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?

Comments

FLAMEBAIT HERE PLEASE

[Anonymous Coward]

Place all the "You are such a stupid shit, everyone with my intellect knows the Millennium starts next year" Comments under this thread.

Thank you for your support.

When Y2K will happen

[Gleef]

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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Re:It simply doesn't (!)

[mce]

I hate to rain on your show, but I have had some first hand experiences with software written in C that did contain The Bug. There is more badly written software out there than even many people in the IT industry can imagine.

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).

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Re:11am?

[Bradley]

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?

Com'on, everybody knows this!

[Bruce Perens]

Y2K will begin on January 1, 1900!

I thought I was certain

[tilly]

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

It already has

[tilly]

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.

Answer: both and more. (and not much)

[Falsch Freiheit]

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.)

Re:It simply doesn't (!)

[toastyman]

Oh, C software is very very vulnerable. Take a look at GNU software that has had problems.

Or a list of changes FreeBSD has made. (Note that about half of these are ported applications, not FreeBSD specific)

Or look here at some reasons why C is vulnerable to Y2k problems.

Just because it was written in C doesn't make it Y2k bugproof. Using time_t when possible is great, but the act of trying to make things human readable/parseable makes it harder.

Note too that most old Verisign keys expire on 12/31/99, people with old browsers should have fun on SSL sites. (Netscape allows 'Continue Anyway', IE won't allow you to)

Kevin

Re:Why wasn't there any year 0?

[Cef]

Sheesh this has been brought up time and again.

At the time the basis of the current calander was being "thought out", there was a monk (can't remember his name) who translated the roman system into a newer system, which is the basis of the Gregorian calander in use today. One of the reasons for this, was "Why should the church use a calander based on the rule of a Roman Emperor?" They finally decided on the year of christ's birth as the founding date. But they didn't use the current numbering system, they used roman numerals. How do you express 0 in roman numerals?

The romans had no concept of how to represent "nothing" so they took christ's birth as the year 1 AD. If you want to get really deep into this, you will also find that the date of christ's birth, the date of his death, and the actual number of years that had passed since his death to the time of the creation of the AD system was inaccurately calculated, due to misunderstandings of how lunar time, and siderial time interrelated, as well as simple "miscalculations".

However, even then, the calander was not 100% correct. Leap years were added, (to account for the drift caused by the fact that the rotation of the earth on it's axis, and the rotation of the earth around the sun do not mesh terribly well, there being approximately a 0.25 day difference) and then they were further resolved. The final rule (which is very accurate over large numbers of years) states that a leap year occurs..

• Every year evenly divisable by 4,
• Unless it is a year ending in 00 (Century),
• Unless that year is also divisable by 400.

On top of this, you have leap seconds, to bring our time in sync with universal constants (this is in relation to astronomical events). The earth is actually slowing down (very very slowly, DON'T PANIC!), plus the orbit of the earth is not circular, but is actually slightly wobbly.

The real problem, and the reason that causes all the trouble for systems designed by people that use 2 digit dates, is caused by the human ability to contract and shrink things, effectively encoding them in a method that while it appears logical to us humans, can cause all sorts of problems for computers. The human race has only itself to blame.

BTW: If you ever wondered why the calander is called the "Gregorian calander", it was named after the Pope at the time it was finally ratified (with leap years added), Pope Gregory.

Windows systems use local times

[coyote-san]

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.)

Y19K errors

[Tom Christiansen]

Y2K will begin on January 1, 1900!

I think you mean: Y2K will begin on January 1, 19100! , as in:

#include <time.h>

char *months[] = {
"January", "February", "March", "April", "May ", "June",
"July ", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December",
};

main() {
time_t now = time(0);
struct tm *t = localtime(&now);
printf("Y2K will begin on %s %d, 19%02d\n",
months[t->tm_mon], t->tm_mday, t->tm_year);
exit(0);
}

Mark my words: the Y19K errors are on their way. :-(

Shall we track it here?

[dsplat]

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.