Q
q
Not only must the year be divisible by 4, if it is a century
year it must be divisible by 400.
year it must be divisible by 400.
B
Bob Day
Gerry Quinn said:
Pull your head out of the sand for a moment, and take
a look at: http://www.grantjeffrey.com/article/y2kretro.htm
-- Bob Day
D
Dan Pop
In said:
Does it matter?
Dan
D
Dan Pop
In said:God forbid I'm not running at least 256 bits by then.
Yeah, but that would be a 64-bit x 4 vector processor ;-)
Dan
L
Leor Zolman
I suspect just the opposite. In the ensuing uproar over renegade,
unprincipled, greedy software developers, government would just enact the
Federal Software Quality Commission to oversee and regulate the software
industry into submission.
-leor
S
Stephen Sprunk
Villy Kruse said:
The first company I worked at was acquired for cash, and they paid out our
stock options as a cash bonus through payroll. Our CEO's share was $250M,
which unfortunately crashed the payroll system every time they tried
printing the checks. We ended up having to get a custom patch from the
software vendor, and this delayed the payout (and acquisition) over a
month...
Certainly a much more interesting anecdote than anything I heard about Y2k
S
S
Stephen Sprunk
Corey Murtagh said:
I assume that $20 is after inflation, which means it'll be on par (in
constant dollars) with what we pay for petrol or ethanol today. Hardly a
problem, though I'd expect us all to be running on hydrogen by then; ethanol
is a transition fuel.
S
D
Dan Pop
In said:
A country generating no significant software products has nothing to fix.
It's as simple as that.
Dan
L
Leor Zolman
That's ok, we probably know it to at least the same relative accuracy as
January 1, 1970 "accurately" mirrors the beginning of the Unix era.
-leor
X
xarax
Villy Kruse said:
Back around 1983 at Southern California Edison, there was
a panic in their mainframe data center. SCE printed their
paychecks, as well as managing all of their accounting on
their own IBM mainframe system (using COBOL). The paychecks
were printed monthly. The panic happened when some executives
were seeing asterisks appearing in their paychecks. It turns
out that the COBOL programmers never imagined the possibility
of someone getting a monthly paycheck for more than $9,999.99
and when that finally happened, the dollar amount appeared
as **,****.** and invalidated the paychecks.
In another typical COBOL moment of ineptitude, the programmers
were discussing/debating the merits of a possible stock split
(they were participating in the SCE employee stock purchase
plan). The crux of the problem was that the COBOL programmers
were afraid to vote for the stock split, because they had
HARD-CODED the number of outstanding stock shares in about a
zillion COBOL programs and they didn't want to give themselves
more work to go back and change all of that source code by
splitting the stock.
Another COBOL moment at SCE: They used variable-length records
to indicate the record variant data type. For example, if the
record was 60 bytes long, it was type "A". If it was 70
bytes long, it was type "B", and so on. Then a situation
arose where they needed to define a new record type, but
it was the same length as an existing record type. They
had already hard-coded the record lengths in zillions of
COBOL modules. The solution? Insert padding fields to make
the new record an arbitarily longer length than the existing
record types. Then go into every module that had the hard-coded
record lengths and add the new record length/type.
Ah, the good ol' days...
G
Gerry Quinn
LOL! That article was written a mere ten days into the year 2000 by tha
author of "The Millenial Meltdown", and already he was running for
cover. He should have waited a few days, some of his his followers
might not have been down from the hills in time to read it.
He had no significant examples of serious failures to report, so he
started pushing that good old line "If it wasn't serious why did we
spend so much?". Nearly all the article is just "Everybody else said it
was serious too".
He asks:
"Those who naively suggest that Y2K was all hype should ask themselves
why banks (who are not generally known to throw their money away) would
spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of
thousands of man hours to fix the problem..."
You know, banks *aren't* known for throwing their money away - they've
got plenty of yours and mine for that! Barings, for example, or AIB.
There was a Feb 29 bug in 2000 that wasn't hyped at all, and little
enough went wrong that day either.
Truth is the Millenium Bug Disaster was a '60s science fiction scenario,
based on the assumption that all the operations that keep the industrial
world turning are done by technicians blindly obeying the orders on
punched cards that some big old computer spits out. The real world is
considerably more fault tolerant.
- Gerry Quinn
C
CBFalconer
Stephen said:
And where does the power to extract that hydrogen come from? In
case you hadn't noticed it does not tend to occur in free form in
nature. However, it can serve as an intermediary between real
renewable sources and portable machinery.
M
Mike Wahler
Villy Kruse said:
Anecdote:
Funny you should mention this. All of us U.S. folks are aware
of the current escalation in gasoline prices (I'm supposing a
similar thing is happening elsewhere.). But now, in the 21st
century, I was shocked to learn the other day that a local
gasoline retailer was losing money because his pumps didn't
have a '2' in the high order position. He said in a news
interview, that he was being 'forced' to sell at a loss, for
$1.99/gallon, although the average price was around $2.35.
He said he has to 'eat' the loss until his new pumps arrive
in a few days.
I told my wife I should go down there and sell him a few
pieces of cardboard, a crayon, and a handheld calculator,
perhaps for about $300. He'd get that back in recouped
losses in less than a day, and my wife and I could have
a very nice night out on the town.
-Mike
R
Richard Tobin
[/QUOTE]
Really? People upgraded their coffee makers and spark plugs?
-- Richard
C
CBFalconer
Mike said:
You (and he) are too young. Back in gas shortage times, when
prices worked their way above 50 cents a gallon, most pumps
couldn't handle that wildly excessive level. The operators set
them to charge half-price, and created a sign stating as much.
This solution may not be complete in these days of 'charge at the
pump'.
C
CBFalconer
Richard said:
Yup. I had to flash 5 bioses for those items.
A
Alan Balmer
Probably you did, but surely you didn't believe all of them.
Of course there were scare stories, and lots of ridiculous rhetoric,
but that's true of any issue the media decides to hype. Much of it
wasn't true, and sensible people knew better.
On the other hand, once it was past, those same news media were so
disappointed that the world didn't come to an end that they started
accusing everyone of making the whole thing up. Sensible people don't
believe that either.
The truth is that there were real problems and most of them were
fixed. During 1999, I did perhaps 30 compliance surveys among my small
business clients. Some updates were needed in nearly all cases, though
only a few would have had serious consequences (mostly in scrambled
book-keeping.) In some cases the action required was no more than
making sure systems were shut down on Dec 31 and rebooted after the
new year. One large client had issues which would have cost them
rather a lot of money if ignored.
When the new year finally arrived, I had closed up shop and moved
across the country. I had a Y2K trouble call from one former client,
which was resolved over the phone with all data recovered.
Of course there were scare stories, and lots of ridiculous rhetoric,
but that's true of any issue the media decides to hype. Much of it
wasn't true, and sensible people knew better.
On the other hand, once it was past, those same news media were so
disappointed that the world didn't come to an end that they started
accusing everyone of making the whole thing up. Sensible people don't
believe that either.
The truth is that there were real problems and most of them were
fixed. During 1999, I did perhaps 30 compliance surveys among my small
business clients. Some updates were needed in nearly all cases, though
only a few would have had serious consequences (mostly in scrambled
book-keeping.) In some cases the action required was no more than
making sure systems were shut down on Dec 31 and rebooted after the
new year. One large client had issues which would have cost them
rather a lot of money if ignored.
When the new year finally arrived, I had closed up shop and moved
across the country. I had a Y2K trouble call from one former client,
which was resolved over the phone with all data recovered.
A
Alan Balmer
As I mentioned in another reply, I was ignoring that bit of rhetoric.
Should have said so at the time.
M
Mike Wahler
CBFalconer said:
Actually, I'm not.
Yes, I remember that.
Right. I also remember complaining "why can't I just
slide my credit card through a reader at the pump,"
long before that method was available. (Of course,
being a 'geek', I understood that it was easily doable,
although the typical 'layperson' did not.).
-Mike
O
Otto Wyss
I don't hope time_t isn't as often converted to int as size_t is. Well IStephen Sprunk said:
guess it won't be that big problem, I just wanted to point out that you
never should assume what other coders think.
O. Wyss