Xdaliclock Fails Y2k (But Everything Else Seems Fine) 217
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!
Looks like xdaliclock has an easter egg, not a bug (Score:1)
if (date == 0)
{
}
The code that follows this appears to reverse the pixmap if clock >= date.
NNTP-Cache (Score:1)
another clock app (palmos) (Score:1)
David
bash: ispell: command not found
Re:For Those of Us that Had to Work Dec 31... (Score:1)
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!
Re:If It Ain't Busted... (Score:1)
Though, if you can fix it in ASM, go right on ahead.
Re:UserFriendly? (Score:1)
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
Re:Internet Explorer 5 still has a Y2K bug? (Score:1)
Re:Internet Explorer 5 still has a Y2K bug? (Score:1)
Re:UserFriendly? (Score:1)
Re:it's all over the place (Score:1)
My Y2K problem... (Score:1)
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...
Urer'f gur genafyngvba... (Score:1)
Yep. The doomsayers have been proven wrong yet again.
Did you see that too?
Houston. We have a problem.
Re:Internet Explorer 5 still has a Y2K bug? (Score:1)
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.
Re:Internet Explorer 5 still has a Y2K bug? (Score:1)
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().
Internet Explorer 5 still has a Y2K bug? (Score:1)
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)
Re:peace and quiet (Score:1)
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.
xclock does, xdaliclock not (Score:1)
Xclock work with no problem(is still running) but
xdaliclock start with one 1 at left.
Was funny!
Oliver
Re:Automatic SW validation considered preposterous (Score:1)
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
To all offended... (Score:1)
Happy New Year and thanks to all who have helped squashing y2k bugs.
Chilli
Re:Mmm, don't forget to read userfriendly (Score:1)
http://www.userfr iendly.org/cartoons/archives/00jan/19991231.html [userfriendly.org]
looks like the strip the characters arent the only ones having problems
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Re:Limited experience leads to blase attitudes (Score:1)
Re:UserFriendly? (Score:1)
How about:
THANK YOU! (Score:1)
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...
NIST Utility Bites It (Score:1)
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...
If It Ain't Busted... (Score:1)
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.
Re:User Friendly... (Score:1)
Re:UserFriendly? (Score:1)
Actually, it's not gibberish, but I think you need to be an old Usenet hacker to get the joke...
it's all over the place (Score:1)
The Sherman's Lagoon... (Score:1)
http://www.slagoon.com/
I had a Jan 1 2000 problem. Not a Y2K 'bug' though (Score:1)
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!
NIST programs may have problems too ... (Score:1)
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 more website glitches (Score:1)
Mmm, don't forget to read userfriendly (Score:1)
Re:Argh (Score:1)
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.
Re:For Those of Us that Had to Work Dec 31... (Score:1)
I participated in the set at universal studios.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
My "known" y2k Bugs (Score:1)
- 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....
dali clock doing something strange (Score:1)
_joshua_
Re:Countdown error (Score:1)
Very neat looking wheel, BTW.. They got it running yet?
---
Re:Countdown error (Score:1)
---
Re:Microsoft's y2k problem (Score:1)
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.
Re:peace and quiet (Score:1)
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
Re:THANK YOU! (Score:1)
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
Mirror of 2600 page (Score:1)
15:16 and all is well (Score:1)
Re:Y2K Cable TV failure (Score:1)
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.
Re:Microsoft's y2k problem (Score:1)
Re:All of NIST's time servers are HOSED! Y2K! Y2K! (Score:1)
-Barry
the ...... is ..... (Score:1)
stop watching so much tv and free your mind
Tin seems to be non-compliant. (Score:1)
Re:Rebooted yet? (Score:1)
Arrogance (Score:1)
"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.
Re:Old crappy Win95 machine and printer working fi (Score:1)
38 years to make my fortune... (Score:1)
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..."
Phone System "Hiccups" (Score:1)
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.
Re:That looks like an Easter Egg! (Score:1)
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
Re:My Y2K problem... (Score:1)
Re:ELM Mailreader Bug! [But the code is orphan.] (Score:1)
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?
Re:Hey, Gambia don't look too hot. (Score:1)
Taco (Score:2)
Re:ELM Mailreader Bug! [Check out the ME+ version] (Score:2)
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].
Re:My car won't start! (Score:2)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Here's a possible reason (Score:2)
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.
Re:Possible little Y2K-related telephone hiccup... (Score:2)
Field Marshall Stack dun said:
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
Hey, Gambia don't look too hot. (Score:2)
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]]
Re:Hey, Gambia don't look too hot. (Score:2)
dclock thinks the year is 19:0 (Score:2)
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 :)
Re:peace and quiet (Score:2)
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.
Re:peace and quiet (Score:2)
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.)
Rebooted yet? (Score:2)
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....)
Re:peace and quiet (Score:2)
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.
Re:15:16 and all is well (Score:2)
(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
Re:You have new mail. (Score:2)
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.
ELM Mailreader Bug! [But the code is orphan.] (Score:2)
Guess I have to dig into the code to save face.
Re:Thank you THANK YOU! [ME+ version] (Score:2)
Re:peace and quiet (Score:2)
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.)
I was DESPERATELY hoping... (Score:2)
/Everybody/ would get
Re:I like curly quotes (Score:2)
Automatic SW validation considered preposterous (Score:2)
(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.
I got hosed - by a MONITOR! (Score:2)
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.
Re:peace and quiet (Score:2)
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?
Re:User Friendly... (Score:2)
Was Y2K Hype? Course Not! (Score:2)
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 looks like an Easter Egg! (Score:2)
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
Am I the only one with a problem? (Score:2)
Re:crashing as usual (Score:2)
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.
_________________________
Y2K Cable TV failure (Score:2)
Limited experience leads to blase attitudes (Score:3)
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.
Possible little Y2K-related telephone hiccup... (Score:3)
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)
I bet this made a few people's hearts beat faster when it happened.
Re:peace and quiet (Score:3)
Re:User Friendly... (Score:3)
You have new mail. (Score:3)
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.
Best Y2K tracking sites (Score:4)
Y2K World Dispatches [msnbc.com]
Y2K Security Tracker [msnbc.com]
One of my favorites from the World Dispatches was:
---------
Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?
For Those of Us that Had to Work Dec 31... (Score:4)
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)
2600 Weirdness (Score:4)
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)
With false american pride I ask . .
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)
peace and quiet (Score:5)
"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.