Peter de Jager: Where Is He Now? 82
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."
Peter's Email Address (for thank you notes) (Score:3)
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).
--
Re:Y2k (Score:1)
Suddenly I feel a century older.
Media Attention (Score:1)
Re:FP for de Jager! (Score:1)
http://www.gsp.com/2038/ [gsp.com] states 19 Jan 2038 at 03:14:07 as the rollover date.
Gary North? (Score:1)
Re:Fair Warning (Score:2)
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!!!
Re:FP for de Jager! (Score:1)
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:1)
fucken hell, man, that's really harsh! where ever did you get such crazy ideas?
:::
Re:Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:1)
Cheers,
Daniel.
--
Daniel Zeaiter
daniel@academytiles.com.au
http://www.academytiles.com.au
Y2K, backups, security, life jackets, EMO (Score:3)
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
He's one of societies unsung heros. Too bad, society needs heros.
--
Remove the rocks to send email
Re:It seems to me... (Score:1)
News: Norway trains won't start-belated Y2K (Score:1)
'nuff said.
Re:Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:1)
*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.
Re:Gary North? (Score:1)
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.
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:1)
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
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,
COBOL was the problem in the first place. (Score:1)
Re:Fair Warning (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:1)
Maybe there was more of a problem to solve than you realize.
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:1)
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.
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:1)
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.
Re:Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:1)
Re:FP for de Jager! (Score:1)
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
New Years (Score:1)
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)
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
Amazing. (Score:1)
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.
Re:FP for de Jager! (Score:1)
Re:History will vindicate him (Score:1)
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.
Re:Fair Warning (Score:2)
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.
Re:When is enough enough? (Score:1)
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.
Re:COBOL was the problem in the first place. (Score:2)
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.
My Y2K Bug occurred in 1998 (Score:1)
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.
Independent s/w industry (Score:1)
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Re:Y2K, backups, security, life jackets, EMO (Score:1)
Yeah, it kinda sucks. (Score:4)
Pfft.
watch out (Score:2)
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.
Happy New Year! (Score:1)
Happy New Year! (Score:1)
Re:Yeah, it kinda sucks--wrong!!! (Score:1)
Happy New Year! (Score:1)
Y2K doomsayers . . . (Score:2)
Happy New Year! (Score:1)
Re:Yeah, it kinda sucks. (Score:1)
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.
Re:Happy New Year! (Score:1)
Fair Warning (Score:2)
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)
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)
Better too much than too little (Score:2)
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.
It seems to me... (Score:1)
Instead, we have people complaining that de Jager scammed everyone. I think hacks pitching
This is a case of (Score:2)
Re:Y2K doomsayers . . . (Score:1)
money well spent.. (Score:1)
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
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:1)
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.
Re:FP for de Jager! (Score:2)
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
Re:When is enough enough? (Score:1)
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.
Re:Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:1)
An open letter to Peter de Jager (Score:3)
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
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
Re:Y2K, backups, security, life jackets, EMO (Score:2)
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?
Fat comments are anoying (Score:1)
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?!
Re:FP for de Jager! (Score:1)
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...).
Re:Y2K, backups, security, life jackets, EMO (Score:1)
Huh?! Too much champagne last night?
Substitute lifeboats for life jackets and the analogy holds valid.
Why so angry?
It wasn't just expensive memory (Score:1)
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
Thus, the database was created with a two-digit year field.
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:2)
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.
Re:He lied - he was advocating doomsday until the (Score:2)
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
Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:2)
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
Y2K (Score:1)
New Y2K problems (Score:1)
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.
No good deed goes unpunished. (Score:1)
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:1)
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...
Re:Fair Warning (Score:2)
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.
Re:Scam Scam sausage and Scam (Score:1)
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.
When is enough enough? (Score:1)
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.
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Re:Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:1)
The smartass
Re:Y2k (Score:1)
Josh Sisk
Re:An open letter to Peter de Jager (Score:1)
Re:Yeah, it kinda sucks--wrong!!! (Score:1)
de Jager did a good job, it was the other loonies who made him look bad.
Michael
Re:Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:2)
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.
Re:Y2K, backups, security, life jackets, EMO (Score:2)
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
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)
Re:Y2K, backups, security, life jackets, EMO (Score:2)
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)
Re:Y2K, backups, security, life jackets, EMO (Score:2)
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
Re:Why should this guy be ashamed? (Score:1)
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.
History will vindicate him (Score:1)
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....