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...
Slashdot Mirror
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...
Who cares? Does it run Linux? :-)