Y2K: Hoax, Or Averted Disaster? 625
Allnighterking writes "Y2K -- remember the fear it generated? Cartoons were written about it. The dried food industry saw a boom. Doomsayers abounded. But in the end, no planes fell, no one died and the electric grid stayed up for three more years. Was it all a hoax? Or was it the result of careful and complete planning and upgrading. American RadioWorks has a series of articles talking about the disaster that never happened called Y2K You can either Listen in or read the Transcripts of each of the 3 broadcasts and decide for yourself. The over 100 Billion pumped into the US economy alone may well have fueled the boom and predicated the bust. Could the success at Y2K prevention have made the coming problem in 2038 something people will ignore?"
Collective fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Collective fear (Score:5, Informative)
No, it was two things - firstly it was a genuine problem with many back-end financial (and other) systems that had a huge amount of effort and expense spent on them and were fixed, invisibly (to the general public) thanks to a great effort by many in the IT industry. Secondly it was an over-hyped problem that was never really going to affect desktop PC's and the like, which was over-sold to the public and never materialised.
So, for most people's point of view it was a lot of fuss about nothing, because they never saw the real problem, which could have caused serious problems, and only saw the hyped, non problem.
Disclaimer: I did technical support for a Y2K team for a large bank. I know what I'm talking about. I saw the systems that would fail, and what it would do. I saw them fixed.
Re:Collective fear (Score:5, Informative)
All the while the fixes were slowly, calmly being instituted.
Bean Counter Stampede (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it was all a "hoax" or "overblown" according to the beancounters until around early 1999, when the press picked up the story for real. Then there was a realization, a sudden panic, and by March of '99 there was a Y2K coordinator in place. The rest of the year was spent in a mad panic to fi
Dit-toe (Score:5, Interesting)
However, if we had not done any of that, critical systems would have gone down and we would have lost serious money (millions) on bad trades, fines for failure to settle properly, loss of business from negative publicity, etc.
Re:Collective fear (Score:3, Informative)
Same here, but for a small bank. The one thing that royally sucked about it was that the regulators got their hands into it - and decided that the proper way to prepare for Y2K was to paper it over instead of getting work done. They made it a safety and soundness issue so everyone in the industry had to jump for them.
Re:Collective fear (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, our vendor found "one more bug" late in December 1999. We had to install a Y2K patch while we were doing year-end processing on 30 December. Fortunately, I had insis
Re:Collective fear (Score:5, Interesting)
Good God! Are you still with that vendor? We chose to stay open on 12/31 (it was a FRB business day) because we are an ag bank and usually do a tremendous amount of business on 12/31.
I think that at one point I figured that the amount of paperwork I had to do to "prove" that we were in good shape doubled the amount of work involved in preparations.
I ran our core system's "test bank" in updates past 1/1/2001. For each "critical date" I calculated interest accruals and compared them to what the system calculated. I ran transactions and made sure that they posted properly.
The people I really felt sorry for during the process was our Board of DIrectors. They had to listen to me for 1 or 2 hours at each meeting talk about Y2K preparedness.
As a side note, I was home before midnight that night - and I was the last one out of the bank.
Latent bugs after 2001-01-01 (Score:3, Interesting)
Where I work (air traffic control) we did extensive testing for two or three years prior to the big event. Most of our major systems were unaffected or easily corrected, although about 20% of the corporate desktops were red-flagged.
We did have one legacy system that we couldn't replace that was known to be a problem. The short-term solution was to roll back the clock to 1972 (the last leap year that started on a Saturday). Everything was fine
What he said. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Collective fear (Score:3, Interesting)
It's true that Y2K problems on personal computers (at least home ones) probably wouldn't have been very severe, even without preventive fixes. But it is also true that there were some systems where Y2K and similar problems could hav
Re:Collective fear (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed that it was overhyped, but there were desktop level systems that would have died without work. I saw a number of them during testing and prep during '98/'99
The classic was all those xBase systems that used Substr(Dtos([datevale]),3), effectively stripping off the "useless" first 2 digits (apologies if my syntax is incorrect - it's been a
Re:Collective fear (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Collective fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Closer to home I did Y2K testing on my fathers amateur radio contact database. Much to his suprise it comprehensively failed.
Sure it was overhyped and the disaster-move division of the press got excited but it was most definitely real, 2038 will be just as big a deal.
If Y2K should have done one thing it would be to teach customers the dangers of being tied to a software provider who could say "oh yes we know, tough shit, upgrade for $1M". I'm not sure it did 8(
Alan
Re:Collective fear (Score:4, Funny)
Examples include:
And people were actually buying this stuff because it was Y2K compliant.
Same IT perception problem as always (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the same promlem IT always faces. What we do is abstract enough that management can barely believe we do anything at all, but the fact that you are able to use your computer systems at work doesn't mean that you don't need any IT staff. Come on folks, just 'cause it's working doesn't mean we aren't doing something.
Is your car running? Then I guess you don't need gas, much less oil.
I know I averted a lot of problems for a lot of people. I was doing IT & POS Support, and spent a considerable amount of time dealing with Y2k issues, and my boss spent more time, including dealing with an unfixed Y2k bug in the most popular retail back-end system. But before the year end and after the bios updates & bug fixes, _our_ systems worked. I was on call that night, but I didn't get called. That certainly didn't convince me my Y2k work had been useless. Oh, and dates matter. Talk to anyone doing Sarbanes-Oxley work, or making sales projections, yadda-yadda.
I expect this kind of nincompoopery from the mainstream media, and that's where much of the panic came from. I didn't tell anyone to buy a generator. I expect better of
Re:Collective fear (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand what you are trying to say, but it doesn't reflect the whole story. For instance, we had pruchased 15 or so Dells sometime in 1999. We put them at a customer site in November and everything was fine. We shut down in December and didn't return until January 2000. It took us a few days, but we realized that the second t
Re:damn right! was: [Re:Collective fear] (Score:5, Informative)
What? :-) Look, there's always an April 29th, the leap day being added always to February. And the year 2000 was a leap year, though many thought it so for the wrong reason. The rule is: if year is evenly divisible by 4 if not divisible by 100 unless divisible by 400. Which makes year 2000 a very special leap year as it is indeed divisible by 400.
Oh no (Score:5, Funny)
Phil Collins is going to release another album?
Don't be silly (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Don't be silly (Score:2)
Re:Don't be silly (Score:3, Insightful)
To state that there is no 2038 problem simply because it's a reasonable amount of time in the future and
Re:Don't be silly (Score:3, Funny)
Combination (Score:3, Insightful)
How about the combination of the two? I remember seeing Y2K companies trading on the stock market with $10 billion market caps. But then I remember hearing legitimate stories about real world fixes.
It is like the Tsunami. Lots of people are going to make money unethically but, ultimately, we can't stop them unless we just cut off all help.
Re:Combination (Score:3, Funny)
In what way are those two alike?
2038bug.com mirror (Score:5, Informative)
mirror: http://mirrordot.org/stories/c3714b90fba0ed06b444
It was a non-event. Here's my theory. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, back in those days we had a problem every four years. Yep...you guessed it, some programmer had forgotten to take leap year into account.
And when that happened, programs broke. We fixed them in a few minutes and we were on our way. But companies didn't stop. Planes didn't fall out of the sky. Nothing bad happened, other than annoyed users and managers.
My point is that programmers have been screwing up dates and date routines since the computer was invented. We had instances of all the programs breaking on one days. And yet, nothing bad happened.
Hoax. Great for my career....I got a big house with a pool, and a BMW out of the whole Y2K thing, so I'm not complaining. But lets face it, it was a boondoggle.
I personally blame Yourdon. But only because the man is a complete idiot.
Re:It was a non-event. Here's my theory. (Score:4, Insightful)
The AC is right that temporal logic is hard, calendars are nastily irregular, and there are inevitable errors. As late as 1999 I bought new books with incorrect leap-years examples. Really silly, as unless you need to process birthdates or the like, the % 4 is the correct answer from 1804 to 2096 - more than adequate if you're dealing with the current timestamp.
The vast majority of real-world control systems are embedded systems, not running either mainframe or server or consumer OS -- both good and bad. Various tests of Y2K effects did trigger a few glitches, but the predictions of aircrashes, etc., were always overblown, and mocked at the time.
But! around 1 March 1992 I started to try to get people interested in starting to fix the problems during routine maintainance - too early, no one listened until at least 1998. Similarly, 2038 isn't the only epoch date around - 2036 for those same mainframes is another. In 2009, a number of Y2K "repairs" will need re-patched. Know your epoch!
2038 ? (Score:3, Funny)
Lets see, I'll be 73 about then.
Providing it doesn't cause my VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) 200 mph Zimmer Frame to crash, I don't really think I'm going to care all that much.
Re:2038 ? (Score:2, Funny)
the big problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's the same mentality the apparently caused countries in the indian ocean region to decide that a tsunami warning system was not a high priority.
there was a time in early/mid 2000 that i got so tired of people deciding that y2k was a hoax that i wished really bad things had happened.
eric
It happened (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It happened (Score:2)
The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't believe the hype. Traffic lights for example have failsafes in them to stop such things... anyway why does a traffic light care about the year? The day of the week/month maybe.
Similarly, elevators don't give a hoot what year it is.
Contrary to the press your washing machine will *not* think "ooh it's 1900 I haven't been invented yet.. better explode".
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:3, Interesting)
If it cares about the day of the week, (and it's working this out from the date, rather than using a 0-6 counter and a clock) it's going to need to know the correct year to work that out correctly. I agree that a lot of this was hype - even if the traffic light *did* think it was Sunday when it was Monday, nothing terrible's going to happen.
Simila
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, if the clock fails, then all will happen is that people have to wait an extra minute or two for an elevator. As long as the elevator doesn't fall down the shaft, everything will be okay.
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:3, Funny)
elevator madness
Sircus is correct (Score:2)
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:2)
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:2)
~D
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:5, Interesting)
Twice in my life I've seen traffic lights stuck on green in both directions. I don't know how it can happen, because I don't know how traffic lights are switched. Nevertheless.
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't a hoax. (Score:5, Insightful)
The seriousness of the problem was exaggerated by the following misconceptions:
1. Everything that held a date in it with 2 digit years was going to have a problem.
2. Everything described in point 1 that was not fixed would fail in the most disastrous way - missiles being launched, planes falling from the sky.
In reality there could be no problem, or the problem might only be cosmetic. For example, a system I was testing would show the wrong status colour (meaning you haven't done a diagnostic in so many months) but it would not do anything wrong. Still, it had to be fixed to be Y2K ready.
Nonetheless, I was slightly under whelmed by what went wrong on the day. I knew society was not going to collapse, but I expected a few non-critical SNAFUs. I made sure I took out cash from the ATM before New Years, but I gave the water supplies and the bomb shelter a miss
Perl Script (Score:5, Informative)
(Shamelessly stolen from http://www.gsp.com/2038/ )
Re:Perl Script (Score:2)
Re:Perl Script (Score:2)
> Executing: "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe" -w "test.pl"
Tue Jan 19 04:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 04:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 04:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 04:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 04:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 04:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 04:14:07 2038
> Execution finished.
Looks buggy.
Re:Perl Script (Score:2)
Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Whew... one less thing to deal with.
Re:Perl Script (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Perl Script (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess Gentoo isn't 2038 ready. Must be time to panic.
Re:Perl Script (Score:2)
darwin 7.7.0... (Score:5, Funny)
Tue Jan 19 03:14:01 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:02 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:03 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:04 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:05 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:06 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038
w00t!
LAMENESS FILTER SUCKS...
# Please try to keep posts on topic.
# Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads.
# Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
# Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
ewps (Score:2)
Re:Perl Script (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Perl Script (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, that's the last second in 31-bit unix systems!
The 2038 limit is way overhyped. The only thing we have to do is change the definition of time_t from:
typedef long time_t;
to:
typedef unsigned long time_t;
And we can merrily keep using it on our 32-bit systems until 2106.
POSIX disallows negative time_t anyway, so if you've used it you deserve to have your system break.
(This rant is a dupe [slashdot.org] since I said the same thing here four years ago.)
not a hoax (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:not a hoax (Score:2, Funny)
You fixed somewhere from 2 to 300 bugs? That's kind of a broad range, isn't it?
still waiting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:still waiting... (Score:2)
National Institute of Standards and Technology [nist.gov]
pernicious economic fallacy (Score:4, Insightful)
No money was pumped "in" to the US economy. Money was merely moved from one use to another.
While the economy gained from the new spending, it lost from the lack of the default spending.
Without any hard data, one should assume that this was either a wash or - more likely - a net productivity hit.
People make this mistake all the time: "ooh! hurricane! I bet all that spending on new windows helped the economy!". No, it didn't. It took money that would have otherwise been spent at restaurants, book stores, etc., (or left in banks and brokerage accounts, where it helps build other sectors of the economy) and moved that money into glass repair shops and plywood factories.
Don't fall for the myth.
Re:pernicious economic fallacy (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't a myth. Yes, money is a closed system, but spending is not. The broken window fallacy is a fallacy. You can "pump money in" by having more money change hands more rapidly. There isn't actually more money, but everyone sees more money per unit time because it gets around faster.
Economics 101 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Economics 101 (Score:2)
Against that, a lot of software upgrades were forced all over the world, earning income for American companies -- my company in Hong Kong for instance had to upgrade its DacEasy accounting package in 1999, which we otherwise had no need to do (it just refused to accept dates in 2000 as due dates for invoices, so 12 month credits couldn't be given until we upgraded).
Economics 102... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Economics 101 (Score:4, Informative)
The wiki article people keep pointing to also makes connections to outsourcing and a whole host of related issues that relate to bogus ideas of a free market. Clue to all: free markets are a myth sold to you to make someone's subsidy more palatable. So yes, the existence of free markets is a bold lie.
Can anyone show me a free market anywhere on earth?
Not in theory, mind you - where a lot of you libertarian/republican eggheads live - but in REALITY. Show me a real free market - where people live and die by the price of goods and services.
The moment any market is fed a subsidy by the government, it is not a free market - the system will have been gamed for the benefit of a few against the many. But - and this a BIG BUT - all countries have gamed their systems exactly this way and supposedly for the benefit of their people. And when such gamed systems work for large populations, I don't really have a problem with it. Example: I like throwing money at farmers (sadly, usually republican and pyscho Xtian assholes) because I think it is in the interest of national security to have an independent food supply - in my example the farmers gain a monetary benefit, while the rest of us gain something a little less tangible in the way of national security.
It is when the numbers of people benefitted by such a gamed system become so few that we may call this "looting" instead. I don't know that many of us are benefitted by the oil wars we fight such that the same or greater benefits could not be derived from some other energy source which might also have hidden benefits for the environment if they are cleaner energy sources.
So yeah, Bastiat is great. Really. But he also assumes facts not in evidence. And most of us have to live in the really real world.
Nuclear powerplant safety is oversold too. (Score:2)
"The Simpsons" has a lot to answer for (Score:2)
You lie! I've seen The Simpsons.
Seriously, I wonder if that show adversely affected the perception of the risks of nuclear power in the minds of the general public. I'll bet it did.
Y2k Over Rated (Score:3, Interesting)
21 month delay (Score:2, Insightful)
IIRC, there was an event on Sept. 11, 2001 that all but shut down the U.S. economy for 96 hours. It wasn't software generated, of course, but many of the back up sites, redundant networking and contingency plans that kept the world's largest companies from going into an immediate air-stall owed their existence to the pre-Y2K fervor. Sometimes it takes a little fear to get the suits to pry open the pocketbook.
Of course, now that the current security obsession is terrorism maybe we shouldn't be too surprise
Anecdotal ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Replaced computer, had no problems.
Moral of the story: this was a lighting system. Big deal. The client invested several tens of thousands in the project to check three large office buildings in my location, and avoided a minor pain in return. However: everything was checked, and it might have been anything. If it had been the UPS's or the fire alarms for instance, the result of not doing anything could have been a major pain. Point is - we found something, so it wasn't just a waste of time.
(
Re:Anecdotal ... (Score:3, Informative)
Banks, government offices, airtraffic control, medical instrumentation
Um... it wasn't "solved", really. (Score:5, Insightful)
We got lucky. (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, the Y2K "crisis" only occurred because humanity as a whole can't seem to plan very far ahead. Or remember its lessons, it seems. The SARS
scare was something that happened a short while ago, and people are
Re:We got lucky. (Score:2)
Well, it would help if you mentioned the name of "your" country. I mean, if it was New Zealand or whatever, it might not be that big a deal.
And bear in mind that SARS has died down for now. If it flares up again, people will immediately become paranoid about coughing in public. The question is whether the potential (*current*) ri
Y2K (Score:2)
If you were in the hospital right after Y2K, be glad that a gr
proof of hoax! (Score:3, Funny)
For small businesses, it was no hoax (Score:5, Interesting)
These would all, everyone of them, puked big time without serious remediation. In many cases it was line-by-line code work, or the building of elaborate insulating layers between modules. In many cases, the cleanest and most rational fix really was a system upgrade. But I can tell you (from having simulated calendar rollovers on such systems), that on 1/1/2000, a lot of my customers (minus the serious work), would have been unable to buy, sell, pay their people, etc., for weeks into 2000 - at which point many would have been mortally wounded. This was no hoax, and the most important work I did at that time was educating the business owners who kept hearing the words "hoax" or "exagerated" on the news.
I wasn't worrying myself about planes falling out of the sky, but I was worried about calamitous damage to a huge chunk of the economy: the $2-15M/year business. Of course, I like to hunt, so no harm buying a little extra freeze-dried food anyway, right?
Pffffst! (Score:2)
2038? If we live through 2029 [space.com]I'll totally just pay a tech to come over to my cave and fix my counting stones with the skins I earned cornering the market on wooly mammoth hides.
Hype (Score:2)
The media because hype and emotions garner eyeballs, which lead to more advertising revenue.
Businesses because many of them were involved in Y2K solutions and services.
This reminds me of the "shark attack" news tidbits that used to come out during the summer when there was nothing new to report. Studies later had found that shark attacks didn't in fact increase suddenly. It had always been
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
retailers (Score:2)
The whole thing was just ridiculous, and it was all to sell
Millennium Bug (Score:2)
and
it wasn't a bug!
We were lucky (Score:3, Funny)
The bust might have happened anyway (Score:2)
Not a hoax (Score:2, Informative)
A railroad I know of had to manually route trains for about two to three weeks because of a couple of missed Y2K parameters. Had it not been for a few old-timers who were still around from when that was done a couple of decades ago, all of the predictions about crashes and whatever would have come true for this particular company.
The company covered up the problems in order to protect their stock price. I imagine a few other companies had similar results.
I heard on the radio that in the city where I liv
y2k causes the tech bubble. (Score:2)
Without Y2K (Score:2)
I remember. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
"So what's it been like for you this evening?"
One of them turned to observe me. She glared with that particular flavor of ultra-tough female no-monkey-business copitude we have all seen.
"It's going fine, sir. The Y2K Bug is just a myth."
Okidoke, ma'am. Have a happy.
-FL
Hoax? Come on... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I understand Politics a little better after this - it is easier not to spend the money, wait for the disaster, then point fingers.
Why not write this off as a success? Are people just that used to not succeeding?
There WERE various y2k problems... just nothing in major industries like travel, banking, etc.
What about the recent bug mentioned here on slashdot about the airline flight booking system, failing when there were more than 32767 transactions in a given month? That is an example of the same kind of problem the y2k propbem was... I bet the head of Information Technology at that airline was making a 6 figure salary - how could he have the airline so reliant on software that didn't have a backup system, nor one he knew the performance characteristics of?
It wasn't like NOTHING happened (Score:5, Interesting)
Always breaking anyways, why 1/1/01 different? (Score:3, Funny)
My logic in 1999 was this: Everything is always breaking anyways and we still seem to get by, why should 1/1/01 be any different? Servers die, applications crash, battery backups fail, power outages happen, cars crash, trains derail, planes wreck, secretaries with "temporary" admin permissions delete entire file servers. From my point of view, I'm amazed that we even make it from one day to the next!
"Yea, but on 1/1/01, it's ALL gonna break at the same time!!!!" Dude, it's already all breaking at the same time. We'll be fine.
And now I get to say: "See, I told you so."
Re:Mirror? (Score:5, Informative)
Update: 01/2004 The first 2038 problems are already here. Many 32-bit programs calculate time averages using (t1 + t2)/2. It should be quite obvious that this calculation fails when the time values pass 30 bits. The exact day can be calculated by making a small Unix C program, as follows:
In other words, on the 10th of January 2004 the occasional system will perform an incorrect time calculation until its code is corrected. Thanks to Ray Boucher for this observation.
The temporary solution is to replace all (t1 + t2)/2 with (((long long) t1 + t2) / 2) (POSIX/SuS) or (((double) t1 + t2) / 2) (ANSI). (Note that using t1/2 + t2/2 gives a roundoff error.)
The year-2038 bug is similar to the Y2K bug in that it involves a time wrap not coped for by programmers. In the case of Y2K, many older machines did not store the century digits of the date year, hence the year 2000 and the year 1900 would appear the same.
Of course we now know that the prevalence of computers that would fail because of this error was greatly exaggerated by the media. Computer scientists were generally aware that most machines would continue operating as usual through the century turnover, with the worst result being an incorrect date. This prediction withstood through to the new millennium.
There are however several other problems with date handling on machines in the world today. Some are less prevalent than others, but it is true that almost all computers suffer from one critical limitation. Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970. A recent milestone was Sep 9 2001, where this value wrapped from 999'999'999 seconds to 1'000'000'000 seconds. Very few programs anywhere store time as a 9 digit number, and therefore this was not a problem.
Modern computers use a standard 4 byte integer for this second count. This is 31 bits, storing a value of 231. The remaining bit is the sign. This means that when the second count reaches 2147483647, it will wrap to -2147483648.
The precise date of this occurrence is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038. At this time, a machine prone to this bug will show the time Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901, hence it is possible that the media will call this The Friday 13th Bug.
Re:Mirror? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mirror? (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot redefines UTC? (Score:4, Insightful)
ROFL. That's so utterly incorrect.
Here are some links to the definition of UTC, although I guess the damage has already been done.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/Coordin
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-009/_1277.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universa
Re:Linux : Hoax, or Suck? (Score:3, Insightful)
How to install a network card driver in Linux:
Re:It wasn't a hoax (Score:2)
There was one other lie. That the using 2 years to store the date was done to save space. If the space was that much of an issue, then the programmers wouldn't have stored the date using BCD.
CREATE TABLE item (desc varchar(30), idnum int(4))
The '4' in int(4) does no stand for 4 bits, it stands for 4 digits. int(2) takes up less space than int(4).
Some (legacy) systems require the use of BCD; even the x86 line of processors has instructions for working with BCD.
Re:what about Y10K? (Score:2, Funny)
Don't worry, a solution to the Y10K problem has already been proposed - RFC 2550 [faqs.org] covers it very extensively.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Not a hoax (Score:3, Interesting)
This might not be relevant to you, but then, you worked for a company that made a scam as their business principle. Not someone I would buy anything from