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Xdaliclock Fails Y2k (But Everything Else Seems Fine) 217

Posted by CmdrTaco from the happy-new-years-everyone dept.
Tracy R Reed writes "Like any real geek I was near my computer and used the xntpd-synchronized time to determine when midnight really struck. As soon as it happened, xdaliclock did something strange!" Besides the terrifying xdaliclock crisis, 2600 had a great page up that seemed to fool quite a number of Slashdot readers. Several other joke websites popped up, and several others had real (minor) glitches. So far I've heard rumors of an ATM system that went down for a few minutes, and some radiation monitors that messed up for a bit. But apparently that was about it. The most overhyped event in years. Enjoy the day off if you get one!
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Xdaliclock Fails Y2k (But Everything Else Seems Fine) More

Xdaliclock Fails Y2k (But Everything Else Seems Fine)

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  • I'm looking at the source right now, and there's some interesting code in digital.c:

    if (date == 0)
    {
    struct tm tm;
    memset(&tm, 0, sizeof(tm));
    tm.tm_year = 100;
    tm.tm_mday = 1;
    tm.tm_isdst = -1;
    date = mktime(&tm);
    was = (clock >= date);
    }

    The code that follows this appears to reverse the pixmap if clock >= date.

  • NNTP-Cache (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    NNTPcache V2.3.3 NEWGROUPS Command Gives an error since today.
  • While BigClock (ver 2.5) survived the rollover just fine (running on palm IIIe, os 3.1) bigclock turned on the backlight and ran a fireworks show to celebrate the rollover.. Just a little tidbit while we're mentioning computer clocks.

    David

    bash: ispell: command not found
  • Other effects of Y2K ...

    You and Jennifer are going on that date tonight in your new pickup truck, and your (now much thinner) mom approves!
    Your dad is no longer a wimp, and just celebrated the printing of his first science fiction novel.
    Biff is now a craven coward, and works for your Dad.
    Doc isn't dead!

  • No, what the previous poster was saying is that 1972 is a good "replacement" date for 2000. The days of the week are all the same for a few years.

    Though, if you can fix it in ASM, go right on ahead.
  • I had to sit down and write a quick ROT13 translator... sad, but I couldn't think of where I could get one to work on WinNT. It was a nice nostalgia thing. If you have WinNT you almost certainly have QBASIC, in which case, this will work:

    DECLARE FUNCTION StrRot13$ (s AS STRING)
    DECLARE FUNCTION rot13$ (c AS STRING)

    PRINT StrRot13$("JRYY vg ybbxf yvxr gur l2x oht qvqa'g erne vgf htyl urnq.")
    PRINT StrRot13$("LRC. GUR QBBZFNLREF UNIR ORRA CEBIRA JEBAT lrg ntnva.")
    PRINT StrRot13$("QVQ LBH FRR GUNG GBB")
    PRINT StrRot13$("UBHFGBA JR UNIR N CEBOYRZ.")



    FUNCTION rot13$ (c AS STRING)
    DIM n AS INTEGER

    n = ASC(UCASE$(c))
    IF (n ASC("Z")) THEN
    rot13$ = c
    EXIT FUNCTION
    END IF

    n = n + 13


    IF n > ASC("Z") THEN n = ASC("A") + n - ASC("Z") - 1
    rot13$ = CHR$(n)
    END FUNCTION

    FUNCTION StrRot13$ (s AS STRING)
    DIM i AS INTEGER
    DIM tmpstr AS STRING

    tmpstr = ""

    FOR i = 1 TO LEN(s)
    tmpstr = tmpstr + rot13$(MID$(s, i, 1))
    NEXT i

    StrRot13$ = tmpstr
    END FUNCTION



  • Perhaps a bug in Netscape that the page takes advantage of? The getYear() func I believe is being phased out in favor of another function that is more "sensible" ...
  • The reason IE does that, though, is that ECMA script defined that as the proper behavior, and suggested that future scripts should not use getYear() ... I wish I knew what the proper replacement func was. {shrug}
  • 'cuz some of us aren't blessed with good operating systems at work. Some of us program in VisualBASIC and Visual C++ for a living. (QBasic felt about right for a quick coding and posting to those people who aren't blessed with good compilers, too.) If you got Linux, use perl, tr, anything like that. If you got DOS or WinXX then use QBASIC. It's there.
  • Well, I see 11/9/44.. You're assuming that it's 1944? Why not 2044? It's closer after all :)
  • ...a friend of mine (rapidly moving down that list, as you can imagine) called me at 8:30AM today, to see if my computer was okay and to see if I had finished a flyer for a concert he's promoting. He nearly became the first documented Y2K fatality in Florida.

    On the other hand, all of these folks saying "all's right with the world" won't really know until about 10 AM Monday, when the millions of corporate drones show up, get their first cup of bad coffee, talk about the lack of events this weekend, and fire up their twenty-year-old accounting packages...
  • Well it looks like the y2k bug didn't rear it's ugly head.


    Yep. The doomsayers have been proven wrong yet again.


    Did you see that too?


    Houston. We have a problem.

  • It appears that Netscape's version of the getYear() function returns the correct year minus 1900; while in Microsoft's, it returns the correct year minus 1900 only if the year is earlier than 2000, otherwise it simply returns the year. Neither is great (why not just return the stupid year?), but at least in Netscape's version it behaves logically.

  • I looked up the ECMAScript Language Specification [www.ecma.ch]. (Thanks for mentioning it; I had not heard of it before.) It is careful to point out that getYear() is not officially part of the specification, but the definition given is based on Netscape's getYear(), not Microsoft's. The function it recommends that is part of the specification is getFullYear().

  • Check this out:

    http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calen dar/ [fourmilab.ch]

    In my copy of Netscape Communicator 4.7, the current date is filled in correctly. In my copy of Internet Explorer 5.0, the date is filled in with the year 3900. Could it be a bug in getYear()? Microsoft's support site says I am up-to-date with patches. And I haven't seen any company put out more Y2K patches than Microsoft.

  • Re:Taco (Score:1)

    by pudge ( 3605 )
    I refuse to feel obligation to "prove" anything to an Anonymous Coward.
  • (Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)

    Actually there are such languages. CF Pascal for example. It might even be possable in Java. The big problem is unrestricted pointers (i.e. C style) make it impossable to prove anything.

    There is another problem. You can prove that program X matched mathmatical model Y, but that doens't say that Y solves the problem you wanted. This wasn't treated as a big problem in my CMSC classes (back in '91), but it feels like a big problem to me. For example if model Y had two digit dates, then program X could have a bad bug, and the proof wouldn't find it, because it matches the bug in the model!

    Also, for me at least, it was far simpler to write the code then to prove things about it. Like by at least an order of magnitude. A simple simple simple 10 line function would take hours for me to make formal statments about. I expect others do better. But as far as I could tell this level of effort could only be justifyed by life critical applications.

    There are some pretty good results you can get by modeling part of your program logic. Like if you can model the locking hierachy of a multithreaded program the SPIN tool is a major help in finding race conditions, lock inversions, and deadlocks.

  • I was at My Linux box at Y2K rollover and have a xlock -digital and a xdaliclock.
    Xclock work with no problem(is still running) but
    xdaliclock start with one 1 at left.
    Was funny!
    Oliver
  • The important thing is that expressing the program in two distinct languages results in two distinct sorts of thinking as the two expressions are written. Most bugs tend to occur only in one of the thinking modes, and are thus exposed when the diverse expressions of the program are compared.

    It is not only this. The formal specification of a program/algorithm also is usually much more concise and closer to the domain language used for informally talking about the problem. As a result it is (if the right framework was chosen) easier to find conceptual flaws in the formal specification.

    But you are of course right in saying that there is no such thing as a 100% verification.

    Chilli

  • I don't think that anybody is ignoring the contribution of all the fine engineers and operators who ensured the safe transition of our computer systems into the new year. What was clearly overhyped IMO was all that fear that we will be thrown back into stone age and should better spend new year's eve in a bunker. That media hype is what is critised.

    Happy New Year and thanks to all who have helped squashing y2k bugs.

    Chilli

  • heh, did you notice that if you hit the "previous" link to get yesterdays comic you arrive at this invalid url:

    http://www.userfr iendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jan/19991231.html [userfriendly.org]

    looks like the strip the characters arent the only ones having problems :) of course, s/jan00/dec99/ will fix that...

    --Siva

    Keyboard not found.
  • Don't be silly, Pintos have been spontaneously exploding long before anyone knew what the Y2k bug was. :p
  • Ugh....

    How about:

    echo "QVQ LBH FRR GUNG GBB" | tr A-Za-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m
    ;-)
  • Just wanted to add my thanks to you guys (and girls) out there who DID spend countless hours making sure we'd have heat and light and water on New Year's Day. We spent the roll-over downtown, watching the great fireworks (Rochester, NY). The evening would have been perfect, except for one very LOUD, very DRUNK and very OBNOXIOUS revelrer next to us (three word vocab, one of which was "Moth'a") who spent the first ten minutes of the Millenium cursing at all the doomsayers, saying "See, the lights didn't go out you bunch of @#$&*@!!##!"

    If it hadn't been for you, this particular slob would now be whimpering and shivering in a cold dark corner of his house, cursing technology and wondering where his next meal was going to come from...

  • Arrrrrgh...

    Well, just to prove that Linux is not "invulnerable" to Y2K bugs, my web server got itself all wrapped up in knots and had to be physically rebooted ("init" wouldn't even respond to Ctrl-Alt-Del!). It was fine at midnight, but sometime later in the morning, a runaway process chewed up all the memory, to the point where I couldn't even get a console login.

    I suspect the "nist" time update utility from www.icce.rug.nl (which I run in the root crontab) is the guilty party. I checked it and found that it choked on a "00" year. I managed to get it working, but it appears to be full of other Y2K bugs (leap year stuff in particular). I've found that cron tends to go wild when you suddenly change the system date by 100 years or so... ;-)

    This is the sort of thing I think we will continue to see for the next few months into the New Year. Not a biggie, but enough to bring a computer or two down...

  • > Welcome to the wonderful world of 1972. :-)

    IF IT AIN'T BUSTED, DON'T FIX IT.

    Surprise, surprise, but there are still a lot of people out there running very happily on old 486 boxes. If all you want to do is run an old word processor (e.g., MSWord 6.0), or write email, why spend money on a new computer? All it gets you is a new set of headaches (i.e., Win98), with new interfaces to learn and new drivers to update and new software to buy, all for no perceivable change in functionality!

    A few lines of code to fix the RTC, and you're off and running again.

  • rot13 anyone?
  • > s just gibberish today...

    Actually, it's not gibberish, but I think you need to be an old Usenet hacker to get the joke...

  • tons of sites that use that matt wright script for a bulletin board say 19100 as the year for new postings... not like anyone should bitch since jwz and wright and others wrote this stuff years ago and provide it freely to us...
  • ...site isn't Y2K compatible. It displays dates 01/01/100 and the strips won't show.

    http://www.slagoon.com/
  • The university department I work for ran into a slight problem. My boss just gave me a call (pretty calmly, but a little upset) saying that she had just tried to login to our (ie my responsibility) secure website to check and make sure it was still working. When she did, she got an error saying 'Certificate Expired'. Fortunatly, I only had to roll into the chair next to my bed to check it out on my box .. no error for me! Turns out she had Netscape 4.05, and the Authority Certificate (not ours, but the RSA Data Security Certificate) in 4.05 and earlier expires on Dec 31 1999.. This is something our IS guys didn't think of (we always upgrade our netscapes when the come out, but other people don't often).. I wonder how many other people missed it? First thing I did was go to netscape's website, and sure thing it's right there [netscape.com] on the right hand side. The boss said that Netscape's website was really slow when she was downloading 4.7. I bet a bunch of people went to purchase "101 Things to do with a ton of rice, three drums of whiskey, and a shotgun (for Dummies)" on Amazon.com and got the same certificate error.

    OBActualY2KProblem: At least 8 power plants in the US lost their synchronization signal from the GPS satellites. No loss of service, since their computers still knew what time it was). It has been fixed, but if it had gone undetected for long enough for the clocks to get unsynchronized. That would have been a problem!

  • I use nist 2.00a to set the time on my machines and it has a y2k problem.

    NIST reports the year as 00 ... nist 2.00a has code in it to set the year ahead by 10 if it's less than 90 ...

    This makes it report the year as 1910. simple change is to fix nistserver.c so it adds 100 instead of 10, and y2k works fine.

  • Some website glitches were captured by the folks at Memepool [memepool.com]. Currently (11:58 PST, 01 Jan 2000) their top story. There's also an older one with some stuff dated 1900 at the MS website.
  • I'm thinking he had a y2k problem [userfriendly.org]. heheh I wonder if he did an ascii rotation of characters (maybe rot13), I think I'll go try and translate this before tommorow :)

  • I like my paragraphs to start and end where I lay them!

    But of course you can decide where paragraphs start and end in HTML (I've done so now). And its dead simple, just use a P, and a /P tag to bound your paragraphs. With HTML you can also emphasize things using italics, and boldface, which is actually a lot neater than _bold_ and /italics/... but this you probably knew already :)

    Actually a lot of people do use HTML to cite others, and to insert clickable links.

  • Good trilogy you are quoting :-)

    I participated in the set at universal studios.
    --
    Leonid S. Knyshov
    Network Administrator
  • - in Lille, France the Metro system has been down for at least 2 days.. no reason given, so I dunno if it's a y2k bug or not...

    - customers of Eplus, a German cellular phone company, could not use France Telecom or Bouygtel as a roaming provider after 1/1/00... officially not a y2k bug, but the "workaround" given by the service rep was so lame, I am pretty sure it was a y2k issue.


    Can you guess where I was for new year? ;-)

    Otherwise the world's still in the same fucked-up state as it was when I last read Slashdot/the news.. Yeltsin resigned? My....
  • To me, the dali clock doing something strange... Just seems so fitting. They didn't call it the Dali clock for nothing. You would think that if you name it after Salvadore Dali it would be expected to do something strange. Isn't that what surrealism is all about?

    _joshua_
  • That was reported on CNN. I saw the whole thing. Some problem with a clutch or something.

    Very neat looking wheel, BTW.. They got it running yet?

    ---
  • Well, CNN had their 2000 coverage, and they showed midnight hitting in every timezone.. anyway, they were laughing about the wheel not working when everyone thought it did. However, it sounded more like they _decided_ not to turn it on for safety reasons, because a precheck had revealed a problem with a clutch on one of the spinning bits or something. No details anyway. I don't remember them saying anything about a fizzle when the guy tried to turn it on.. Pretty funny anyway.

    ---
  • I can use the rest of the system (albeit, slowly) - then that's a strange defintition of a "lock up"

    If you are rebooting because your system performance has been affected by a crashed userland application, this is a Bad Thing.

    It may not strictly be a lock-up, but it seems to me to be very poor behaviour on the part of your operating system to have the performance of other system services be impared in this fashion. Suppose you were running a server under fairly heavy load and this happened? All of your users would be adversely affected by this, and you DON'T have the ability to reboot - you have to wait for however long it takes Task Manager to catch up with the problem.

  • Computers store numbers in binary, not decimal

    But humans don't. A large fragment of code written has been written by humans. Furthermore, people have been spotted doing data entry - and rumour goes they use a decimal number system for their data entry. But that's just rumours. I'm sure your credit card has a binary number, and an expire date in binary. And could you repeat your birthday again, in binary please?

    -- Abigail

  • Just wanted to add my thanks to you guys (and girls) out there who DID spend countless hours making sure we'd have heat and light and water on New Year's Day.

    I've always wondered about that. Even if a heat or light system would have a Y2K bug, why would that mean it no longer would provide us with water or heat? Is the system coded in such a way that it thinks 1900 is a very warm year all around, and noone needs heating? Or that people in 19100 no longer need water? What kind of dating bug would actually lead to a shutdown of a system - in such a way that a manual override doesn't work either?

    I'm curious.

    -- Abigail

  • I put up a mirror of the "Y2K" page: http://www.dougal.org/2600.html
  • It's now well into the first day of the new Millennium for those of us in 'lil old England. We haven't had any major problems (yet), however, remember that most people are not working today so there could be problems around the corner. Did anyone else notice how badly the BBC covered the Millennium "Bug". They were plain wrong in most cases, trying to create public histeria. Anyway, I'm off to finish my lunch, have a great Y2K all, Jonathan.
  • That had to give those people at home a good chill.

    Imagine the scenario. A family, gathered around the TV to watch the ball drop. "3.....2....1...." and then nothing but a bright glow from the now snowy tv.

    heh heh.
  • sounds like a lock up to me..... unresponsiveness, that is.
  • I'm using Tardis 2000 1.1 in Win98 and it is getting the time correctly from both tick.usno.navy.mil and tock.usno.navy.mil. It is 6:10pm EST, so maybe they came back in the last hour and a half.

    -Barry
  • hype = relentless in the leet0 media

    stop watching so much tv and free your mind
  • Tin supplied with Debian Slink thinks all the newsgroups in active are new (in NNTP mode). Tin supplied with potato crashes when it reads its configs. Anyone else notice?
  • Working as a computer tech in jan 99 we had a flood of people comming into our shop with computer that "wouldn't boot" after they tried a "Y2K" test that some local news media suggested. Some of the computers were pentiums but don't think that we had any PII's. Any way the best was a coach at a local high school who set his clock in BIOS and watched the screen shut off when it hit roll-over.

  • "all the IT and CompSCI people out there weren't really worried"

    I'm kind of offended at your arrogant post that implies that all the IT and CompSci types are clueless and that the wonderful "engineers, technicians and programmers" are the only ones who understood and sorted out the problems. There are thousands of clued up CompSci types who understood the problems and worked their butts off preparing systems for Y2K, fixing problems BEFORE THEY HAPPENED; the problems were VERY REAL for them, and they are just as deserving of praise as you guys who do embedded systems etc.

    I'm sorry if you ran into a few arrogant clueless CompSci people, but don't form any generalisations from that. There are plenty of arrogant clueless engineers too.

  • Watch out for your crappy old bios/RTC. Some were found to have date errors known as the Crouch Echlin effect [intranet.ca]. You may not see a problem for two or three weeks.
  • I'm out of this business by 2038...

    ah, the time.h bug. It'll be even harder to explain to idiots too...
    "Clocks will be weird" vs. "It just won't work..."

  • I've seen a few posts from people talking about the phone system "hiccuping" at the stroke of midnight, and attributing the failure to Y2K. I'd like to share my experience.

    Our NOC was fully staffed through the date change, to keep our customers informed and monitor any possible DoS attacks or other problems. Sure enough, just after midnight the majority of our POTS voice lines puked.

    It was easy enough to say "Ahh, man, of course, it's GTE, they forgot to check some equipment" or something along those lines.

    After fighting with GTE all night, we finally get a truck to come at 7AM this morning. Before the tech even looked at our equipment, he knew what the problem was.

    You know those idiots that proudly shoot their guns in the air to celebrate the new year at midnight, forgetting that what comes up must come down? Apparently it is fairly common for the bullets, on the way down, to knock out telephone service by hitting the copper lines on the poles.

    It's a good thing that there weren't any Y2K-network issues, otherwise we could have had a disaster... the lines won't be fixed until Monday.

    Funny... we thought of everything to make sure we'd be up and online through the night. At least we thought we did. :-)
  • did anyone find any "strange" behaviour in other programs?

    Well the older version of tin is convinced every newsgroup is a new group. The newer versions have a tendencey to end up in a "Reading attributes file..." loop
  • I have a worse one. Relative calls at 6 AM asking if phones and power are working. My response: I hung up. Then he calls back at 8 to see if everything is okay, saying that he had trouble getting hold of me earlier. Oh well, stupidity always rears its ugly head.
  • Or you could see what havoc it causes...
    Aparently it confuses IE. I don't see this as a problem. Also isn't it mentioned in one of the RFCs that this is going to happen so the clients must be able to deal with it?

  • Can you think of any better way to get one heck of a nice grant than to be the only country in the world to have lots of major problems with y2k? I bet the US state dept is currently offering them lots of aid. Looks like Gambian is in for an inrush of new funds.

  • Taco (Score:2)

    by pudge ( 3605 )
    Please. Most overhyped event in years? If it were not hyped at or near the level it was, we would have seen disasters. Call it the most useful hype in years.
  • Is this thing an orphan?

    Kari Hurtta at the Finnish Meteorological Institute has been maintaining a patched version of Elm for a while; here's a page with his patches [ozone.fmi.fi].

  • Try filling the gas tank.
    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • I'm making this reason up off the top of my head so I don't guarantee its accuracy :)

    Say the software is only expecting dates from 1980 onwards. Then the Y2k bug hits and gives it a date of 1900. This figure is way out of the ballpark.

    If the software is well written, it should see that this is the case and raise an error and maybe stop working. However, this is not always the case and maybe the software performs no check for a valid date - it simply takes whatever is passed to it - in this case, the year 1900.

    Now because the date is so wrong to what the software is expecting, it may cause the software to act unpredictably - maybe it might write data to the wrong memory area, cause a stack overflow etc.

    Bingo - the whole system malfunctions.

    So the Y2k problem is not so much that the system uses dates, but that it also might cause a system with minimal error checking to behave unpredictably.

  • Field Marshall Stack dun said:

    Was it a slow busy or a fast busy? Generally, if the reason you're getting the busy signal is because of too many people using the phone network, rather than the line you're calling actually being busy, the busy signal tone will beep much faster.

    First off, it was a slow busy (literally as if half the connection had dropped); on my end the phone literally hung up, whilst on my dad's side the line was still on (in other words, it thought it still had a connection).

    Secondly, I know how Bellsouth's lines tend to behave during busy traffic periods (for example, after the tornado that hit the Mt. Washington area); you will either get a fast busy or you will get a message stating all circuits are busy (I had tried to call my folks to let them know I was ok and making sure they were ok; they live close to Brooks, where the tornado touched down, and I was in the Mount Washington area where the tornado caused F4 damage around a mile northeast of us). Same for when we had a severe snowstorm in 1994 that knocked many of the power and phone lines down (people were asked to stay off the phones, and when the circuits got too busy you either got fast busy signals or "all circuits are busy" messages).

    You did not get such funkiness as the phone line hanging up across HALF the connection (which is what it literally did), tying up the phone line to an extent it was impossible to connect to the other side till te circuit finally realised it had hung up on my end. Also, the slow busys were on attempts to RECONNECT; before 7 pm EST we had made a successful call to my husband's folks, and I had begun the call to my folks just before 7 pm EST (which was when the phone hung up and I got slow busy signals).

    Furthermore, we had no problems after that point in trying to contact friends whom we were visiting for New Year's, at that.

    Furthermore YET, this was at 7 pm EST, not at midnight EST. Nobody reported problems before that time, and I've heard of no problems (save for some stuff with international calls over Bellsouth's circuits, around midnight EST) after that time. It was just the momentary, two-minute hork RIGHT at 7 pm EST (which would be 0000 GMT 1 January 2000); that, and that alone (well, that combined with having witnessed a lot of Bellsouth incompetence and having had to deal with it firsthand to the point that every day I pray to God/Goddess/Cthulhu/[random deity here] that someone else comes in to break Hellsouth's monopoly on phone service--been trying to get bad lines fixed out here for over a YEAR which affect my entire apartment complex AND a major mall, and Bellsouth STILL refuses to admit it's their problem) that made me suspect it could've been a Y2K burp.

    I'm prolly gonna check with my sister (who works at a telco) over the next few days to see what sorta funkiness could've caused those symptoms...I've certainly never had the phone lines behave like THAT, though. Not even in Bristol, TN during fall Winston Cup racing weekend (and trust me...it is pretty damned close to impossible to place a call in or out of Bristol on that weekend...even by pay phone, much less cell phones). :P

  • http://www.abc.net. au/news/newslink/nat/newsnat-2jan2000-19.htm [abc.net.au]

    The small West African nation of Gambia has emerged as one of the only countries in the world to be seriously affected by power blackouts and other disruptions in the New Year.

    The International Y2K Cooperation Centre, based in the US, says the Gambian energy sector experienced significant power outages while air and sea transportation, the financial sector and government services have been crippled.

    Failures have been reported in the Gambian Treasury Department, the National Tax Service and at the Customs Service.

    [More at URL... [abc.net.au]]

  • I bet the US state dept is currently offering them lots of aid
    Why? Do they have a lot of oil?
  • This happens in both the old and new dclock, too. Rather funny, I think. I really should patch that and give the author a little help. I didn't get the wierd xdaliclock bug, but it does think the year is 0 (rather than 00). Not sure if that's a bug or feature. But other than that, everything works fine.

    Just for spite I decided to turn on my laptop at about 11pm for a couple hours, simply because everyone was saying how "you should turn your computer off until after midnight!" Bah! Linux didn't care. Python didn't care. Emacs didn't care. So pffft! to them :P :)

  • Computers store numbers in binary, not decimal...

    That is not true for all computers. Many older and slower computers use BCD for dates and times. If you are programming an 8-bit microprocessor without hardware multiply/divide, it is easier and more efficient to use BCD. If you need to display or print the date/time, a BCD digit can be converted into an ASCII character with a single addition operation. BCD is also easier for humans who are examining hexadecimal core dumps and packet dumps. Serial time codes such as IRIG-B and NASA-36 are also in BCD format.

  • Yes, I'm also starting to get annoyed with the "Oh well, it was just a lot of hype" attitude.

    This illustrates a real problem in the software world, if you *really* need to know that something is going to work, it takes a tremendous effort to get there, and you're never really 100% sure you've got it right.

    This problem isn't going to go away, even if the Y2K (and the 2038?) problems are declared dead issues.

    (Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)

  • There are some reports filtering in on the
    redhat-talk mailing list about PCs with older
    BIOSes that are refusing to boot now.

    Don't assume that everything is okay on your
    box until after you've rebooted. If you wanted
    to be really paranoid, you'd first check the
    website of the company that made your mother
    board, download any BIOS upgrades, and install
    them before reboothing.

    (Me, I upgraded my BIOS about a year ago, so I'll
    probably just cross my fingers....)

  • I'm offended too. After working hard to ensure that my sites are Y2K compliant (prevention is better than cure) I now have to contend with a bunch of short-sighted managers saying that Y2K actually turned out to be a waste of resources.

    The fact is that if we hadn't made the changes to our systems and infrastructure we would be in a real pickle now.

    Oh well.... time to try to educate.
  • I was just amazed at how badly the BBC did anything. 29.5hrs of continual Millennium coverage
    (uninterrupted for anything execpt Eastenders - have to keep those ratings up).
    Who really wanted to watch it all?
    At least ITV didn't do their usual copycat trick by mirroring everything auntie does.

    iain

  • This is no Y2k bug, it's merely that your wtmp file has been rotated or wiped, so the last login is listed as the Unix Epoch (the date you state is precisely Thu Jan 01, 1970 at midnight UTC, i.e. the Unix Epoch).

    It happens to me all the time (because I rotate my wtmp files faster than I should, I guess). Except that since I'm in the +0100 time zone, the date printed is more immediately recognizable as the Unix Epoch.

  • Well, all my messages going out via elm (my primary mailreader) are sent from the year 100. Great. I've got the word "fool" stamped on all my messages. And, there hasnt been an update for elm in ages. Is this thing an orphan?

    Guess I have to dig into the code to save face.
  • I really appreciate it! I wish I could mod you up!
  • I thought about that response, and since it's a geek's primary responisbility to educate others (thus boosting his/her own self image), I didn't like my answer...

    The 8080 used 8 bit words. The 8088 used 8 bit external bus and internally was 16 bit. Thus any interface it had with other hardware was 8 bit.

    A lot of PLC equipment is still based on this standard. Thus the hardware (Input/Ouput cards) communicate with the main processor on an 8 bit backplane.

    8 bits give you a maximum integer value of 255. Therefore a year like 1987 won't fit. The best you can do is save the last two digits (ie. 87).

    The only fix to this problem was changing the hardware... no software fix available.

    Make Sense?

    (I guess I didn't want you to do the math after all.)
  • Even though you could see the digits at the base of the ball spell out "2000" before they lit up, I was desperately hoping that when midnight hit, they would actually light up "1900" instead.

    /Everybody/ would get /that/ joke.
  • ?Yes I do!? "No - I don't."
    That's nice. It almost look Spanish. :-)
    Do you think so? Yes, I do!
    Here's the best explanation [www.hut.fi] on the terrible issue of using MS-HTML in regular postings.

  • (Sometimes you hear computer science-types speculate about the possibility of automatic software validation, i.e. the possibility of developing a new language where it's possible to mathematically prove that your software is is correct. I'm not holding my breath.)

    Me neither. Consider:

    Suppose you have an automatic software validation system. It will require as input a specification of the correct behavoir of the software, in a formal language that it can parse. Rendering the specification into the formal language amounts to writing a program. How do you prove THAT is correct?

    Therefore a general formal correctness prover is impossible. You micht be able to automatically prove that two expressions of a program are equivalent, or that a particular program matches a particular formal specification. But you can't prove that the program is "correct".

    Which is not to say that such tools are useless. I have yet to see a method of testing a program that doesn't amount to expressing the program and/or its requirements in two languages - as distinct as possible - and then comparing the two. Typically this will be the code versus a human-readable spec, pseudocode, or profuse comments, and the comparison will be done by humans: a team of programmers or software QA engineers. The process might include code walkthroughs, writing and running automated tests, coverage analysis, etc. But an automated tool comparing code against a formal spec would be a very useful labor-saver, or an additional tool in the kit.

    The important thing is that expressing the program in two distinct languages results in two distinct sorts of thinking as the two expressions are written. Most bugs tend to occur only in one of the thinking modes, and are thus exposed when the diverse expressions of the program are compared.

  • After being down with Pneumonia for the three weeks when I INTENDED to do this stuff, I recovered enough to do my Y2K upgrading about Christmas eve.

    So Sun Dec 26 went down to Fry's with the wife and got a copy of Red Hat 6.1 and his-and-hers Compaq 5888s. (Didn't get monitors - had some old ones and am expecting a big price break on LCDs this spring.)

    Loaded Linux onto mine on Mon and started configuring on Tue. Had to patch the ethernet driver to suport the diamond "homenet" / ethernet card. (Stock Red Hat driver is hardcoded to use it in the "homenet" mode - 10-base-T port dead and trying to do a 1Mbps link on the telephone wiring.) Winmodem is dead of course, I don't think the install found the DVD drive (though the CD/R is working), and the power button is software driven so I have to unplug it to shut it down until I get that configured, but it's close enough for now.

    Reason for the migration: I'd been running my home network on an old Sparc with SunOS 4.1.3, and didn't want to drop mail on the floor. Hung an external modem on the serial port. Beat my head against sendmail.cf for a while. Taylor UUCP's automatic config file translator worked beautifully. Finally got it all working and cut over at 9:10 PM New Year's Eve. (Had also copied all the files from the SunOS to the new machine for safekeeping and salvage. Old disk was 2G and hitting the wall. Whole thing takes up Shut everything down (to guard against crossing-the-boundary bugs) and went out to party.

    1/1/2000 turned things back on again - and discovered that shutting down had been the last straw for the old Mitac monitor. B-( Horizontal oscilator won't even start with the video in 640x480 mode. (Played musical monitors to check that the computer was OK.)

    So back to Fry's and dropped another $400 plus tax on a new 19" Princeton Ultra95e. (NICE, SHARP display. Time to get new glasses so I can take advantage of it.)

    The most annoying part, of course, is that SunOS 4.1.3 came up fine and said the date was Jan 1 2000. So it probably would have kept working well enough to handle the mail after all.

    Oh, well. At least it gave me an excuse to cut the whole home network over to an Open Source OS and my workstation to a 700 Mhz Athlon.

  • (Not an attack- I'm genuinely curious:)

    Even on small systems like that, how could Y2K be a problem? Computers store numbers in binary, not decimal, and with the number of bits required to store two BCD digits (that is, 8) you could also store any number between 0 and 255 in a straight binary representation, which would put the Y2K threat on New Year's Day 2156. So why is it that the problem would have happened yesterday?
  • Well spotted - had to look again to see it - I take it that you *really* do read the comics, not just skim through them like some of us :)
  • To the people who say "See, Y2K was all bullshit!" :

    If you're thinking Y2K was all hype and a load of crap, etc, then you obviously had nothing to do with it or only experienced your own small part. As usual, in these kind of cases, extrapolation to the "whole world" from your small experience is incorrect!

    Over the past two years, I worked at the corporate level for a major telecoms company, a state government transport department (trains, buses, etc), a major insurer, a union and a medical education institute. I also advised numerous clients and even wound up digging into software I'd written "on the side." (YUK! :)

    All I can say is that had we done nothing, the phones would have slowly ground to a halt, billing would have been screwed, premiums incorrect, etc etc. Y2K was real and it was only the efforts put in that have resulted in the "anticlimax" that we have experienced to date.

    Don't forget, it's still early days yet. Small to medium business hasn't returned from holidays, the Leap Year is still to be passed, end of Financial Year calculations, etc etc etc. The show isn't over and won't be for some time. We still also have the Unix/C epoch date (2038 - yes?) and fixes for all those "windowed" solutions (eg: = 30 = 1999) - what happens in 20 years when that code is still in use? :)

    'Scuse the ranting - just that it burns me a bit to see all the "Told ya so's!"...
  • that behaviour in xdaliclock looks more like a planted easteregg than an actual bug... the behaviour really is bizarre. i doubt it's a malfunction.

    on that note, did anyone find any "strange" behaviour in other programs? i was expecting windows to do something strange, but apart from crashing as usual, it seems normal. anyone find any other y2k easter eggs in other programs?

    Fross


  • My parent's 486's BIOS has a problem with Y2K. I can set the year in the BIOS, via DOS prompt, or via Windows and it will report the date as 2094 upon booting. Oh well, I'll write a ASM program that will run on bootup...
  • i was expecting windows to do something strange, but apart from crashing as usual, it seems normal.

    That's an interesting observation.
    How is one supose to tell, exactly, if the one-a-day-BSOD is y2k related or not?

    For what it's worth, I got a phone call from my uncle who left a message on my machine at a little past midnight last night, telling me that his windows box 'has that blue screen again' and asked if he should wait till the next day to reboot.

    _________________________

  • Three cable TV systems in Alabama failed at the stroke of midnight.

  • Limited experience leads to blase attitudes (Score:3)

    by dustpuppy ( 5260 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @07:47AM (#1424136)
    Sorry to add a 'me-too' post, but I feel exactly the same way.

    I was so sick of people saying the definitely nothing would go wrong and everything would be fine. Sure in the end that was the case - but that is with hindsight and after all the effort that was put in beforehand.

    Looking at the posts about various systems still up and running, many of them seem to be of the sort: "Hey, Windows/Linux/whatever is still running on my desktop - bah, I knew that the Y2k bug was all hype."

    Having worked in both the engineering and enterprise IT industries, I have worked with many many large systems, and you are right redtoade, many systems are old and archaic ... and also essential in the day to day operation of the business.

    Collegues who have worked with me in the past year on the Y2k problem anticipated that the transition would be a fizzer (ie quiet) after all the work that they had done, but no-one would be so naive to claim that Y2k was all hype.

    These comments come from guys on the front line. Most people don't have this experience and extrapolate their limited experience to the rest of the world - ie. it was easy to check my system, the rest of the world will be fine.

    As redtoade pointed out, many systems failed during testing and it is only through all the preventative efforts that there were no problems on the night.

    How anyone could certain that nothing would go wrong is beyond me. Sure, one could be quietly confident (especially after all the effort that was put in), but to be absolutely certain?!? I still shake my head at the number of people who think that the Y2k bug was all scam and groundless hype.

  • Well, it seems the worst that happened with me and Y2K (besides the 19100 bug on several sites--right now that seems to be the most common bug, which is probably a Good Thing) was a rather odd little hiccup that occured around midnight GMT (I'm in Eastern time, btw)...

    I'm calling my folks to let them know I'm off and to wish them early Happy New Year's and all that so they don't get all worried about Y2K and all.

    Upon which--mysteriously--the phone hangs up. I try redialing for a good five minutes. Phone line is busy (really damn weird...because my folks have call waiting, and the LAST time the phone line gave busies there was when the tornado hit in the Brooks/Mt. Washington area just south of Louisville in 1995).

    I finally get through..."Dad, did you hang up?" "No...I thought YOU hung up..." Both of us are counting this down to a momentary fart on the part of Bellsouth Kentucky, aka the one phone company in English-speaking North America that makes US Worst actually look good. :)

    "Bellsouth reporting no problems", my arse. :) At least in Kentucky, I'm fairly sure the phone lines did hiccup...then again, the phone lines are generally wonky here... :)

  • Raditation Monitors (Score:3)

    by winterstorm ( 13189 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @05:30AM (#1424138)
    Here is a story about the radiation monitors glitch: http://www.mercurycenter.com/asia/docs/074403.htm

    I bet this made a few people's hearts beat faster when it happened.

  • Re:peace and quiet (Score:3)

    by MikeBabcock ( 65886 ) <mtb-slashdot@mikebabcock.ca> on Saturday January 01, 2000 @06:32AM (#1424139) Homepage Journal
    I'm with you ... I didn't have to do any ASM recoding this year, but I have to agree with your stance. Many people have asked me if Y2K was over hyped. I usually say 'yes and no' -- that is, it wasn't hyped enough to get businesses to react as quickly as they should have (upper management) but it was hyped too much as an end of the world scenario (bunkers and food stores and the like).

  • Re:User Friendly... (Score:3)

    by dsplat ( 73054 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @11:49AM (#1424140)
    Did anyone else notice the copyright date? [userfriendly.org] My only complaint about the rot13 is that there is no tool I know from automatically decrypting a comic strip. I had to type it into Emacs and M-x toggle-rot13-mode. Please, nobody make any nasty comments about the fact that I obviously have no aversion to typing.

  • You have new mail. (Score:3)

    by billh ( 85947 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @07:33AM (#1424141)
    I would hope so, after thirty years. I SSH2'd into my web server this morning, and found this little gem:

    Last login: Wed Dec 31 1969 19:00:00 -0500

    Unfortunately, you can't fool uptime:

    12:32pm up 46 days, 21:03, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

    I was stuck at work during the rollover, and the only real problem we had was a fax server thinking that it was in the year 1899. And the countdown screensaver we've had for more than two years finally crashed.

  • Despite the fact that these reside at MSNBC, here are the two sites I've found most usefull in watching and tracking this non-event

    Y2K World Dispatches [msnbc.com]

    Y2K Security Tracker [msnbc.com]

    One of my favorites from the World Dispatches was:

    LONDON, Jan. 1 -- One of the few Y2K alerts in England was a boy who cut the cables to his PC because he thought bugs were trying to crawl in.


    ---------
    Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?

  • For Those of Us that Had to Work Dec 31... (Score:4)

    by Diamond Slicer ( 39462 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @05:32AM (#1424143) Journal
    For those of us that had to work Dec 31, y2k is real.

    In the sense that:
    All phones now forward to bosses office.
    For somewierd reason random computers had thier bios changed to longer recognize the hard drive.
    You now have the best chair in the office.
    Various settings on computers are screwed up.
    You have uninstalled solitare on bosses computer (going to enjoy him debating wether to ask tech to reinstall just so he play game and look like a fool or just sit there)
    Quake III is now what loads if you click on any shortcut (in WinNT)
    The clocks are all an hour slow.
    People have random meetings scheduled in there planners that they left on the desks.
    Backgrounds on monitors show the boss and his secretery... involved in a rare act that his wife would kill to find out.

    So bosses out there... the lowly computer programmers you made work Dec 31 - New Years Day... Have gotten thier revenge... muahahhahahhaha
    (currently figuring out to change building security code)

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @07:35AM (#1424144)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 2600 Weirdness (Score:4)

    by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @05:10AM (#1424145) Homepage Journal
    Here's what it looked like at 2600 earlier:

    Internal Server Error
    The date specified (01-01-1900) is impossible. If you have forced this
    error condition, you may be in violation of state, federal, and/or civil
    laws. Those outside the United States should check with their respective
    governments concerning their country's extradition treaty. Dissemination
    of this error is also strictly prohibited.


    If you believe you have received this message in error, please reload
    the page and try again.



    Pretty odd, eh?

    --Mike--

  • A summary . . (Score:4)

    by Money__ ( 87045 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @05:38AM (#1424146)
    I've saved a few pages with date glitches and thought I would post them here for all interested. This has got to be one of the most overhyped non-stories in a long time.
    With false american pride I ask . . .Who do I sue? ;)

    Here we go:

    From the Auckland International Airport Limited we have this little date jem:
    Y2K Update
    Dated 02:58 1 Jan 100
    Auckland Airport Confirms Business as Usual

    From the bury-your-head-in-the-sand-till-it-goes-away dept., we have this one from audiusa.com
    Sorry, we have temporarily disabled this module. "While Audiusa.com is fully prepared for Y2K and beyond, we wanted to keep our databases clear of the millennium madness everyone seems to be talking about.

    From www.tvtoday.de/tv we have this little assending date snafu jem:
    Samstag, 01.01.100

    Then from the people at pleaseread.com we have another assending date from hell:
    Saturday, January 01, 19100
    Award-winning text-to-speech software applications utilizing
    the best technologies in the world.
    (Editors note: Best technology? they can't count to 99 ;)

    And from the make-it-stop-make-it-stop dept.
    we find AllAdvantage.com thinks the best way to comply is to not partisipate:
    Happy Y2K from AllAdvantage.com!
    As a precautionary measure, we've disconnected our servers from the Internet and are watching the millennial date change from the sidelines.

    Most of these small errors (19100) are caused by one small piece (printf("19%d", tm->tm_year);) of sloppy code (as previously posted on /. [slashdot.org]). While these little didbits make for a good laugh, I'm happy to see that non of them add up to the 'show stopper' everyone has been hyping. Happy New Year!
    _________________________

  • Countdown error (Score:5)

    by OrigamiSlayer ( 21319 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @07:00AM (#1424147)
    Anyone else notice the countdown error during the ball drop in times Square? As they started counting down minutes and seconds, it would display 15:01, 14:00, 14:59. It did this all the way to midnight. And Sam Donaldson said nothing was wrong.

  • peace and quiet (Score:5)

    by redtoade ( 51167 ) on Saturday January 01, 2000 @05:48AM (#1424148) Homepage Journal
    I'm kind of offended at the tons of posts saying:
    "NOTHING HAPPENED!!! See, I told you so."

    I'm sure all the IT and CompSCI people out there weren't really worried about any Y2K stuff... but we control systems engineers (level 1 production types) were terrified of it.

    Anxious as we were, we tried to get management to fund an inspection of all systems... and since management is usually made up of non-geek types, there was no way to squeeze a penny out of them for what they felt was unneeded computer work.

    BUT, thank God for all of the Y2K hype!!! If management hadn't seen Dan Rather explaining (in small terms) what the possibilities for Y2K were, we wouldn't have received time and funding to inspect our systems.

    So after 7 or 8 of my clients found 85% of their systems to NOT function after a clock change to Y2K, we spent MILLIONS of dollars this year to fix them PRIOR to the actual event. These weren't Intel based processors mind you... these were Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and older Distributed Control Systems (DCSs), some even based on Z80 and 8080 technology. The industrial/manufacturing world is still decades behind in it's control systems... so while you guys are lounging in your linux alphas... we're still doing machine code.

    I guess what I'm saying is Y2K was VERY REAL for us... and you can thank the thousands of engineers, technicians and programmers who fixed the problems BEFORE THEY HAPPENED for a very quiet new year's eve.

    Happy New Year everyone.

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