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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?
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
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----
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?
To further confuse matters, UTC includes leap seconds but GPS time does not so they are off by 13 seconds IIRC (NTP servers obviously correct for this).
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
...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?
Sydney is on daylight saving now, so we're GMT +11 at the moment.
One of the TV channels (9) is running a 25 hour special watching the new year come in from all around the world. However, at 10am Saturday, they have:
Today on Saturday: Y2K special
Today On Saturday will update and report any major problems associated with the Y2K bug. In the event of nothing or little to report, Channel Nine will revert back to the Millennium live coverage.
I think that it will run for about ten to fifteen minutes, but I could be wrong. Anywhere else doing something "special" like this?
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"
Article said "Most large, critical systems run on GMT. Air Traffic Control and most military systems certainly do."
I, rather pedanticaly, merely mentioned what deficiencies GMT has, why UTC was introduced, and that time critical installations use UTC.
Why would the average Internet User need split-second accurate time synched to UTC beats me. If you really want, just pick an apropriate NTP server to synch with. Many NTP servers for example get current time via GPS, that is UTC.
-W
The fact that the press release mentions GMT three times and completely ignores UTC, even though it admits that it really means UTC when it says GMT at the note, is not at all surprising to me - it is an announcement by the prime minister of the UK after all, and UTC is coordinated by BIPM in Paris
That aside, its a common mistake to call UTC GMT but its a mistake nonetheless, even though GMT = UTC to within a second.
Oh, and no, I'm not really that sad, I have a life - its just that I've spent some time reading stuff while setting up a GPS NTP server lately.
-W
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!
only unix systems using 32bit time_t will run out of seconds on 2038
...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!!!"
Exactly. They're on the other side of the International Date Line. In fact, if you pay attention to the times shown, they're about the same time zone as most parts of North America, like Chicago, like Dallas, and so on. Nothing special there!
Kiribati is, by all accounts I've read, in the farthest East (ie: the "first") time zone.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
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.
He he he.
Reminds me of the April Fool's Japan Times - Not! ad of a few years ago:
Now in Theaters: Godzilla vs Hello Kitty!
"He's back, He's mad, and he's looking for a little pussy!"
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
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.
Yes, New Zealand (gidday) is first to see the dawn - now if only the marketing people had actually got their shit together, we could all be down here having a party (did I mention it's the summertime and all is well at the beach?) instead of working. I'm going to be based in Auckland watching the dawn break, filing stories to http://www.idg.net if anything does happen - and I'll fire them off to Slashdot as well.
Good luck - may the force be with you. Person your battle-stations and FULL STEAM AHEAD
I am a leaf on the wind
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?
He was refering to the International Date Line, which is in the Pacific Ocean. From there, "it" will pass west through Asia, Europe, and finally, the Americas. Just like every morning.........
Dave
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
Actually, Mr. Coward Sir, if you get yourself an account on Slashdot (It's easy, free and fun! Sign up now!) then you can set the preferences to show you so-called "military" time as opposed to AM/PM, which I'm quite partial to myself now that I've been living in Europe for 4 months.
Enjoy!
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!
Speking as one of those lucky few techies who has to be "On-site, and fully capable of making rational decisions" (from the memo those of us working Dec. 31-Jan. 1 got) I would liek to say the following.
Ahem.
THHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHPPPPPPPPPPPPPPT!
Cheers!
-NOC Monkey (OOK!) Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.
It has begun - Current time across the international date line is 00:01, Jan 1, 2000.
Welcome to the New Year!
Wohoo!
-NOC Monkey (OOK!) Experience is what allows you to recognize a mistake the second time you make it.
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
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
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...
What, are you on crack?
It's Japan, there's always some huge monsters, giant robots, or multi-tentacled aliens roaming about causing havoc. The Patlabors were deployed in the landfill zone a few years ago now, scientists are still working on that "Macross" ship that crash landed this year, I think Gamera and Ultraman are hanging out in Shinjuku after kicking Mothra's pansy ass. Godzilla doesn't run with that crowd anymore - not since becoming Capt. Majors's bitch.
Way off-topic. Deal.
---GEC
Bow-ties are cool.
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.
Use Adsense for Charity
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.
SYDNEY TV GUIDE
for 10.00 am Saturday 1 January 1999
Interesting that the Y2K Special's Schedule was hit by the Y2K bug.
I double checked, they've indeed got an issue (not necessarily Y2K, but definately date related) with the scheduling page.
"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?
Jesus is coming... Quick! Look Busy!
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...
Oops, I think I missed it!:(
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..
SP4 with minor patches on top of it is the basic setup listed as Compliant by Microsoft, therefore we are basically required to ensure every system fits that standard.
By the way, there are some very odd fixes listed in the detailed fix list on the Microsoft site. Check out links like this one. Basically, you may get an error installing Service Pack 4. If you want to install SP4 properly, install Service Pack 6. I guess they have to be thorough, but it still sounds pretty funny. =)
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.
zdump Pacific/Galapagos, 5 hours ahead of New Zealand. As I write this (9:37 PM EST on Dec 30) it is 8:37 PM on Dec 31 there.
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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