Y2.01K 269
Posted
by
kdawson
from the wait-till-two-oh-thirty-eight dept.
from the wait-till-two-oh-thirty-eight dept.
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."
Spamassassin (Score:4, Informative)
Spamassassin in Kerio Mailserver has a bug that flags all messages dated 2010 as spam. I think it affects the normal spamassassin as well.
Re:the eternal curse of the software developer (Score:3, Informative)
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:4, Informative)
Two reasons
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:3, Informative)
It's not the Excel language that breaks stuff as far as I recall, but Windows' regional settings. Set your windows regional settings to France or whatever, and it should work.
At least, that is the case for csv files in Excel.
Re:Windows Mobile (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's Y2K01 (Score:3, Informative)
In electronics and many engineering situations decimal points are not used. Usually because they can be lost in copying due to small imperfections etc.
So 1.2kOhm would be written as 1k2 ohm.
10.2 ohm would be 10r2. You can see this in a lot of older schematics. I think some confuse this standard where you would write 2010 as 2k010, the last zero can of course be dropped.
Not sure which one I would prefer, just throwing in the information as it seems to be the 'solution' of sorts to the confusion?
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:5, Informative)
Amen this this sentiment. The effort to make sure that the Y2K bug didn't cause more havoc and mayhem is precisely due to the herculean effort on the part of hundreds of thousands of programmers who worked overtime to see that it didn't happen.
I had the cell phone for my company to receive the complaints from customers seeking an engineering solution to fixing any potential problems on the night of December 31st, 1999. The company CEO had this number on speed dial for some very high end clients. That I got through the night with some excellent sleep is a testament to the work that did happen was well done.
It turned out for the company I worked for, there was a Y2K bug that did get missed, but it was relatively minor and only impacted the error logging system. Even funnier was that particular system had only been developed six months earlier, by a programmer who clearly should have known better. The date being logged was recorded as the year "19100" instead of 2000.
I'm far more worried about the 2038 Unix overflow bug, which is a much harder bug to try and root out of systems. We have 18 years to fix that bug, but I'm mainly worried that legacy applications on archaic computers used in situations that has no budget is where it will be the largest problem. Unix boxes in particular are known as workhorse computers that can be neglected and ignored... unlike a Windows computer that will most certainly be in the recycling bin within 18 years.
Also, one of the typical "fixes" for the Y2K bug was to set an arbitrary "century window" on the software.... with sometimes random intervals for when this window actually falls. Instead of Y2K biting you all on the same day, it will happen as a class of failures on random dates when some major epoch happens.... such as 2010. So for me, this isn't even news as this is something I'm expecting. 2020 is going to be another year to watch for similar bugs, and 2040 is going to be a particularly ugly year as 1940 was set as a common century epoch point for a great many companies. 1970 was more common, but I hope that the Y2K bug is finally fixed by 2070.
Re:idiocy? Incompetence? (Score:3, Informative)
Similarly, a .xls file created with a non-english excel (we often receive such files from clients who use excel in french) uses commas as the float separator and is unreadable in another version of excel.
That’s not even true. Maybe you meant .csv files.
I’ve created .xls files on a computer with German regional settings (comma for the decimal point, dot for the thousands separator) and moved it onto a computer with normal US regional settings. It worked perfectly fine.
It even converted all my formula cells... on the German settings, semicolons are used to delimit function arguments, and commas are used for hard-coded floats. E.g. if with the US settings you’d use
=IF(A1>0.5, 0.5, A1)
with the German settings you’d use
=IF(A1>0,5; 0,5; A1)
It did all of the conversions automatically.
In a .csv file of course everything is stored as human-readable ASCII, so you’d have to change your regional settings, open it, and save it as an .xls, which should then be portable (independent of your regional settings).