external power to start), there would be a delay in the production of power, lines would trip, and the power pool would turn into a bunch of islands with many people without power.
Or, nobody does anything and the grid continues to be underused.
And what do you think people will do when midnight hits? Some of the lamer ones will be grabbing their telephones to see if they work. Not every telephone in the nation was meant to be offhook at the same time. So, everyone pickup a phone at midnight
Joseph W. Breu
Y2K will arrive in two ways -
1. The old way.
You bet Y2K will arrives the old way, by having a countdown [ Five, Four, Three, Two, One
2. The [uh-oh!] way.
Y2K has already announced itself to the world, UK's recent fiasco is but one example. Many more not-that-Y2k-compliance systems will give [some of] us the once-in-a-thousand-year fits, for the next 24 hours, or so.
No matter which way you end up with, welcome to the year 2000, and I wish you a Happy New Year !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I've been having fun teasing the tards with this one:
In order to prevent problems with the Y2K bug, the Internet will
be turned off from 11:55 AM 31 Dec GMT, which is just before Midnight
at the International dateline, until 11:05 AM 1 Jan GMT, when the last
time zone changes date. The Internet Engineering Task Force considered
just turning off the net for 10 minute intervals each hour, but decided
that bringing the net up and down 23 times would cause more problems.
The day of downtime will have the added benefit of allowing major
Internet Providers to upgrade equipment and software with a minimum
disruption of Service.
As the ball drops in New York's Times Square, as millions of people count down the last seconds, the instant all the digits flip over to 2000...
...A big sign lights up, reading EXTRA BALL!
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
If you are a Cobol programmer and you have not made enough money to retire yet.
You are an idiot and deserve what you get.
Minne-snow-da: Winter is comming...
Since it's now pretty much accepted practice the consider the millenium as starting a year early, I recommend we start the year 2000 a day early. So now the millenium starts at midnight on the 30th. Hmm, on second thought, it should be 10:59 on the 30th, wherever you happen to be.
As for bugs, we don't need to select an exact time. Computers and programs have been failing in various ways for years because of date errors involving the year 2000, and they'll continue to fail for years to come.
What really scares me is that, although we'll make it through 2000 OK, the world really WILL come to an end when we have the same problem in 2100 (after all, it's not a millenium bug, it's a century bug.) In 2100, we'll be vastly more reliant on computers than we are today, and people are STILL writing code that won't cross a century correctly. One of my co-workers (a programmer) told me just yesterday that he'll be glad when the year 2000 is past so we can go back to 2-digit years in our programs for another 1000 years. I don't think I'll be inviting that guy to work on any of our more critical projects...
That should be the headline. =)
I'm fairly convinced that there will be some problems, and that not everything is y2k compliant, but at this time tomorrow (5:10 pm tomorrow, PST) I'm also pretty sure that all the systems i manage, both at work and at home will still be clicking along happily, even though they're clocks are based on GMT. At this time on Saturday, I'll be going to the office to feed my fish, and maybe change the backup tapes. Monday I'll be buried in the usual boring e-mail again.
I was somewhat pissed to notice that the cost of premium gasoline seems to have gone up by 10 cents a gallon in the last few days in my neighborhood, though. oh, well...
I used to think printing on on Unix sucked. Then I figured it out. Printing on Unix *does* suck. Like a Kirby.
I'm in Auckland, New Zealand, where the current time is GMT+13. It's almost 6pm local time, and I'm just trying to psych myself up for the New Year's party that's due shortly.
IDG NZ have set up a nice Y2k news site. Also, according to Dave Winer has commented that Dave Gilmore (spelling, URL) has prepared 2 columns, depending on whether or not we have local power.
I'm currently more worried about the beer supplies holding up until the shops re-open on Sunday. Donations of Heineken gratefully accepted
... and today's pet project has
Perl starts indexing at zero, but that's configurable IIRC...
It took me a second.
I must be getting pathetic in my old age..
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
A number of operating systems (including Linux - at least on 64-bit systems) use 64-bit integers for time, making them Y(ManyGB) compliant!
So there!
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Those are the two most likely errors IMO to be missed in testing. 19K because the people looking at them thought, "4-digit year, that is OK", and 100 vs 00 because until now it has always been easiest to look for a 2-digit year and produce a year that will go from 2 to 3 digits...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Unless, of course, the KDE crowd secretly plans to release something called Y2KDE Saturday, in which caseyour post is the only one here that is ON-topic, and I owe you a most abject apology. ;-)
:-)
Well a good chunk of the KDE crowd is in Germany, and Germany's abbreviation is DE, so the time that midnight arrives for them is by definition Y2K DE.
I think you owe an apology.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
That is the common decision, and then they make a new type named something like long-long which is 64 bit.
Why?
Because there is too much code out there that does stupid things like walks an array or malloc()ing data knowing that a long is 4 bytes, or talks over a network, sending longs out in protocols that have to interoperate with 32-bit machines.
The resulting porting nightmare is so bad that effort is taken to protect the average program from knowing that you are in a 64-bit environment.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
C, and hence languages derived from it like Perl, gets the year from a struct that really contains the year minus 1900. Therefore about half of the 2-digit year formats out there will be 3 digits next year.
Cheers,
Ben Tilly
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Then I went searching.
It looks like you are right. NT is good for a few centuries, VMS for a few tens of thousands of years...
Unix of (AFAICT) all flavors, 32-bit or 64-bit, dies in 2038. (Despite many uninformed comments the the contrary.)
*sigh*
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Just today we shipped some files with cashflow calculations that settle a few days from now - in Y2K - and they were rejected as "old files" because the file-name went from 99 to 00.
Most of Y2K is small stuff like that. Stuff you won't hear about, but which people have to stay on top of.
But - big but - there will be some bigger things. For instance a friend of mine who works in Troy, Michigan has an inte resting story about the traffic lights...
Cheers,
Ben
PS and OT: That discussion software is kind of impressive. They produce - completely dynamically - over a million pages/day with over 20K posts. Yet their pages are pretty much always *very* fast. Their secret? Smalltalk and the knowledge that threaded software is not a good problem for a relational database. Oh, and yes, they run on Linux.
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Banks ran into this a long time ago, to print out mortgage payment tables. Credit card expiration dates past 12/1999 caused many a hurried upgrade several years ago. I'm sure insurance companies, pension plans, etc, all had their little moments of enlightenment.
--
Infuriate left and right
"While we're discussing airlines, many airlines are cancelling up to half of their flights on New Years Eve"
... This has to do with business, not avionics.
... Because many passengers cancelled their tickets
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
You serious?
Since we're dealing with binary numbers,
a K is supposed to represent a kilobyte,
or 2^10 or 1024
so 2K == 2048
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"The use of "kilo-" to indicate multiplication by 1024 is a corruption of the term. "
Well, we probably would have liked to have computers represent decimal numbers internally as decimal, but it just didn't happen that way since
we have to deal with a binary machine.
Early geeks said "kilobyte" Correct or not, the
word made it to marketing and documentation circles.
Oh well.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
2^10 or 1024
Wrong. 2^10==8.
I had to go check. Because I realize I can make mistakes like that. You had me worried.
$ perl -e 'print 2^10';
8
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Okay, in some expressions, ^ means XOR.
In context, you should have understood I
meant "to the power."
You are a troll for attempting to make me look
like more of a moron than I am. I kiss you.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Oh, and for the record, midnight local time I plan on being intoxicated, kissing my SO, out of pager range and not worrying about any such thing.
Y2K bug has already hit for some systems -- systems with a need for near-term future dates.
I think we'll see some stuff starting 12 hours before midnight GMT (4am PST) out in the pacific, and some stuff sweeping, hour by hour across the planet, with a spike at midnight GMT due to stuff all over the planet running on GMT and then further stuff happening on the hour as local midnight wanders past more locations...
We'll also see some issues that don't come up until Monday morning when people go to work... Maybe some stuff on March 1 for code that doesn't handle that leap year correctly...
Overall, though, it's likely to just be minor glitches -- rural and third world power outages, but no (or few) major metropolitan areas without power; small airports with problems, but the international airports will be fine... etc. (there's also the terrorists and script-kiddies to worry about, who'll do it whenever they feel like it, likely midnight local time.)
This was posted in the etoys thread (but was off-topic there)
0 0.shtml
http://www.cbs.com/now/story/0,1597,144162-311,
Actually, the replacement term for GMT is UTC.
It's not a french acronym, but rather the product of an inability to agree on an acronym. (French wanted CUT, English/US wanted UCT, or something like that.)
These time-related answers and more can be found at http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/faq.html
(Though that server appears to be down for the time being.)
LoppEar
Ok, I think this arguement is one of it's own but it rather belongs around here somewhere...
See, when you start counting, you start at 0. The first year (or whatever) isn't over til you hit 1. Seems pretty clear to me that a millenium starts at 0. Year 0 to year 999, year 1000 to 1999, etc etc.
Life starts when you are born, not when you turn 1, right?
- 8Complex
We didn't really start counting years til far, FAR after "A.D." started (I don't know history here) but we could take into account two things...
1 - The person(s) didn't know what the hell year it was since noone can put a set date.
and 2 - The person(s) who set the date were religious and set the date upon the death of Jesus (no offense other religions, catholic or christian is all I know in the religion field).
Taking this into account, I think I'm ready to just denounce the entire year counting system and become a free-floater in time and life... I shall team up with the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the major Pokemon characters (cause the smaller ones have to be the losers) to battle evil into the next millennium. No not your millennium!! Mine - which in my book will start in 3 weeks and 4 days and will last for approxmitely 3 months of 43 days each... not including Thursday which will have 12 days.
Join me in my new religion and we shall battle our way through the millenniums together!!
- 8Complex
The frogs^H^H^H^H^HInternational Earth Rotation Service (IERS) controls UTC.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If I was going to rob a bank, this would be the time to do it. Assuming that the police would be tied up with other problems.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Off topic I know, but I thought it was particularly amusing.
excerpt from this CNN article:
:-)
(CNN) -- Fire erupted in the sky over Auckland at the stroke of midnight, ushering in the Year 2000 over the New Zealand's largest city, the world's first major metropolitan area to see the new year
Looking at the posting time:
December 31, 1999
Web posted at: 5:22 a.m. EST (1022 GMT)
Excuse me? First Time zone to hit Y2K is GMT +12. (according to CNN's own T ime-zone displayer) That makes it 22:22 (10:22pm) in that zone at the time this article was posted.
And I thought journalism was about reporting events, not making them up. Well.. Welcome to 1984^WY2K
----------
'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
----------
'We have no choice in what we are. Yet what are we,
but the sum of our choices.' --Rob Grant
The head of the FAA is doing a publicity stunt to demonstrate her faith in the Y2K rollover -- flying into San Francisco at 7 minutes past midnight. However, given that air-traffic control systems operate on GMT, what does it say about her "faith" in landing 8 hours after the critical time? (It sure leaves her plenty of time not to board that plane, "just in case"...)
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
times like these make me happy i play a accoustic instrument ;). Well and that i have a loaded .22 and MREs in the basement ;). i think y2k is gonna be funny, i mean who in his right mind would fly then, i mean at jan 1 2000 0:00? people are gonna be too busy having sex and drinking to worry about the power being off. /.: who's scared of rioting?
Seriously, does anyone think there is gonna be any rioting? i mean ive been in LA durring a power outage over the whole west, scared me shitless without the rioting. thats what scares me not the power plant explosions or planes crashing, but a man coming in through the window to steal anything that works without electricity.
there it is, question to
"Are you satisfied with fucking?" - Dave Matthews from "Halloween"
Should have been clearer - article said "Most large, critical systems run on GMT. Air Traffic Control and most military systems certainly do."
:)
Well, they don't. Because variable length seconds suck, and that's precisely what you get with GMT that is based on the solar day. As for my computer, frankly I don't give a damn - must be at least a couple of minutes off now
-W
GMT? Surely you mean UTC?
GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) is inadequately defined by the erratic motion of the Earth whose rate fluctuates by a few thousandths of a second a day as it wobbles along its axis and around the sun. This leads to the undesirable side effect of having variable length seconds, since all days are defined to have 24 hours of 60 minutes with 60 seconds each, but the length of the day varies.
UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) was devised and became effective on 1972/01/01 to remedy exactly this problem. UTC normally runs at the rate of cesium-beam atomic clocks, and when the difference between UTC and GMT approaches one second, a leap second is introduced to maintain synchronization.
Hence, nobody really uses GMT.
-W
Y2K already in New Zealand ... and lights, internet etc. going without even a flicker at midnight here (Invercargill).
Happy New Year!
...when does Y2K end?
InitZero
Yeah, well, given the fact that you managed to knock one of your major cities off the power grid last year without help of a major computer bug, i think the world wants to watch the most prepared country, not the one first made to deal with y2k. - trust me, if there are major problems in australia, the rest of the world should panic.
Anyway, back OT, i think we'll see the minor problems at local time zones, and any major ones (if there are any) at UTC/GMT
-CP
So, you've got an O:Line? That dont impress me much du du da du.
it's grey in Auckland, and it was raining, but it doesn't surprise me, heck it's Auckland. The Chatham Islands looked wonderful yesterday (on the TV). They get the first rays tomorrow morning. Oh well, 9 hours to go...
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
but I hate summer anyway. I never usually take much notice of the weather and weather focasts, but sure would have been nice to have spring weather for the new year. I hate summer weather anyway.
Back some what on topic, apparently NZ will change into the new millenium one and a half hours early than NZST. One hour is accounted for because we are in daylight savings time, and the other half hour, as my father was just telling me has something to do with WWII. I didn't understand...more like I wasn't quite listening, I was playing AOEII, but I think that half hour is a load of bollocks, so ignore.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
Y2K isn't the major problem with C software. It's the year 2038. On about January 18, 2038, C's 32-bit time wraps around if the time is encoded as a signed long, and sizeof(long) is 32 bits.
This will affect many date-related calculations in C software. It's not confined to Unix, Linux or any other similar systems, as I have found such software problems in software running on DOS platforms during date compliance testing that included Y2K compliance.
Yes, it means we're all going to go through a situation similar to Y2K all over again leading up to 2038. Nowhere near as bad, of course, but if nothing is done about it, there will be an impact. (Especially if Linux takes over the world!)
An amusing note: 2038 is Unix's Y2K, with the dates starting from 1970. DOS counts dates from 1980, so there could potentially be a Y2K problem on DOS software in 2048 (= 2K).
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
to the first person I hear that says:
"Jesus is coming, Look busy!!!"
Wp 5.1 claims that is is 01/01/:0 today :)
I've been arguing for a while that one of the biggest problem dates is last Jan 1. (I'd say midnight GMT on that day, just for silly's sake) That's when any software that looks ahead and schedules things would have died (or did die?)
-Chris
Will I be standing in two milleniums if I stand right over the GMT line?
You are such a stupid shit, everyone with my intellect knows the Millennium starts next year.
;-)
A millennium is defined to be one thousand years. It says nothing about which thousand years. The issue is that, if you start counting from the first day of January, year 1, AD, you will not reach 2000 years until 1 Jan 2001.
But, consider: All dates are arbitrary creations of mankind, and the turning point between 31 Dec 1 BC and 1 Jan 1 AD is particularly arbitrary.
So, define the "First Millennium AD" to begin 1 Jan 1 BC. Thus, 1 Jan 2000 will be the first day of the Third Millennium. Problem solved, and we can use dramatic words to describe the dramatic numbers.
Or, so I rationalize it.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
A frighteningly small number of Americans know what the K means. On The Chris Rock show they asked a bunch of people what Y2K stood for and hardly anyone came close. My favorite wrong answer was "You To Know". My neighbors in the ghetto mostly call it "Y2G". Me? I just call it, "That one friday when I got so drunk I couldn't see."
-ODB Jr.
Y2k officially begins when you start to see all the lights go out.
Your "standard" time method does not produce any year information, which is what the original poster was talking about.
It's very tricky to get the year from a time_t without converting it to a struct tm. Theoretically possible to write a mktime() clone, but it's not worth the effort.
So what's your point? That the Unix standard for dates is totally incomprehensible to humans?
Is the fact that January 1st is the birthday of Satyendranath Bose, of Boson and Bose-Einstein Condensate fame, a big improtant guy in Quantum Mechanics. It is a little known fact that on his birthday, all Bosons (one type of elementary particle) will convert into Fermions (the other type). Thus causing the universe to collapse. This phenomenom is known as the B2F bug.
Ok, so everything execpt for the conversion thing is true, IT'S A JOKE :-)
A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Actually, the first computers used decimal notation for internal representation. Engineers had to go through terrible headaches to accomplish until someone bright enough figured out that it would be a lot easier to do it binary. Until then representations of numbers than the decimal system had been a quite obscure backwater of mathematics.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
This fiscal year thing you mention may apply to your country, but there are a few countries out there which do have fiscal years in sync with the normal calendar.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
I think the main point that most people are missing here is that we really just need to get stinking drunk tonight.
I had heard that the problems were that the machines were programmed to look at 2 days at once and couldn't deal with it. They expect the problem to go away after the New Year when they can again look at only one date. Course this was mainstream media I got my info from so take it for what it's worth.
now that's funny.
GMT is ahead of US time, so it won't help much in keeping people in suspense on new year's day.
I work for the local ABC station, ABC19 WKPT, and of course ABC is running their 24-hour 'millennium' celebration. We are cutting in for live local news at: 6:18pm | 7:30pm | 11:00pm all local time. However, the news director (not me, the head of the newsroom) has mandated that someone has to be there at 12am just incase ABC network programming cuts out (even though the celebration is all over the world, it's all going through one satellite to get to your home). I think it's absurd, but you never know what could happen.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
Let's have some fun splitting these hairs in real tiny pieces.
There are several standards used for keeping track of time. The most important, by far, is Universal Time Coordinated (UTC), sometime known as GMT (Greenwhich Mean Time). This is the standard time for Earth, and it is with respect to this time that local time is defined (offset by a certain number of seconds, generally a multiple of 3600, i.e. an integer number of hours).
UTC does not flow linearly. That is, the interval between time t1 UTC and time t2 UTC is not always t2-t1. This is because leap seconds get inserted occasionally in UTC, so as to keep it more or less synchronized with the sun. More precisely: there are 86400 SI seconds in an SI day; but the mean solar day is approximately 2 milliseconds longer, because the Earth's rotational period is getting longer (the Earth is slowing down) at an order of magnitude of 1 millisecond per day per century. Terrestrial Time (sometime called Ephemeris Time) is the astronomical time: it is currently 0.184 seconds (roughly) fast of UTC. And UTC will be corrected so as to always keep it to within 0.9 seconds of TT (i.e. the sun should always be overhead on Greenwhich meridian to within 0.9 seconds at noon UTC).
Adding a leap second can take place after December 31 or June 31 (or possibly also March 31 or September 31, but that has never occurred), in the following form: after 23:59:59UTC comes 23:59:60UTC and after that comes 00:00:00UTC. The last leap second happened after December 31, 1998, and there will be no leap second after December 31, 1999 (today). It is the International Earth Rotation Service that is in charge of deciding when a leap second should be inserted. (Theoretically, a second can also be substracted, but that has never happened and presumably never will.)
The other important time standard is the Temps Atomique International (this is in French because the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures is in Sèvres, France), TAI for short. Contrary to UTC, TAI is a linear time scale (to the best of the precision we can achieve, that is, i.e. to within a few dozens of nanoseconds per year). TAI ticks one second every SI second, and it is maintained by averaging over about 50 atomic clocks around the world (there is no Master clock for TAI); the calculated offsets of the atomic clocks wrt TAI can be found in this FTP directory.
The Temps Atomique International and the Universal Time Coordinated are offset one to the other by an integer number of SI seconds (since 1972). This offset increases by one every time a leap second is inserted in UTC. Currently (since January 1, 1999 and at least to June 31, 2000) TAI is 32 seconds fast of UTC (so by the time UTC reaches January 1, 2000, 00:00:00, TAI will read January 1, 2000, 00:00:32).
So TAI will say Y2k precisely 32 seconds before UTC says so. (There is also GPS time, which is exactly 19 seconds back of TAI, but never mind that one. And, of course, there is Terrestrial Time, which nearly coincides with UTC, but not by a round number.)
Now, which of these times should be used on computers? Well, if you look in the /usr/share/zoneinfo/ directory of a GNU system, you will notice that there is a right/ subdirectory which contains nearly identical zone info files. The difference is this: the zone info files in the right/ directory account for leap seconds, whereas the ones outside this directory do not. Thus, if your /etc/localtime points to a right/ time zone, exactly 32 seconds will be substracted from your system clock before it is corrected by the time zone offset.
System time should be a linear time. If clocks were precise enough, it would be inadmissible to skew the clock by as much as one second (even by diluting the effect over a certain period). Thus, system time should be put to TAI (and not to UTC, let alone local time). This is why the right/ time zones are there: if you set your system clock to TAI and set your /etc/localtime to point to a right/ time zone, then your local time (as returned by the localtime() library function call) will be offset to UTC, as it should.
On the other hand, the POSIX standard (see POSIX.1, Annex B, 2.2.2) specifies that the time() system call should measure the difference between the current UTC time and the UTC time of the Epoch (January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00UTC). This is most unfortunate, because a difference of UTC times is not a number of seconds elapsed. And it is especially unfortunate since the rules for computing UTC from TAI were rather complicated before January 1, 1972 (at which time UTC was resynchronized to TAI-10s). Thus, the Unix Epoch, though it is January 1, 1970 at 00:00:00UTC, is actually January 1, 1970 at 00:00:08.000082TAI, and although on January 1, 2000 at 00:00:00UTC (January 1, 2000 at 00:00:32TAI) exactly 946684823.999918 seconds (as measured with respect to TAI) will have elapsed since the Unix Epoch, the time() function will return 946684800.
This being so, either the POSIX standard is mad, or the right/ timezones are wrong. I would tend to say that POSIX is crazy, and that system clocks should measure TAI and leave out the leap seconds. But since system clocks are synchronized by NTP, and since NTP gives UTC (while skewing the system clock to somehow jam in the leap seconds), the POSIX standard is followed de facto. (As a compromise, I would suggest moving the Epoch back in time by 82 microseconds to avoid these funky non-integer figures.)
If I recall correctly, VMS measures time using the Modified Julian Date. This is also synchronized with UTC. January 1, 2000 will be julian day 2451544.5, so MJD 51544.
To summarize, I say that Y2k is when the Unix time() function returns 946684800, which is exactly 946684823.999918 second of atomic time after the Unix Epoch.
Another stupid bit of trivia: according to ISO (the ISO8601:1988 standard), Y2k doesn't start until the first monday of the year, i.e. January 3, 2000. As for January 1, 2000, it is still ``day 6 of week 52 of 1999''. See your local emacs for information on what this day is in various other calendars.
Ok here's what it boils down to:
Calendars are arbitrary.
Someone a long time ago said "January 1st is....hmmm let me see.....here.
So it doesn't really matter. I for one will celebrate when the epoch seconds roll over to 10000000000 (which just happens to be Sat Sep 8 21:46:40 2001 for all you people still stuck in the dark ages.) and again when it hits 2000000000(Tue May 17 23:33:20 2033)
-- Segmentaion Fault (core dumped)
http://cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/at2000/stories/midnig hts/
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Actually, a true geek should refer to it as Y2K-48. I liked the geektoon about this so much that I included it as a question on my computer architecture final.
Y2K issues have already walloped Microsoft, at least according to the fine folks at memepool who snagged this screenshot. ;-)
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Well it's now 00:07 1/1/2000 local time in New Zealand. The power is still on, the water still flows, and the Internet still works. My supported *nix boxes havent crashed, nor has my Windoze98 PC either for that matter. The fireworks are loud and impressive, and the parties are swinging, provided you arent working :-(
Someone needs to give Rob a map showing the bloody international date line. NZ will be 2 hours into Y2K before Sydney, Australia even thinks about it. And some 18 hours before the West Coast of the US. So us suckers get to test all the vendors Y2K ready systems.... Tell you about it in 8 hours time.
Okay.. and i suppose you're going to go around beating people if they don't use the new system? Because you Do of course realize nobody who isn't paid to do so will.. people shorten KB to K and MB to M as it is, you think they're going to accept Another letter?
Not even to mention all the people who have trouble enough as it is with computer terms.. I can't count how many times i've had to correct my parents when they screw up megabytes and gigabytes.
Even beyond all that, who *wants* to say "Kibobyte" or "Gibabyte"? I mean come on, they just sound stupid. I know you're thinking "well, how it sounds doesnt matter" but no geek is going to go around saying "kibobyte".. we get enough flak for talking about computers as it is.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
There's absolutely no excuse for that nonsense, and you are doing your students a gross disservice.
"kilo-" means "multiply by 1000" *only*. This isn't just a convention, IIRC it's the legal definition in essentially all nations under their respective "standards and measures" law. (This is how the US gets NIST and ANSI, Germany gets DIN, etc., and they all get together for ISO)
The use of "kilo-" to indicate multiplication by 1024 is a corruption of the term. It is currently tolerated in areas which are unambiguously computer related (e.g., before "byte" or "baud"), but it is legally risky and is most emphatically *not* correct before existing units such as "year". Or did you think that hard disks are sold in units of million-fold "mega-" and billion-fold "giga-" simply for the slightly inflated values?
To avoid the confusion caused by your former students attempting to refine legally defined terms there's been some discussion of introducing several new prefixes to indicate powers of two, but there's some resistance. IIRC, the abbreviations will be similar to the existing abbreviations but include a "b", e.g.,
kbb - kibobits - 1024 bits
kbB - kibobytes
Mbb - (meba?)bits - 2^20 bits
MbB
GbB - (giba?)
TbB - (teba?)
and so forth.
I thought that this proposal was an overreaction, but after seeing several people insisting that "kilo-" always refers to 1024-fold multiplication I have changed my mind.
(rant off)
That said, I agree that interpreting "Y2K" as 2048 AD is good for a quick laugh, but *only* for a laugh. It has absolutely no place on a "computer architecture final" other than a forepage intended to break the tension.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Obviously the correct answer is local time. That's when all of the techie wannabes will be sitting at home watching their home system (Windows, natch) tick over to 00:00 01-01-;0 panting to see the first Y2K bug. (Of course, since they're wannabes they won't know that only problem they're likely to see at exactly midnight is in the RTC - both Windows and Linux only use the RTC to initialize a software clock during boot-up.)
Few people will notice that the power, TV, etc., fails to go off at midnight UTC. Even if there is a big "oomph," recent newspaper and TV reports make me doubt that the reporters will understand the situation well enough to explain it everyone else. The recent snafu with British credit card processing is a prime example. (CNN, I think, described the problem as being due to the clock being set ahead to 2000 for no discernable reason.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I just have to include a link:
www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
It's funny. Read it.
Unfortunately, I can't resolve the domain right now for some reason. Hope you have better luck.
That it's very in the interest of Air Traffic control (in the US) to be Y2K compliant. I think the same goes for the military.
While we're discussing airlines, many airlines are cancelling up to half of their flights on New Years Eve Day...
-Warren
But the Y2K charlatans and Henny Pennys win either way:
If all hell breaks loose: "We told you so."
If all is well: "Thank goodness we warned everyone and acted in time."
Nice work if you can get it.
You never hear anyone talk about that. What if at midnight we all drop dead or even worse wake up as unfertilized eggs because our bodies think it's 1900?
Rest assured, I'm sure some die-hard /.'er "First Post" d00d will be out there on the Kiribati Islands hitting reload every few seconds on his satelite connected laptop so that his "First Post of The Millenium" will go down in /. lowest moderation history.
I would bet on 00:00 GMT (or UCT for the more pedantic). However, I wouldn't be suprised if we see some systems crap out at local midnight. Already there was a hiccup in the UK with bank cards being denied because of date math being off. Certainly not ATC or process control logic but just as bad for those afflicted.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey all,
;)
Well, technically it's today the 31st right now in pretty England, although it is 2:30 in the morning... ahh, to have Slashdot when you can't sleep
Anyway, after careful negotiation regarding tonights parties and drinking plans, one of my friends has convinced me to start at six o'clock... because that gives us half an hour drinking time before the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles arrive from Australia where because of the Y2K bug they've been set off...
Which is nice.
OK, Y2K aside, how about the big one when the Unix timestamp runs out of bits ?
Not worried about morning ones... 6 pm is the time he's predicted me.
However, the problem is that I am quite happy to start my drinking at nine o' clock in the morning, so either way I'm agreeable.
Is there a link anywhere that says when the New Year hits in different major cities across the world? One that is set for an American zone, but lists the cities, for instance like Greenwhich at 7 PM Eastern. Or heck, just for starters, at what time in Eastren time does Y2K FIRST start over in the Pacific?
What a slappy spanker...
aDK
ARRGGGH...you are forgetting aboot Perl, how could you? After all, it is postmodern.
.{redmist}.
-------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------
As the famed event rapidly approaches, I am finding that this is the best place to track. I have been diligently searching the web for 'up to the minute' events or countdown timers only to find the normal litter and smog that has populated the internet. Perhaps anyone have some useful links for us as I am sure we are all going to get our /. fix anyway (fingers crossed).
If this isn't appropriate, I don't know what is:
Significant Events of the Millennium
1 January 1000 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the second Millennium.
1 January 1001 Pedants celebrate the beginning of the second Millennium.
1 January 1100 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the twelfth century.
1 January 1101 Pedants celebrate the beginning of the twelfth century.
1 January 1200 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the thirteenth century.
1 January 1201 Pedants celebrate the beginning of the thirteenth century.
1 January 1300 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the fourteenth century.
1 January 1301 Pedants celebrate the beginning of the fourteenth century.
10 June 1381 The Pedants' Revolt reaches London. (Not the Pedants' Revolt, the Peasants' Revolt. (sgd.) A Pedant. And kindly close the brackets.) (Thank you.)
1 January 1400 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the fifteenth century.
1 January 1401 Pedants celebrate the beginning of the fifteenth century.
1 January 1500 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the sixteenth century.
1 January 1501 Pedants celebrate the beginning of the sixteenth century.
1 January 1600 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the seventeenth century.
1 January 1601 People begin to get really fed up with pedants.
1 January 1700 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the eighteenth century.
1 January 1701 A few pedants begin to notice that pedants tend not to have very good celebrations.
1 January 1800 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the nineteenth century. A splinter group of ex-pedants turn up and get very drunk.
1 January 1801 The rest of the pedants celebrate the beginning of the nineteenth century.
1 January 1900 Almost everyone celebrates the beginning of the twentieth century. No pedants allowed.
1 January 1901 Pedants hold a Morris dancing festival.
24 November 1996 The Digital Village web site goes online: the third Millennium starts early and catches everybody by surprise.
1 January 2000 Anybody who even mentions the Millennium gets garrotted.
1 January 2001 Massacre of the Pedants.
--GnrcMan--
I for one am of the opiniong that with the exception of a few hard heads out there with some very esoteric hardware / software combinations everything is gonna roll over fine. There was some reports on the news about people getting fucked up electric bills here in the states already with the dat 1900 on them (When referring to billing changes next year) and they are already whining about that.
The biggest threat is going to be from lunatics who are going to assume that bank alarms etc. won't work and go out and act like juvenile delinquents on halloween. It is for this reason that I am staying home, and surfing on my fat ass ADSL. To hell with y-2-fucking-k and to hell with y-2-fucking-morons.
Just my two cents
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin
I'd rather go with swatch's Beats
=1000101
The person(s) who set the date were religious and set the date upon the death of Jesus
I'm sorry but I have to be nitpicky here. Even though I don't put much stock in it I have 10 years of religious education, and I hate gross inaccuracies.
The Gregorian calendar was set on the BIRTH date of Christ. Hence BC is Before Christ, and AD is Anno Domini, which means "in the year of our lord."
This, of course, is still inaccurate due to that fact that they miscalculated the date by 4 years.
TC
I think (assuming that there are problems... which I don't believe will happen)... that it would have to be a giant galoomph followed by more, less-major problems.
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
Since I've resisted "every yes it is the millennium, no it isn't" thread so far, I figure it's time to post my opinion. Look at it this way:
We refer to the last decade as 1990 -1999
We refer to the last century as 1900 -1999
So why shouldn't we refer to the last Millennium as 1000 -1999?
1:30am in Tokyo and all is well.
Except, of course, for the giant lizard staring into my Shinjuku apartment.
According to this article in the Boston Globe, a Y2K-related failure happened yesterday when credit card swipe machines in the UK failed, because they tried to look ahead 4 days and when they "compared Dec. 28, 1999 with Jan 1, 2000, they failed to function because they read the date as Jan. 1, 1900". Oops.
Moral of the story? When do the problems actually start happening? They've started happening already. Hopefully most of them will be mostly minor problems, though? (Although if you were a merchant in the UK, what happened yesterday wasn't minor. Some of the merchants are screaming for blood, and are thinking about sueing the bank who made the terminals.)
Dunno if this counts, but Boris Yeltsin just resigned about 10 minutes ago as President of Russia. Offtopic, right? Well...maybe it's just me, but has anyone else noticed that he looks remarkably like a (poorly-debugged drunken) cyborg??
And after all, if the Russians can't be trusted to fix their nuclear missile launch systems for Y2K, why do we think they would waste their time on a non-critical system like Yeltsin? And for him to malfunction like this, with just...lemmee see...42 minutes to go before the next millennium hits er, the uninhabited Pacific island of Karibata??
Coincidence???
Eh????
On a somewhat related note (failed early cyborg prototypes?), Larry King is about to kick off CNN's 100 hour coverage of the new millennium with an in depth interview on what the next 1000 years will bring with our favorite visionary...Bill Gates.
Perhaps it's time I get to bed.
why do you want to know ? :-))
do you want to make the first post of the new millennium
---
The first failures of any large scale related to Y2K began with the credit card companies a couple of years ago. The last one that affected me was an untested routine for exploding ads for the retailer for whom I work, which was discovered last night when the system failed to print discount stickers due to not finding any ads due prior to Jan 5, 1900. The system was correctly setting the date of the ad, but incorrectly comparing that date to the needed date. The developers missed it in testing, and got a phone call at 2 am as a result.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I wish everyone would stop using the term Y2K... I'm quite sick of hearing it.
I don't remember who it was that said it, but someone said "The need to abbreviate Year 2000 to Y2K is just the sort of reason we're having the 2-digit year problem in the first place."
The first computer had problems 10 years ago, as far as I know. US passports last for 10 years, so I think they had problems when they started giving out the ones that expire in 2000. At least, that's what I heard, it may be an internet legend...
Communication is only possible between equals
Oh, thats an easy one. The second a stray bullet damages property you own or when the first molotov cocktail explodes in your neighborhood.
Coincidently, I just saw a little segment about the 9/9/99 problem on CNN. Bascially, just about what you said above; the-dust-has-not-settled hysteria. I was hoping to to see an end to this Millennium Bug garbage, but I guess we're going to keep hearing about it until enough people catch on to CNN's next big thing (IPv6 change-over? Y2038?).
...and for the last time, it's not a bug, it's a feature!
I didn't want official statements that have been through the spin-cycle already. I was looking for actual experiences of real nerds around the world ... us.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
There is a reason that Y2K problems are going to be primarily local time issues. The problem is in the representation of dates for human readability in many cases. Those are scattered through many user interfaces, reports, etc. Not all of them will have been fixed. But they are communicating with users, usually in their own local time.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Why don't we track actual Y2K events here on Slashdot as well as non-events? The relevant data would be the time it occurred, and where. But we should also track the things that continue working. Is the power still on? Did money come out of the ATM, and was the balance correct? And every single event posted will indicate someone who has a working computer and a functional network connection.
All of this information could serve as a good counterpoint to the Y2K hysteria. And speaking of that, I want to hear everyone's votes for the most hysterical Y2K disaster book. I think it deserves a review here around the Ides of March. We can stab the author in the back with a review that point out every false prophesy.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
what's Y2K again?
I work for a purty bug ISP, no not the big big ones, but a decent sized one and all our srvers run on GMT so I will be covering from 10AM-6PM and 8PM-2AM mainly so I can watch our server farm. We are EST (GMT -5).
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
--
The shareholder is always right.
Unless Kevin805 *lives* in Kirabati or someone else in .nz was faster on the mouse button....
If you can read this the fireworks are going off &
nothings gone down.....cmos clock sligtly fast
& has rolled over o.k.......
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
uhh.. not exactly...
the nasty guy for 2038 is the time function
there are functions in unix (gettimeofday for example) that at least on some platforms defines the seconds as a long, so on 64-bit you get a lot of room...
and time() is available under all win32 compilers I know of, so it comes down to the API called.
most people who are actually worried about the whole y2k 'fiasco' are actually worried about money problems. while this may be a legitimate worry for some people with less-than-up-to-date financial institutions, for almost all of them, 'y2k' has already come and gone quietly without a hitch. this is because almost all business' and financial institutions are operating on a fiscal year instead of a calendar year.
s apear is quite humurous....
i dunno about anyone else, but to tell you the truth, this whole run-on-the-banks-because-all-my-money-is-gonna-di
i'm just working on getting a good seat for the end of the world....
403: Forbidden - you do not have permission to access
Fiscal year calculations anyone? The fiscal year rollover for my work was back in July and we had plenty of programs that did fiscal year calculations. A smaller event than the calendar rollover but it has been quite quiet hasn't it?
Hypothetically, anything hypothetical is possible.
Of course New Zealand will be an hour earlier so that is even better, we can watch what happens there first.
Now I got to go party some more, NOT . The Y2K system watch is boring so far...
couldn't resist:
first post in the year 2000.
Just watched teh ceremonies from Kiribati on HNN.
1) In Mathematics, it doesn't matter if the first element in an array is 0 or 1, as long as you know it's the first element. you can start an array at 45 and go to 46. You know that 45 is the first element and you are fine.
...] ...]
2) This is the case for matrices. IE: most people label matrices in the form.
[[a11, a12,
[a21, a22,
[...]]
notice starting at 1,1. because it really doesn't matter.
3) (Excuse my BASIC, i had to go look this up) you can actually set the indexing in arrays to anything you want...
Check out the command OPTION BASE 1
(this will set all bases of arrays to 1)
4) FORTRAN is still widely used in many older code, particularly in modelling, simulation and other mathematical-engineer purposes. Engineers still have to learn it for that reason.
nachoman
---------
I had to learn FORTRAN because it was used in all the modelling code for a nuclear power plant simulator.
If there are going to be soo much major problems, does it really matter what time it is going to happen? If I'm going to die at 6:00 PM local time... in retrospect will it really matter?
These Y2K "prophets"... if the world is really going to end, why are they telling people? Why not just live your life, to its fullest... oh well.
By the way, we are on EST here on slash right? I mean, the postings are EST, but... i don't know if there are other systems.. If we have y2k problems here... i could really use my karma being reset, need to get out of the red. =P
That is the translation of the name of the monk who thought up the calendaring system that we use. He might have looked like that guy in the 80's Xerox ads. Dennis came up with the idea to have a starting date of the birth of Christ. Then Gregory, CEO of the Vatican at the time, tagged the concept with his name. Modern scholars think that Dennis missed it by three or four years, that Christ was born in 3 or 4 AD. Just think if he had gotten it on the nose, we'd have a few more years to stockpile batteries, water and snowshovels!
Thank you for pointing that out! I am getting tired of some of these stories. Nothing is important anymore! I barely read any of the articles anymore, I just skim because of all the crap!
"As many of you know, I was very instrumental in the founding of the Internet" --Al Gore to Katie Couric 3/99
...i believe will occur when we start seeing mass suicides by cobol programmers who will now have no way of making an income.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
This ignores the obvious point that not everyone sets their clocks accurately.
Besides, there's the fact that a lot of systems are already dealing with 2000 dates: e.g. insurance co's. And then there's companies that aren't going to be open for business until Monday and thus won't discover their problems until then. So I figure it'll take a couple weeks before the full Y2K picture really pans out.
The GMT point is probably what CNN and their ilk are going to be yammering about to keep people in suspense, and ratings up, on New Years' Day. If nothing notable occurs all day: "But we may not know the REAL effects of the Y2K bug for days... weeks... years!"
One slightly OT thing that I've gotta mention: Millenium Bug themed 2000 wall calendars. WTF? The only calendars I've ever seen that will be embarrassingly obsolete before the first month is up. Available now at a mall near you!
But I wonder if they're going to cover it time zone by time zone, still.
"New York seems to be OK... but the big question is, what will be the effect when the clock strikes twelve on the West Coast... hitting both Microsoft and Silicon Valley at the same time!!!" I'm eagerly awaiting the whole news-channel response, mainly for humor value.
I'm in the first Industrialized Country to go through Y2K! What do you think of that?
1/24 of earth just entered 2000 (= ;)
Guess their fireworks didn't run windows NT, cuz they actualy worked..
Happy new year!
Best regards from Norway.
(we still have 12 hours to go)
Jesus guys, It was a little story. Call me stupid, but It's 6AM EST right now, and I was wondering where I might find the first reports of any Y2K glitches, so I came here first. I wouldn't want to see SlashDot flooded with Y2K news, but let's face it, there *may* be problems, and it's going to be news worthy. Just because every joe blow is going to be talking about Y2K over the next few days doesn't mean SlashDot is too cool for it. You people are too busy trying to ignore something, that it looks like your obsessing over it. Say it's not importance once, fine, say it over and over and overreact to 1 story, and it looks like you're trying to fool yourself. So let's hear what Y2K bugs there may be, and if there aren't any, they'll be plenty of other stuff to read. As for the 2000 vs 2001 battle royal of the minds we have here, agreed, give it a rest. What's with all the Anonymous Coward posts, btw?
When the nukes hit.
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Everybody knows that Y2K will start at either local time, GMT or Local Programmers Time.
Assume it is a chip problem. It is my guessthat some of the code writers for the chips have used local japanese/koreans/malaysin time. Other will be using Austin, Tx time, and some smart programmer has probably found this out, and made sure we are hit at random +- 24h from midnight.
I know I store things in some code as local time, while in others i use GMT time.
So be afraid, be very afraid...
Yeah there were some recent updates made to Slack 7.0 for proggies using 1900 ;o)
yeah
Though it may be that all kinds of things run on GMT, for me all that counts is local time and what my systems do... so that is local time. Ofcourse this combined with transnational systems like the Net etc. might mean that we see a prolonged time of systems going down, even before Y2K has started at location XYZ. So the US might be in trouble, because of data in Europe etc.
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The Y2K manager of the organisation I did my internship at had this problem in Austria last Februari. His bank here in Europe had issued him a new credit card, which bounced in Austria, cause they were late with updating the creditcardmachines.
Use Adsense for Charity
Apparently it already came.
I have heard that there was a problem in Europe with credit card machines that were looking ahead four days in advance for calculations and such. Something or the matter. I would care for more information and FACTS regarding this.
When in line at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club yesterday evening 17:00 - 18:00, the credit card machines in the store went down, they made an accouncement to customers over the intercoms.
"19" + today.getYear());
Which, if one set one's clock ahead. came out to a year of "19100" (gosh, JavaScript, thanks SO much for thinking of 1900 as year zero...) Needless to say, it's now doing:
(1900+(today.getYear()*1)));
Or something similarly better.
Cnet has an interesting page right now: a list of webcams which are pointed to partys al around the world. :)
The first is Gisborne, in New-zealand. So you try to click the link http://www.2000-live.com/SmallCam/ and what do you get? "Netscape's network connection was refused by the server www.2000-live.com. The server may not be accepting connections or may be busy.".
I miss the "the server could be affected by the Y2K bug" text
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
I work at a steel mill, which is a major consumer of electricity, so we have been closely following the local power utility's preparations. They have told us that the main opportunity for power failure will be at 7PM EST (12AM GMT). According to them, the entire US power grid runs on GMT to avoid time conversions when stations are communicating across time zones. They claim if the grid survives 7PM it should have no problem with midnight.
But then again nothing is gonna happen, right?
I have read in several places that Brazil is one of the most y2k ready countries. However their are many countries that are behind most noteably Italy. They did not start thier programs until March. As for being a third world country I usally don't think of Brazil that way. Are you one of the most developed countries of south america, and have one of it not the most stable government in the region?
The only thing we really need to worry about are systems that are date sensitive; mainly financial concerns with banks and businesses. Everything else will just go over to "00" and not know the difference between 1900 and 2000. For example power grids will not fail because they dont have days where they dont turn on, all their systems monitor is usage and where to put more power because it is needed. Their computers could care less if the date is Jan. 1, 1900 or whether it is Jan. 1, 2000. And every desktop computer will roll over and that will be the end of it. The problems will be the people, not the computers. Consider this, everyone is up at midnight (waiting for all hell to break lose) and they have lights on, tv on, computer on and everything else on in the house so they will know if there is a glitch. Another will be everyone trying to pick up the phones at the stroke of 12 (local time) just to see if there is a dail tone. There have already been statements made by phone companies not to do this because their servers will not be able to handle it (the biggest dos attack in history). Another problem will be all the little fucks who think it will be cute to hack/crack (whatever you want to call it, be my guest) a website and deface it, and people trying to take down servers on purpose. Then lets not forget all the phychos that think the world is going to come to an end at 12 (local time) and are going to do something stupid and start looting and rioting. All of this with no purpose, and the news media is going to have a field day with it and a day later people will be saying "Where the hell was that Y2K bug!?" and this will just screw up more peoples perceptions of technology and such. Well im tired of writing, just my $0.02.
Its all bunk anyway,so why argue about it?Im just lookin foward to telling everyone 'I told you so' on Jan 1st.They'll probably come up with another one anyway,but it will be nice for a month or so...
Hehe
2^10 == 10^2 == 10 XOR 2 == 2 XOR 10 == 8 != 1024
2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2 == 1024
was for 5 years...maybe it's because I have a french one too.
it is 4 hours from me posting this post to Y2... hehe
Microsoft Windows NT Service Pack 4
Microsoft Windows 95 Y2K Patch
Microsoft Windows 98 Service Pack 1
Microsoft Office 97 SR-1 and SR-2
Notice a theme? As far as the heads of the Y2K committee were concerned, we wanted to be able to say that all the software was completely certified as compliant. That means that because Microsoft identified minor issues with WinNT Service Pack 3 and earlier, we got stuck with hundreds (literally) of hours of install time. SP4 takes long enough on its own, and SR-1 takes about 45 minutes per computer. It's ridiculous.
For the average user in the hospital, Y2K problems started about a year ago - that was the alloted time to handle all these god damned time consuming Microsoft updates and patches..
Anyway, here's a link to CNN.com where they have a page that lists when major population areas are hitting the new year. They also put it in GMT and EST for reference. Find out when your favorite part of the world hits Y2K!
Junon
Insanity is only a state of mind....
Insanity is only a state of mind...
First of all, this isn't the "millenium" (whatever that is anyway) - that arrives in 2001. Even Arthur C. Clarke named his book "2001" because he had the insight to know that the millenium doesn't start until 2001. Our needless celebration means nothing outside of earth anyway. So why bother? Because it's a social celebration. Because we arbitrarily decide that we are going to have a huge celebration on a certain date. If we are going to do that, maybe we should do it more often, and make up holidays left and right. At least most holidays mark the occasion of a significant REAL event - religious, like Easter and Christmas, or historical, like Columbus Day and the 4th of July. Man invented this concept of the millenium. None of us were alive 999 years ago, so can this really mean anything to us individually?
Second of all, does anyone know why we have a leap year? Because the earth doesn't complete a full revolution around the sun until about 6 hours AFTER we celebrate the New Year. This adds up every 4 years. So the Year 2000 doesn't actually come until midnight the next day. But people seem to ignore this anyway. Who wants to celebrate at 6 am in the morning? Or 12pm or 6pm the next day? Again, it's a social celebration. And besides, leap years are fun :-)
In conclusion, what are we really doing by celebrating this millenium? Giving terrorists a venue to flex their genocidalistic muscle? Or giving ourselves an excuse to make resolutions and start out with a "new year"? I'm sorry if this post sounds pessimistic, and takes some of the steam out of your New Year/Century/Millenium's celebration, but don't worry - the other half of me will be celebrating with the rest of you :-)
Happy New Year!
The point of the above discussion is that even "sophisticated" systems (it was all written in C), can have Y2K-type bugs, especially if the original programmers wrote with the idea that "this software will only be used for a few years".
By the way, the solution I chose was extremely inelegant, but it works. The system times were set back 16 years. This gets the leap year right, but the day of the week is off by one. But none of the applications cared about the day of the week, except that the automatic spring-ahead and fall-back for savings and standard time occur on Saturday when the systems think its Sunday. The applications were modified to add back the 16 years appropriately. And since these old OS's are NOT Y2K ready, my systems will gracefully transition from 1983 to 1984 tomorrow night, just like they did 16 years ago. I chose 16 years, versus 28 years for a "time bridge" (28 years would get the day of the week right), because the legacy systems also interface to some old 486 PC's running DOS 5.0, and their BIOS cannot be set back before 1980, nor can they go beyond 12/31/1999. So, these systems are also running 16 years in the past. And no, these 486's cannot be simply upgraded for a bunch of other legacy hardware issues.
The only systems which I have running without the time bridge kludge are my Linux boxes, some of which have been running almost continuously since 1994 with the 0.99 (now 2.2.10) kernel.
What do you mean 5000 years and "everybody knows"??? Obviously, your japanese is great but I would like to know what you are referring to. Boku mo nihongo de hanaseru n da yo. Nihon ni sunde ita kara desu. Also what do you mean by the "akari" bit, just wondering. And what person are you referring to by "sono hito". Actually I'm a little nervous with this Y2K thing everyone is making a lot of jokes about it but things could get serious. I mean I have a bunch of servers and anything could happen. I don't think the world is going to come to an end but I could be out of a job if too much goes wrong.
Anyhow I don't think this Y2K thing is a laughing matter at all.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
"yourname.com for $55
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
US passports last for 10 years, so I think they had problems when they started giving out the ones that expire in 2000.
I don't think so. I don't have a US passport, but I have a Brazilian passport with a US visa dated 1989, and it had a four digit year date.
Or "The 13th Floor"?
The fact is, we are just a simulation running on a computer on a Higher Level Universe. So, if on 2000/01/01:00:00:00 you suddenly start growing some strange green tentacles with pink scales, that's because the particular machine on which your body is running (it's a Beowulf Cli^Huster, of course!) is NOT y2k certified! (reminds me, is my nanotechnological molecular synthesizer Y2K certified? What if my alloy made of two parts of yttrium and one part of potassium does not get synthesized?)
I know this is 10% off-topic, but since I saw a post regarding on small issues like "small third world power outages", I think you're not being smart when you say that. AFAIK, most (concerned about themselves) governments are really taking care of the bug. For example, here in Brazil, the government will have a 24-hour comittee to watch things going from New Zealand to wherever the time zones get us to. we are being as careful as "first world" countries here. I don't want to start a flame war, or something, but that's the truth.
The answer is relative. Using GMT time in preference to local time is really a matter of personal choice or company policy. This is more of a human issue rather than a technical issue. The machines that keep time know what they must do...and they keep on doing it. There may be a few bugs (e.g. Y2K related) but these were caused by human error. Politics (company, country, etc.) may have greater influence in determining the human sense of time than any inaccurate clock or malfunctioning computer. Then again, I could be wrong. In the end, don't blame the machine. It was just following instructions. I don't have any real answers for you on what will happen on GMT midnight. However, I should tell you that some of us are actively looking for the answer by monitoring all 24 timezones. Join us at the #newyear conference on IRC. Get information about Y2K problems and fixes as quick as someone can type it up on the screen. Interaction is two way so questions can be answered within a matter of seconds. For further information please see: http://www.deepchaos.com/newyear.html http://www.webbnet.org/server.html
If you're going to worry about early-morning ICBMs, worry about 'em coming from China...
I refuse, on principle, to have a
I did 'zdump Pacific/Kiritimati' and it's an hour earlier than Auckland.
CNN says the first place is Kiribati Islands, which will have midnight at 5:00 A.M. EST.
I'm glad the only Y2K thing I'll be worrying about is writing '00' on my checks now... If course...I have this problem every year until about March! Cheers all... 29a
BTW, GMT is long gone as an official time standard. It is now called UTC which cryptically stands for "Co-ordinated Universal Time". So why is it UTC and not CUT? Standards body politics. It was the only one that nobody wanted, so that's what the agreed upon. The French wanted it to be TUC to match the French translation, the English speaker wanted CUT - we got UTC so no one is happy or everyone is equally unhappy.
I can't stop to worry about the nuclear power plants in the former soviet union.. Maybe they are too low-tech to have a problem but they still make me anxious.....
I don't know if the monk initiallly skipped the year 1666, but there was a year 1666. With History lessons I learned that in that year there was a great fire in the city of London, destroying a greater part of the city. It was also the yeas of the first (or second) great seawar between Holland and England. The fact that these historical events exist for that year proofs tha there was a year 1666.
You know, who really cares. The fact that we are changing from a 1 to a 2, and a 19 to a 20 is pretty significant given the fact that most readers here have only seen things change from a 70 to an 80 or an 80 to a 90. This argument is never going to be solved so why don't you all stop bitching and moaning about it because I seriously doubt that you will be able to convince the world that they need to wait until 2001 for the "Big Party." 19xx changing to 20xx and 1xxx changing to 2xxx is significant enough for me. ...d
------------------ D. A. Davenport: http://www.firebin.net
You know, who really cares. The fact that we are changing from a 1 to a 2, and a 19 to a 20 is pretty significant given the fact that most readers here have only seen things change from a 70 to an 80 or an 80 to a 90. This argument is never going to be solved so why don't you all stop bitching and moaning about it because I seriously doubt that you will be able to convince the world that they need to wait until 2001 for the "Big Party." 19xx changing to 20xx and 1xxx changing to 2xxx is significant enough for me. ...d
------------------ D. A. Davenport: http://www.firebin.net
My Sprint PCS phone has skipped Y2K. It has reported the date at 1/01.
My Sprint Phone
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