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Peter de Jager: Where Is He Now? 82

Posted by Hemos from the y2k-all-over-again dept.
Saint Aardvark writes "The National Post has an article posted about Peter de Jager, the Canadian computer consultant who helped publicise Y2K. He's taken the post-letdown criticism pretty hard, pointing out that he wrote in 1998 that the problem was effectively solved. It's a fascinating read."
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Peter de Jager: Where is he now? More

Peter de Jager: Where is he now?

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  • An AC in the other Y2K thread said he felt sorry for Pete, and wanted to send him a thank you note.

    My initial reaction was "+1, gracious", but then I realized I'm not a moderator, and that rating doesn't exist, and also, the AC didn't include Peter's email address.

    So: pdejager@year2000.com

    And, as I said when I posted it in that thread [slashdot.org], I realize it's a little sappy and superfluous, but why not counteract a little gratuitous hate mail? Especially 'round the holiday season ("You see, Peter, you really DID have a wonderful life").

    (promise, I'm not drunk, really, I'm a Mormon).


    --
  • These programs were written by smart people back when memory was ferrite cores with wires threaded through them by hand, which meant that it was at a considerable premium, with none to be wasted on those 2 extra digits which weren't expected to change. If any of them had been smart enough to realize that their code would still be in use 30 years later they still couldn't have convinced the people above them. My old XT case wasn't designed to accomodate ATX, LPX, NLX, or the next flavor of the week factor motherboards and the board itself doesn't have any DIMM sockets. This doesn't mean that the IBM engineers were idiots, but I don't think Big Blue's upper managemnet would have been very receptive to the idea of spending who knows how much to turn out a PC that wouldn't need replacing 20, 30, or 40 years later.

    Suddenly I feel a century older.

  • This demonstrates the media's love of championing stories which make for good copy, and then throwing them away with the people who were involved when it suits them. Peter de Jager is just one of the many on whose backs media empires are built.
  • My bad.

    http://www.gsp.com/2038/ [gsp.com] states 19 Jan 2038 at 03:14:07 as the rollover date.

  • What happened to Gary North? His site [garynorth.com] seemed to be pretty popular in the months leading up to Y2K--it even had a good parody at garysouth.com (but it's gone now). Today, his site is still up and predicts doom. After Y2K came and went, I kept waiting for him to take down what he has and put up something saying "I was wrong; I'm a dumbass," but, alas, it hasn't happened yet.
  • Please note that those countries and companies that spent very little on "Y2K compliance" had about as many problems as the USA and Canada and those banks and airlines that went through all the nonsense.

    At the same time, note that countries that spent little money on Y2K are substantially less computerized than the US. For example Russia spent very little in y2k compliance for their nuclear reactors...because they are not computer controlled!!!

  • She's letting so much precious man-chowder go to waste!

  • fucken hell, man, that's really harsh! where ever did you get such crazy ideas?

    :::
  • For God's sake why is that relevant? I could've used any disease and any drug. You know what I was attemping to imply.

    Cheers,
    Daniel.

    --

    Daniel Zeaiter
    daniel@academytiles.com.au
    http://www.academytiles.com.au

  • What do these things have in common? They're all things noone appreciates until something goes wrong.

    No one surviving a shipwreck appreciates that all the life jackets were there and in good order. They noticed when they weren't there when the Titanic sunk.

    You do a good job and everyone and their dog says, "Well I guess you don't need as much funding next time". You botch a job and everyone screams and hollars that you botched it.

    Makes you understand why govt works the way it does. If you're efficient this year and get a bit lucky and nothing unforseen goes horridly wrong, next year they give you less money to do your job... then next year Murphy clocks in early and works overtime and you get called out because you're over budget. So what do you do? When you're a month shy of the end of year you look at the money you've got and find something to spend it on. I've seen the most STUPID things bought in the last month of a budget cycle, just so that the money is all gone so they can ask for the same number of buckets next year.

    Tape backups, same thing. You keep backups running perfectly for years. Data gets restored off a well organized tape library, and hopefully you can continue to run a GFS rotation because noone cuts your tape replacement budget. However, the moment something goes wrong (because the beancounters cut your tape budget most likely), WELL! everyone from the top rung down to the janitor is looking for your head on a platter.

    Emergancy Measures Org (Canada's cival disaster group, largely volenteer) goes the same way... money is often hard to find, but when something goes down the tubes (they were on standby for Y2K too I believe) they are Johny on the spot.

    What worries me with the Y2K thing is the next technodisaster (and there will be one, I don't know what it will be yet, but in an infinate universe I'm sure it'll suprise me :)) to come along and we'll get hit with the crying wolf stuff. Well we didn't cry wolf. We stopped the traffic before it drove into the river under the broken bridge. It irritates me that not only Peter, but all the rest of us, the technically literate of society are being tarred with this brush. He just got an extra large helping of tar.

    He's one of societies unsung heros. Too bad, society needs heros.

    --
    Remove the rocks to send email
  • You got that right as far as the .com scams....just last night was remarking how "nothing went wrong" last year when we were all monitoring the change at the medical center I work at; however big $ were spent to ensure that.
  • Here's a link to a story [salon.com] I just read at Salon.com - about a train in Norway that wouldn't start because of a belated Y2K date problem. Seems it went to 31/12/00!

    'nuff said.
  • The real point is that de Jaeger wasn't really a doomsayer. He was saying for two years PRIOR to 2000 that the problem was basically licked. If he was really a shyster he could have spent those two years making a @^*%-load of money and REALLY cashing in.

    *shrug* He should have sold the web site. This crap he's taking now would be a lot more tolerable with a few more zeroes at the end of his bank account.
  • If you go beyond the first two opening screens on Gary North's website, you'll find this statement from him about why the website's still up:

    This Website contains over 6,000 documents on Y2K. I began posting links to these documents in January of 1997.

    Many of these links are now dead. The original sources have been removed. The only public records of these documents are the summaries on this site.

    For researchers on Y2K, this site will remain a primary source. The major search engines are still linked to the documents, page by page.
    For anyone looking into "Y2K and anything else," there will probably be a link to this site on the first or second screen of the search engine.

    I have decided not to take down this site for a while. I want researchers to have access to it.

  • A company can't spend so much money on IT related projects in one year to be strapped for the next two years. Yes, they can shift a bit more money in the budget to IT and then shift it back, and a little more, to other areas the next year, but it isn't plausible that it would so severely effect the IT budget in 2001 that "they don't have any to spend on new stuff they DO need."

    Also keep in mind that any company that did 'intelligent' Y2k systems and infrastructure analysis also got for the first time something very rare in IT: a complete inventory of all hardware and software in the company. The useful Y2k tools were actually IT inventory tools which incorporated stuff like Y2k compliance DBs and hardware testers. Bindview and WRQ did this pretty well IMHO. SMS was, as predicted, shite.

    (I sold my soul to Y2k for about a year.. The money was good but the job was SO DEPRESSING... I was actually running a hardware compliance lab as well as doing checks on shell/perl/VB scripting and 'info resource' knowledge working.. I actually wrote a 'virus' that would infect word/excel/access documents and fix their years to 4-digit years (don't ask about microsoft year digits please, I'm sick to death of the whole thing :p) then resave the data, but my boss was really afraid of it getting loose ;)

    I think PDJ is getting unduly harshly criticized, he did sound the alarm and provide a fairly accurate regular understanding of the problem along the whole period of time of the issue. I personally saw many Y2k issues crop up, I personally fixed many Y2k issues in scripts as well as Perl (and yes, a few of those were of the data corrupting variety, not just cosmetic or display-crashing, imagine backups stopping happening because of a 2-digit date compare.. Stupid, but unfixed life would have SUCKED for awhile.. no documentation, the developer/admin had left years before, the usual clusterfuck...)

    Your Working Boy,
  • If you ask me, we aught to take the inventors of COBOL into the street and shoot them for making such a crappy language. While it's true that this y2k thing could have been caused in any programming language, half of the problem was finding the COBOL programmers to waft through all that all-caps code that's harder than hell to read (not to mention the lovely identifiers). If all that coide was in some language that was more alive, the situation could have been averted even quicker than it was.

  • Not much of a suprise that a microscope would work past Y2K without a glitch. Why the hell is a microscope going to care what the date is? The only devices that can possibly be affected are devices that need the *correct* date. Very frustrating how the media blew the whole thing out of porportion to suggest that any computer controlled device is likely to break because of Y2K.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Glad to hear that your 286 didn't have a problem. I've got an FIC PN-2000 Socket 5 or 7 board (apparently the *only* post 486 board they made without a flashable BIOS) with an Award BIOS chip, and it sets the year to 2094 if you set the year to anything past 1999 or let it rollover to 2000. It even "infected" a "Dallas" type Real-Time Clock chip which in turn infected a different Award BIOS chip which previously didn't have a problem.

    Maybe there was more of a problem to solve than you realize.

  • Come on... I fired up my old `286 after Y2K, I'd owned it since 1990. It worked fine, although it was underpowered. It knew what the date was. 99.9999999% of the Y2K scare was a SCAM. After all, the 3rd world countries that were USING old `286 and `386 hardware didn't have problems.

    We're talking about a 286 or 386 as a "server", and in most cases the workstations sucked more. Also saying that 99.9999999% of the Y2K scare is a scam is BS. There were real issues regarding software that definately were Y2K related, period. Try using LANtastic, Novell 2.x or 3.x without patching, etc.
  • Most of the competent PC techs on Earth hadn't even been born when much of the problem code was written.

    Banks do not run on PCs.
    Air traffic control does not run on PCs.
    Power plants do not run on PCs.

    If you actually think the Y2K problem was what the mass media says it was, then you must know as little about it as they do.

  • The media were looking for another feeding frenzy, and when nothing much happened they went looking for someone to blame for disappointing their audience. It's like the National Enquirer has the high moral ground for journalistic integrity like Larry Flint had the moral high ground regarding Washington's morals. There is no doubt that sensationalism sells, and sells well. Pity the quieter more reasoned voices. Pity us when we cannot hear them.
  • Bzzz... wrong on all counts, except for the glasses, which are not horn-rimmed.

    Why do you find it so hard to believe that de Jager is not a con artist? He isn't. There probably would have been many problems then there were without him and all the subsequent media attention to the Y2K problem. Mind you, I believe that most of the media attention was playing to the fears of the audience and little else, but if it got any companies that weren't working on updating their computers to do so, fine by me.

    And as evidence suggests, it was a necessary fix. I don't really like the way that they solved it, as it just moved the problem back 30 years, but it does give a lot more breathing room. Given that Wall Street's first fix didn't work, that SRS's first fix didn't work, that NASA's first fix didn't work (I could go on) then I'd say that all the attention was needed.

    As for your opinion on my existence: You're not a friend, you're not family. Therefore, I don't care what your opinion is.

    Just my 2 shekels.

    Kierthos
    (Is it just me, or are some people taking /. too seriously these days?)
  • Am I the only person here who doesn't bother celebrating New Years?
    Last year was almost slightly interesting....
    stayed up til 4 am (pst) the morning of dec 31/99 just curious if any glitches would appear in some of the first few timezones to cross over.
    New Years in the local time zone I didn't even bother keeping track of..... I was surfing the net when I heard some fireworks in the distance and realized it must be midnight.
    The only thing even remotely connected to the end of the year that I do is watching air farce (about the only good thing on Canadian tv imho)
    Parties and all are great but if there's any counting/'happy new years' type of stuff going on count me out

  • Y2K post mortem (Score:3)

    by Minupla ( 62455 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `alpunim'> on Monday January 01, 2001 @03:15AM (#538978) Homepage Journal
    here [year2000.com] is a link to a fairly insightful Y2K post mortem. It addresses several of the arguments being made by media about why it was all unneeded.

    I wonder why the media pundants didn't make a huge amount of money selling Y2K insurance if it was so obvious that there was no problem? That's what insurance companies do, they make money by performing risk assesments and setting a price that covers the risk. Noone was selling Y2K insurance (unless you could pretty much prove you'd fixed all your y2k probs :)).

    Noone knew how the book was gonna end till it ended. Anyone who tells you otherwise was selling something :). Like I told my clients pre-98, 'If I told you that on Jan 1, 2000 there was a 1 in 100 chance of an earthquake, would you stake your company on the other 99 chances, or would you do some disaster prep?'

    I know I solved a couple of handfuls of show stoppers for clients.


    --
    Remove the rocks to send email

  • Here's a man who spent ten years of his life standing up for what he believed to be a genuine problem, didn't sell out, and managed to get the momentum rolling for the world to solve this problem. And the media turns on him because this worked too well.

    And what do I hear on slashdot? "It was a hoax." "We would have been better off saving months of productivity by not fixing it." "This was a scam that ruined the market." "Nothing was publicized as wrong in less technically inclined areas(according to standard American ignorance of other countries) so therefore it was all a big con." And so on.

    What a truly sad, depressing world we live in.

  • I've already run into problems with financial applications using 32 bit dates that run out in 2038, unbelievably. With one application I found that we couldn't enter a bond that expired past Jan or Feb 2038 (I worked out the exact date using a quick C program and confirmed this in the application). So what ? Well, the US treasury issue bonds that redeem in 30 years time. So I suspect the financial industry will see these Y2.038 bugs in 8 years time!
  • Whatever happened to journalistic integrity?
    Reporter getting a pulitzer prize for babbling about the Hindenburg. No prizes for discovering that the fabric coating is what burned.
    O.J. Simpson trial (with freeway chase).
    Botched Florida vote counting (with Ryder truck).
    At least the National Enquirer et. al. are "supposed" to be sensationalistic.
  • Alomex wrote:
    At the same time, note that countries that spent little money on Y2K are substantially less computerized than the US.

    Not universally. Italy, for example, didn't spend 1% of what the USA did on testing or fixing the "Y2K" problem and they are every bit as computerized as the USA and had the same level of problems.

  • One thing you might consider -- many countries (such as Italy) do not have much of an truly independent hardware or software industry. They are part of the general Western economy and largely use American or German software on systems built in France or Britain or the US (all with parts from Taiwan ).

    In fixing Y2K bugs (and I was involved in correcting quite a few real stinkers throughout the 90's) here in the US, we were often fixing them for users all over the world.

  • If you ask me, we aught to take the inventors of COBOL into the street and shoot them for making such a crappy language.

    That would be, among others, Adm Grace Hopper, who was a hell of a lot smarter than you'll ever be.

    You try getting and idea as novel, large and amorphous as a "high level programming language" right on the first try. People are still trying to get it right after nearly fifty years. Remember Fortran I was also godawful bad too. The only language of that vintage that I'd want to program today would be LISP, which was impractically slow for non-research applications in an era when computer time was a precious commodity (imagine doing the payroll for a fortune 1000 company on a computer whose CPU is severely outclassed by a Palm Pilot).

    Try imaginging all those legions of COBOL code grinders if they had to work in assembly. COBOL was supposed to make programming accessible to folks who weren't math freaks; in that sense it was a brilliant success in that many gals from the secretarial pool learned to write COBOL programs from having to keypunch it day in and day out. Of course, they produced programs like you'd expect from people who learned this way, but back in the day (at least in the seventies when I got involved) people with academic knowledge to improve this situation were to snobbish to sully themselves by getting involved with business programming.

    It's easy to mock the mistakes of pioneers using the advantage of hindsight. Take the all-caps issue. The people who started the field didn't have a background in typography or art history. It took programmers decades to figure out that there was more visual entropy in lower case letters; this was pretty good given that it took centuries for calligraphers to come to the same conclusion. Now it's pretty much received wisdom.

    You should be dragged out in the street and whipped with a nanosecond.

  • As part of my life at a previous employer (a well known Fortune 500/single-letter stock symbol on the NYSE [nyse.com] company), I found out that I was supporting a piece of software for a very large contract with another company ... a few days before someone decided to start sending the 2000 model year production units into the database. The previous guy who had supported it had just quit a month or so after the guy who ran the software for three years had quit.

    I did not know the software, nor did I know about that decision (Thanks, Pat!) so the unusually large file that I received that day was processed just like every other file had been. And so the fun began.

    Two days later, when I pieced together the problem, I asked the DBAs to roll back to the Monday-night database backups. That made the situation worse by undoing three days worth of work by the local engineers. So, we had to roll the damaged database back in, and had to recover the lost data the hard way.

    They would build a day's worth of production, and we would put two or three days worth of their missing data back into their system, so we slowly caught back up.

    Five weeks later I gave my notice, and went to work in the I/S shop of a Pizza company.

    Of course, this was a year and a half ahead of the "day" that the media focused on, so the whole thing was easily kept quiet and dusted under the rug. "Nope! No Y2K problems here!". Just like all of those credit card companies that did not handle "02/00" very well, in 1996.

  • Ah, but a LOT of the software out there was in-house developed by corporations, and that happens in Italy (etc) as much as anywhere else. Imho, the commercial apps were not the problem: the badly documented in-house stuff was.


    ---

  • Tru64 Unix already has a 64bit time_t.

  • Yeah, it kinda sucks. (Score:4)

    by Enahs ( 1606 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @06:21PM (#538988) Journal
    I mean, if it hadn't been for his publicity, we'd have probably been watching Dick Clark a year ago dodging 777's. But instead, people worked hard, got the bugs worked out, and instead of patting everyone on the back for what a great job they did, most of what you heard was, "So where the hell's the big disaster? It was all a sham to make money."

    Pfft.
  • You are all going to have to bear with me I'm recovering from last nights dose of poison. My grammar isn't really the best when my blood is still saturated in alcohol. Happy new year to all by the way.

    The media treated the "let-down" as if they were looking forward to computer systems everywhere crashing. If this guy hadn't alerted the public to the problem, wouldn't the problems have occured anyway? Let me use an analogy.

    You feel a case of influenza coming on, because you are getting a headache. You don't know for sure, but you think you should go to the doctor to get it checked out. The doctor tells you in about a week you'll have the flu. But if you take these anti-biotics, you should be fine. You take the medicine, you don't get the flu the next week. Figures right? But then what do you do? You angrily lecture the doctor for prescribing you medicine and wasting your money when you never got the flu anyway - the medicine wasn't needed.

    Of course there aren't going to be any problems with computers if we all spent billions fixing them. We fix a problem we knew we had, and then whinge because the problem never showed itself.
  • Let me wish you all a happy new year.
  • h a p y y new year
  • Well, yeah, it was a joke. You seem to have correctly identified the attempt at humor, and still reacted as if you didn't.
  • A happy new year to Peter de Jager.
  • were part of the reason the Internet economy became so popular. Many people began to see technology for what it is: integral to all parts of our lives, wheter we like it or not. People decided to take advantage of it. This helped lead to the Internet stock craze, but it also helped the economy in a more direct way. Companies were willing to give huge piles of cash to people who could certify their systems as being Y2K compatible. That provided a huge boost to our economy. It's cooling off now, but it gave us a shot in the arm that set the stage for the mass deployment of Internet companies. Granted, you have to be more careful as an Internet company today, but investors are willing to invest in a good, solid money-making company. Technology awareness was heightened because people were curious and looked at computers to see what all the fuss was about.
  • Everyone have a happy new year!

  • This sort of thing is mostly a problem among non-technical people. They weren't as close to the Y2K issue as IT people, and never got to see it the way they did. All they saw was the media hype and then when nothing did happen saw it as a scam.

    I think perhaps too much was done to correct the problem. If a few semi-serious things had have gone wrong, perhaps the general populous would have seen the real importance of all the money that was spent to fix the problem.

  • I do hope you have a happy new year!
  • Nothing happened thanks to his warnings. I have friends who work in banks, and according to them software did not run in the first "set-the-clock-forward and see-what-happens" tests.

    A nuclear power plant in Ontario failed the tests after the initial set of y2k bug fixes had been made.

    Yes a lot of people who were worrying about the y2k shouldn't have. A friend of mine sells research lab microscopes, which are computer controlled. He was getting calls about y2k compliance. His answer was "try it on the new year, and if it doesn't we'll replace it, what's the big f*****g deal? your lab experiment might get delayed a few days!?"

    As you can expect the microscopes worked without a hitch.

    To sum up, banks, utilities, telcos and airlines were well advised to head y2k warnings, all others were a bit hysterical.

  • Re:Fair Warning (Score:3)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @07:09PM (#538999)
    Just hoping to clear a bit up on that Ontarian nuclear power plant that failed the tests.

    I worked for Ontario Hydro at the time, doing network rollouts in their head office(Toronto, Canada). So while I wasn't part of the Y2K team in question, I did know a few of the guys, and I was in "that circle."

    Anyways, and I wish I could remember now, that failed test had relatively little to do with the reactor itself. I think it might have been some of their accountng systems(they're all Novell/MS crap) or somesuch. I know this doesn't really sound good, but all I remember is, "Oh, was that it? Hahaha, I'm not worried :)"

    Sorry! :)

    Dave

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)

  • Scam my a**e (Score:4)

    by cyber-vandal ( 148830 ) on Sunday December 31, 2000 @06:40PM (#539000) Homepage
    As a person who has the misfortune of being a COBOL programmer, I fixed loads of Y2K bugs in the shoddiest hacked-together code ever. Peter de Jager deserves credit as the man who saved the world, as the PHBs certainly wouldn't have had the vision to fix the problem without a lot of publicity.
  • I've been amazed by the people who think the whole Y2k scare was a hoax. Yes, there were a lot of scam artists fleecing the ignorant - just as many large consulting companies extract a ton of money in exchange for sharing their ignorance. There were also a ton of broken programs that failed in various ways when given dates in 2000.

    Some were just shoddy coding, others had simply been kept around 10-20 years longer than anyone originally expected. Most companies wouldn't have gone to the expense of testing and fixing broken code without a lot of hype to justify it. I heard quite a few stories from people who'd been saying something will break messily in 5-15 years and only got the budget to fix it when upper management started reading about it in the newspaper. Without the hype to make it a priority, a lot of that work would have been buried among all of the other maintenance.

  • ...that people would have been upset no matter what happened. If there was a disaster or two, people would have complained that enough had been done to prevent it.

    Instead, we have people complaining that de Jager scammed everyone. I think hacks pitching .com's which have no chance in hell of making money is a worse scam than that.
  • This is a case of someone doing doing his job too well. Take it as a cautionary tale, and embrace the world of built-in-obsolescence
  • Castigating de Jaeger (sp?) shows ignorance beyond belief. He wasn't by any means the first Y2K doomsayer, as I'm sure many /. readers are aware. I remember discussing the two-digit year problem with fellow members of the Cincinnati-Dayton (Ohio USA) Chapter of the ACM in the 1964-65 period. It was absolutely stunning to learn in the latter half of the 90's that no one had quit doing this stupid thing even when disk space and RAM got cheap, nor had anyone committed any resources to fix systems that were obviously going to break. My one-time coworker, Bob Bemer, made the most determined run at developing concern about the upcoming problem. I read that he actually had an audience with President Nixon (71-72?) on the topic. Nixon supposedly sloughed it off and asked Bob about repairing cars. Bob also wrote a detailed article on the upcoming Y2K problem in a 1978 issue of "Info World". He was really casting pearls of foresight before capitalistic swine, IMHO. I think that he made his own bundle on Y2K consulting. I think that he deserved to. Anyone who thinks that a catastrophe avoided was a hoax because it didn't actually happen is taking on the trappings of an idiot.
  • how would people have felt had all that money been spent, yet the computers still crashed? they're disappointed because the fix worked?

    the way people (the media) have reacted to the y2k phenomenon simply proves again how shallow and stupid they can be..and it shows that the media simply live off disaster. the best thing they had in decades was averted, and they're pissed..

    blurpy
  • Whether the computer fires up thinking it's 2000 or not is the least of the problems. That can be fixed by telling the computer BIOS that it is 1972 or such. The problem is with applications and utilities that do bad things when 99 + 1 becomes 00, when 00 must be greater that 99, when 99+1 creates a trapped error, etc.
    The Y2K scare by the media was mostly a scam, mostly because it is much too complicated for their small minds. But if nothing were done to prepare for it, quite a few things would have been rather messy, with a small number of spectacular failures.
  • Clearly you know not of what you speak. The highly publicized Y2K bug has been around almost as long as computers. Because of efforts to cut costs and to "increase" the efficiency of computers, it has been (and actually still is) the standard to only use 2 bytes for the year in a date. De Jager was merely one of the many people over the years to point the fact that when the year 2000 came around, there would be a lot of results, damn few of them good. Some results were predictable, in the cases of where computers would print bills or docuements with the year 1900 on them, and figure interest on bank accounts as such. (Actually, bank results varied, depending on what system they used.)

    As a point of fact, the Y2K bug is still with us, as many of the consultants just used a 'pivot year' of 2030, and kept the year part of the date as two bytes. Any 'year' equal to or below 30 is figured to have a 20 in front of it, any above 30 are figured to have a 19 in front of it.

    Under that 'fix', New Year's Day of 2001 would still be recorded as 01-01-01, with the computer intrinsically treating it as 2001 with regards to any other functions. However, under that same fix, New Year's Day of 2031 (01-01-31) would be treated as New Year's Day of 1931. This is obviously a mid-term fix, as there is now a 30 year period of time to finally drag computers out of the 'Dark Ages' and allocate 4 bytes for years (which assuming that humanity does not destroy itself by then, will not be a problem until the year 10000).

    This applies to Mac and Windows based computers only. I believe that Linux based computers have their own problems around 2004. (I think.)

    Kierthos
  • >>we may want to calculate the risks and expected benefits a bit more.
    The smart ones took the oportunity to fix things that needed fixing, including any Y2K problems that would adversly impact operations.
    The dumb ones froze development and made changes to ensure that everything (especially obsolete reports that nobody uses) was y2k compliant.
  • antiBODIES work on the flu. antibiotics don't. your antibodies are part of your body's immune system. antibiotics are pills.
  • ((CC'd to his email address))

    I know the last thing you probably wanna hear is yet another email expressing pity after that National Post article. So this isn't one :). Just wanted to let you know that a heck of a lot of us in the IT trenches were grateful to you for giving us the clues to hit our bosses over the head with. So tally me with the 'you got a bad break' group in your mental tally. And you might wanna follow this URL and hear what more of your peers have to say about you.

    People who make a real difference in the world unfortunately are seldom recognized for their efforts. *smiles* at least you got off better then some other examples from history, no one has burned you like Joan of Arc, or had to recant your statements like Galileo. So at least you keep good company.

    I salute you,
    --
    Remove the rocks to send email
  • No one surviving a shipwreck appreciates that all the life jackets were there and in good order. They noticed when they weren't there when the Titanic sunk.

    Um......pardon me, but what the FUCK are you talking about? The Titanic was equipped with more than enough life jackets. Several hundred extra than were needed.

    It's was LIFEBOATS that were short.

    PLEASE don't make analogies to stuff when you don't know the facts. Damn.

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Why does the reporter need to comment on
    Peter's weight and even write:

    "considerable gut rolls over his belt"

    How annoying.
    So the guy has a few extra pounds/kilos.
    ... what's that got to do with anything?!

  • I believe that Linux based computers have their own problems around 2004. (I think.)

    Using 31 bits for seconds since 01-01-1970, you run into problems in early Feb, 2038. Using 32 bits, things break in 2106 (it would really suck if embedded programming created now using this lasted ~106 years...).

  • Huh?! Too much champagne last night?

    Substitute lifeboats for life jackets and the analogy holds valid.

    Why so angry?

  • Yes, core was expensive, but memory wasn't the only thing in short supply -- insight into good software-design practice was rare, and bad habits were formed.

    Many vertical-market applications are designed by modeling the actions of the applications' users. Obviously, a programmer needs to understand the domain of the problem his program is supposed to solve.

    Years ago, it was common for a programmer to be handed a paper form, and told to implement the form exactly in software. Just like old checks, many of these forms had date fields that were pre-printed with

    1 9 [] []

    Thus, the database was created with a two-digit year field.

  • Obviously you don't know anything about business accounting. A company can't spend so much money on IT related projects in one year to be strapped for the next two years. Yes, they can shift a bit more money in the budget to IT and then shift it back, and a little more, to other areas the next year, but it isn't plausible that it would so severely effect the IT budget in 2001 that "they don't have any to spend on new stuff they DO need."

    I submit that the current tech market slump is due to "irrational exhuberance" with Internet related stocks -- which generally have nothing to do with Y2K related companies. Well sure, Y2K companies are computer companies, but I'm talking about the unjustified valuations for stocks such as Amazon, RedHat, and VA Linux. That's just to name a few of the "big" ones that have been corrected somewhat already. There are hundreds to thousands of other stocks out there that have irrational valuations, and that's what is going to create a continuing slump in the market if anything.

    As far as companies' spending on IT in 2000, yes it was somewhat effected by their spending on Y2K related fixes the previous year. However, I submit that one of the reasons that companies did not go hog-wild on purchasing new computers in 2000 was simply because they didn't need them! What significant PC technolgies came out in 2000? Well, there's Windows 2000. Most companies took the stance of wait and see how stable it was and are only now starting to implement it. It's expensive, and IT staff require(d/s) a heck of a lot of training to tame this new best from Microsoft. Second, we have the Pentium IV. It was delayed, and delayed, and when it did come out we find out that it doesn't give that much more performance than Pentium III or Athlon systems. In fact, some tests conclusively show that due to the internal design of the processor it is slower than some Athlon systems. Plus, you can only currently use Pentium IV systems with RAMBUS RAM. This causes the systems to be much more expensive than comparable systems using standard SDRAM, or DDR SDRAM which will be available in consumer systems soon. So, you have to ask yourself, why would companies spend tons of money on operating system upgrades that they don't need and are unsure of the stability of, or computer hardware that doesn't offer significantly better performance yet cost tons more than equivalent systems? A CIO or CEO would have to be criminally negligent to spend on these technologies in the year 2000, as they have a fudiciary responsibility that "normal" IT workers don't.

    So stop your FUD or your trolling and use some common sense. Failing that, just go away.
  • Greetings all,

    I've just received a flurry of thank you's from this group, so I thought I'd visit and see what was being posted.

    Many thanks to all who have posted an attack on the silly notion that this was a hoax.

    I saw this "He lied - he was advocating doomsday until the end by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01, @09:10AM EST (#116) I saw him live (well live on TV) about 6 months before Y2K and it made me really angry to see this guy telling everyone in Australia their cars were not going to start and their toasters would fail. That was scaremungering, of the worst order in my opinion."

    This is an example of how an accusation becomes a reality. I never once said that cars would not start... and as for toasters? Again, I published an article that offered $1,000 for ANYONE who find such a device KNOWING I'd never have to pay the money.

    As to 'scaremungering(sp) until the end?' I published an article 'Doomsday Avoided' in Feb 1999 That basically said nothing much would happen.

    I also published a cartoon book 'The Bug Stops Here!' In 1999 that poked fun at all the TEOTWAWKI silliness. I started working on that book in mid-1998 I was also, for the record, on a plane that evening flying from Chicago to London to prove that I believed everything that needed to be done was done. This year? I stayed home with my family.

    Folks have a Happy New Year... Thanks for all YOUR hard work.

    Ciao
    Peter de Jager
    Jan 01/2001
  • You are all going to have to bear with me I'm recovering from last nights dose of poison. My grammar isn't really the best when my blood is still saturated in alcohol. Happy new year to all by the way.

    The media treated the "let-down" as if they were looking forward to computer systems everywhere crashing. If this guy hadn't alerted the public to the problem, wouldn't the problems have occured anyway? Let me use an analogy.

    You feel a case of influenza coming on, because you are getting a headache. You don't know for sure, but you think you should go to the doctor to get it checked out. The doctor tells you in about a week you'll have the flu. But if you take these anti-biotics, you should be fine. You take the medicine, you don't get the flu the next week. Figures right? But then what do you do? You angrily lecture the doctor for prescribing you medicine and wasting your money when you never got the flu anyway - the medicine wasn't needed.

    Of course there aren't going to be any problems with computers if we all spent billions fixing them. We fix a problem we knew we had, and then whinge because the problem never showed itself.

    Please comment.

    Cheers,
    Daniel.

    --

    Daniel Zeaiter
    daniel@academytiles.com.au
    http://www.academytiles.com.au

  • Did you know that one computer company out in like Indiana had all of its systems crash because of Y2k? Seriously. I forget what it was called, but I know this happened.

  • There are some more date-related problems set to start in the next few days/years. It's because of the way that days are written using two digits for each field, such as "01/03/01" (this Wednesday, to most Americans). As from 2001, the year can be confused with the day and/or month.

    This article [networkmagazine.com] from Network Magazine [data.com] has more info.

  • Sigh, What do people expect? Can't people respect that this man spent the last ten years of his life working on this problem. He and many thousands of other people worked hard to resolve what went on. Just goes to show you how much the media will inflate problems and exploit people.
  • The Y2K scam was one of the biggest coup de grace's in the history of CONsultation (note the emphasis).

    Total BS! We had clients that refused to upgrade Novell 2.x and 3.x to patch these Y2K issues until the hype started. They also ran 286 and 386 systems that the BIOS choked on. Accounting software, etc, etc. We made money doing these upgrades, and also pushing software companies to "do the right thing" so that Y2K wasn't a issue for our clients. It's amazing when you get into ninch software the likes of specialized accounting software and pharmacy type (state related) stuff. And yes, we replaced computer systems, terminals, etc. Was it worth it to them? Hell yes!! We had one client that didn't do nada, and their whole network crashed, resetting records in their database requiring upwards of 10K of fix. Go figure...
  • Alomex wrote:
    Nothing happened thanks to his warnings. I have friends who work in banks, and according to them software did not run in the first "set-the-clock-forward and see-what-happens" tests.

    You don't think the fact that most time-dependant programs generally make the assumption that the clock isn't going to make large jumps either forward or back could possibly have contributed to those failed tests, do you? The fact that there were more problems attributed to the Y2K testing than to the actual event indicates to me that most of the effort to "test" for "Y2K compliance" was not just wasted, but actually harmful. (In fact, I got bit more badly by a misguided Y2K test than by the sole Y2K bug that hit me.)

    There are two things to learn from Y2K. First, you can't test the time-dependance of software by simply resetting the clock. To properly perform the test, the state of the machine has to be updated to match what it will be when the date in question actually arrives, not the state it happens to be now. That is difficult and is not usually easily accomplished. Setting the clock back is even harder.

    Second, there are classes of bugs and not all are harmful. The errors that were actually seen (of which various Perl scripts printing 19100 for the year starting January 1, are a prime example) were exactly what I believe we'd have seen more of if all the hype hadn't happened. I expect that if you put the power plant control software from two years ago into the plant's computers now there would be absolutely no change in it's operation because control software typically doesn't know or particularly care about what the date is.

    Please note that those countries and companies that spent very little on "Y2K compliance" had about as many problems as the USA and Canada and those banks and airlines that went through all the nonsense. If it had such a potential for disaster, shouldn't we have seen at least one life-threatening failure somewhere? Perfection is difficult to achieve in practice and so saying "it would have been a disaster, but for the efforts of those raising the alarm" because we've apparently somehow achieved perfect Y2K compliance is a bit hard for me to believe, especially in light of the disastrously ignorant way many organizations approached their Y2K testing.

    In short, I believe that the world wouldn't have ended or even been inconvenienced even if all the consultants hadn't existed and none of the hype had occured. I'm sorry that it hurts the feelings of one of those consultants for that to be a common view, but I don't believe that it's an unreasonable view and my sympathy is tempered by the amount of hassle and extra work I had to go through because people like Peter de Jager and Ed Yourdon spent the last decade whipping people up into a unreasoning frenzy so they could make twice my income selling technical armageddon seminars to the PHB's.

  • Come on... I fired up my old `286 after Y2K, I'd owned it since 1990. It worked fine, although it was underpowered. It knew what the date was.

    99.9999999% of the Y2K scare was a SCAM. After all, the 3rd world countries that were USING old `286 and `386 hardware didn't have problems.

    I submit that the Y2K scam is RESPONSIBLE for the current tech market slump. Money was spent that companies didn't have, on stuff they didn't need. So today they don't have any to spend on new stuff they DO need.
  • Mm... we may want to think before jumping to the conclusion that De Jager did such a good job. May I sound a note of caution?

    It is good that people sound alarm bells. But the benefits of precuations do come at a cost. And I, and more importantly leading publications like The Economist, believe the cost of Y2K (billions worldwide) was way higher than the benefit.

    In the event, there was very little discernable difference in impact between countries that spent billions (like the US) and countries that spent much less either in real $$ or as a percentage of GDP, like Italy. No airplanes crashed, even in Russia. Society did not break down, either in India or in Indiana. The objective evidence seems to suggest that this was an overhyped scare.

    And the cost was certainly great. De Jager is personally responsible for slowing down software development for 6-12 months before the Y2K. Companies stopped buying, slowing down the industry.

    Next time we all believe a scaremonger, we may want to calculate the risks and expected benefits a bit more. It's like anything else, from airplane crashes to virus dangers or maximum speeds on our highway: we should carefully weigh the costs and benefits, not just look at the risks and spend regardless of cost. There was too much hysteria in all this Y2K thing for my liking, and not enough science.

    (Also, it's personal sour grapes: this Y2K thing was responsible for me rebooting my ham radio server for Y2K testing... unnecessarily as it turned out... it had been up for a couple hundred days when I did this. It's back to 425 days now, but still! :-)

    Anyway: hope we're ready for Y10K.


    ---

  • Re:Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Um. Antibiotics don't help the flu. It is viral. If your doctor gave you antibiotics for the flu, he needs a lecture on misuse of medication.

    The smartass
  • I'm sure they realised the problem, but people that designed the problem soft and hardware never thought what they were designing would be still be in use so many years later. I'm sure they fell victim to the common delusions about 2000: Flying cars, Moon colony, etc...

    Josh Sisk
  • I think Galileo comparisons are a little extreme, in this circumstance.
  • I strongly disagree. It wasn't Mr. de Jager who caused the loonies to stockpile toilet paper, it was a bunch of other people who were in it to make money. There was a lunatic around Nashville here who ran the "y2kwomen.com" site (it's still there, check it out) who was one of the people who made money off others' fears. I think she really believed it, she was still in the bunker up to Feb. 29 last year since she was convinced that might be TEOTWAWKI, too.

    de Jager did a good job, it was the other loonies who made him look bad.

    Michael

  • For God's sake why is that relevant? I could've used any disease and any drug. You know what I was attemping to imply.

    It's relevant in so many ways. You did it by accident but the effect is the same.

    If your doctor decides to give you antibiotics to fight off a (potential) viral infection and you don't get viral infection, his drugs did absolutely nothing to help you. This is much the same thing with (most of) the hype with Y2K. Yeah there were some problems but none were as widespread or as deadly as some of these guys have predicted.

    In the same vein, the same doctor could give you the proper medication and thus prevent a nasty week of the flu. This too is like what happened with Y2K. Some of the hype was warranted and fixed the problem. However all the fear mongering and flaming doomsayers did absolutely nothing to help.

  • I agree... the problem about Y2K is that since it was fixed but people think the whole thing was a hoax, next time we will do much worse. And guess what! The next time is coming sooner than you think, in 2047.

    In 2047 or so, the 32-bit time_t counters are going to roll over. For those of you who don't know, (every?) Unix, including Linux and also Windows NT, and many embedded systems keeps track of time as the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970. This is stored in a 32-bit number of type "time_t".

    Now, fixing that rollover will be more important than fixing Y2K was. Those 32-bit time_t's are actually used for keeping track of time on most computers, but the Y2K issue was mostly a problem for user interfaces.

    Perhaps everyone will be using open-source software then, and all we will have to do is redefine time_t to be 64-bit, recompile, and do some testing. That would be really nice.

    But I doubt it will be that simple. There will still be people using old software - Legacy code like Microsoft .NET :-) If you spent much time studying the Y2K problem, you will remember that companies would often claim their software works -but only up until 2047 or so. Microsoft is one of these.

    So, imagine the situation in 2012. All of us geeks will be either retired, or at least getting a little grey-haired. Most people who use computers will know nothing at all about what's going on down in the guts of them. The companies we work at will continue to be run by pointy-haired bosses. And when we go to them and say:

    "We need some budget for fixing and testing the time_t rollover. If we don't do this, all the old stuff will crash and burn."

    And they will say: "Wait a minute... this sounds like that Y2K hoax 50 years ago! This must be bullsh*t too. So forget it, that code has been working fine for 45 years, we won't touch it."

    Personally, I think Linux and all Open-Source/Free software should take the lead in this area by switching to 64-bit time_t's NOW.

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • Arrgh.

    I was wrong. Not 2047/2047. It's really January 18, 2038. I don't know what the exact time of the rollover is that day.

    I'll be... um.... 66 years old. Crap! I hope medical technology is really advanced then, or I will be too decrepit to either make big bucks helping fix the problem, or flee into the hills with a box of food and a shotgun. :-)


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

  • Don't forget, computers often need to look forward in time. For example, if I compute your new house mortgage today (something that I suspect people use computers for, every now and again), I'm going to be looking at dates all the way up through 2031. So if there's any financial software down at your bank or mortgage company that uses 32-bit time_t's, it's at least possible that it may start displaying symptoms as soon as seven years from now.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • This is exactly the analogy that is needed. I can imagine thousands of bean-counters now wishing they had ix-nayed the y2k compliance expenses, since it is obvious (sic) that it wasn't needed, seeing as how there weren't any significant problems. Of course, in the alternate reality where the y2k expenses were all nixed, there was great chaos when many of the computer programs failed.

    Many people think that y2k was a 'flop', yet if there hadn't been attention drawn to it, it very well may have been a problem.

  • After the backlash dissipates, and history reports the true events surrounding the Y2K scare, the real criminals will highlighted: The Media. They were the ones who collectively jumped on the Y2K problem and overexposed it and painted it as the coming apocalypse. Now, they are calling it a hoax, and crucifying all who participated in averting the potential disaster. Why? Because calling their own reports and predictions a hoax lets them continue to report on the Y2K scare, and sell more newsprint. Good news never hits the front page.

    It is far easier for the media to blame someone else, than themselves.

    *sigh* Whatever happened to journalistic integrity? Wait a minute.... That's an oxymoron....

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