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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?
Y2K will begin on January 1, 1900!
Bruce Perens.
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
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.)
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
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..
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.