Y2.01K 269
After our recent discussion of decimal/hexadecimal confusion at the turn of 2010, alphadogg writes in with a Network World survey of wider problems caused by the date change. "A decade after the Y2K crisis, date changes still pose technology problems, making some security software upgrades difficult and locking millions of bank ATM users out of their accounts. Chips used in bank cards to identify account numbers could not read the year 2010 properly, making it impossible for ATMs and point of sale machines in Germany to read debit cards of 30 million people since New Year's Day, according to published reports. The workaround is to reprogram the machines so the chips don't have to deal with the number. In Australia, point-of-sales machines skipped ahead to 2016 rather than 2010 at midnight Dec. 31, rendering them unusable by retailers, some of whom reported thousands of dollars in lost sales. Meanwhile Symantec's network-access control software that is supposed to check whether spam and virus definitions have been updated recently enough fails because of this 2010 problem."
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:3, Funny)
Wait until Dec. 31, 9999. Watch as people panic about there being 5 digits in the year and how programs were only written to accommodate 4 digit years for the past 8000 years!
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:5, Funny)
Wait until Dec. 31, 9999. Watch as people panic about there being 5 digits in the year and how programs were only written to accommodate 4 digit years for the past 8000 years!
They are going to have thaw out a lot of old cobol programmers.
Windows Mobile (Score:5, Funny)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10425455-56.html [cnet.com]
this is affecting me and the other 3 guys on the planet with a Windows Mobile phone, too. :(
MMX Technology (Score:4, Funny)
Geez! Intel introduced MMX Technology [wikipedia.org] to take care of this problem in 1996! Get with the times!
We got hit by Y2.01k (Score:3, Funny)
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm so the 9/11 hijackers were Y2K bugs then? We better keep an eye out for more aircraft bugs on Sept 11 2011 .... holy shit there is an 11 in 2011 AND 9/11! ZOMG!
Re:Have I not heard this before? (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't I hear this before? I remember people talking about scamming banking systems via the confusion caused by 2010.
Wait a second... isn't that the plot from Superman IV?
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:These coders are morons. (Score:4, Funny)
For instance, I'm doubtful there will be anything in existence in 2 billion years that will be capable of reading your code...
That's probably what the Ancients thought when they built the Stargates. Never underestimate the need future species may have for a plot generation device.
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:5, Funny)
Because everybody forgot about Y2K on Jan 1 2000. Planes didn't fall from the sky, remember (well not immediately, anyway).
Yes. I anticipated this. I now store all my dates much like the Unix epoch, except I store it in a 1 gigabit integer field (f*ck 64-bit integers) that counts the number of seconds since midnight January 1st, 50,000,000,000^1024 years ago.
We should be safe from now until the universe collapses, Jesus comes back, Allah blows us all up, or the Great Green Arkleseizure wipes his nose.
Oh--and you do have that new holographic storage tech in your laptop, right? You'll need a few exobytes just to store the timestamps on all your files...
Re:does the wii has a minor 2010 issue? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My ThinkPad had some trouble too. (Score:5, Funny)
[..] I manually the hardware clock [..]
Did you accidentally the whole clock?
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:5, Funny)
True.
We should start freezing them now, just to be sure.
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:3, Funny)
How on earth could this happen? This is shear blistering incompetence that no one thought to include any more days past this point.
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:5, Funny)
They are going to have thaw out a lot of old cobol programmers.
I, for one, welcome the Lords of Cobol.
/All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:3, Funny)
Indeed. They even said if the cache machine in your branch did not work ...
Well, this works actually very well. The machine is caching all the money ...
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:2, Funny)
There are reasons of business and budget that trump incompetence, but your post reminded me of a story.
Technical background: I worked in VAX/VMS, where dates were stored as binary but commonly displayed as dd-mmm-yyyy, such as "01-Jan-2000".
Once upon a time, there was an Oracle DBA, whose primary claim to fame was being female and good looking in a line of work where such attributes were uncommon. She applied for a job in my IT department and we interviewed her. Although we found her visually refreshing, her technical skills were lacking. So I promoted an existing staff member into the DBA position. The candidate we passed on landed at a nearby IT shop. Later on, we had a collaborative project with that other IT group. My DBA (the one I promoted) drops into my office...
DBA: "You gotta see this! Remember Ms. xxxxxx? You were right. She built a database where all of the date fields are STRINGS!"
[DBA goes on an on about how wrong that is, but misses the real implications]
ME: "Do you know what the funny part of this is?"
DBA: "No."
ME: "She just made April Fools Day the first day of the year. In fact, years don't matter all that much, since they are relegated to the tail end of the string. Any select statement that sorts by one of those string/date fields is going to give you some fascinating results! As of now, the calendar is April, August, December...."
[Laughter for the rest of the afternoon]
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:4, Funny)