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US & UK Issue Y2k Travel Warnings 86

Posted by Hemos from the where-to-not-go-for-vacation dept.
In a coordinated release, both the UK and US have issued their worldfwide Y2k preparedness reports. No real suprises here - Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and the heartland of China. The strongest warnings were given in reference to the Ukraine, which the US State Department has recommended not traveling to around the end of 1999. More interesting was the UK's warning about the US, citing potential failures in "limited disruption to the water supply; to internal travel using small airports; and to small health facilities" as an ongoing concern.
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US & UK Issue Y2k Travel Warnings More

US & UK Issue Y2k Travel Warnings

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  • Probrably the same place that the CNet report got it's country names.. Ehter and speculation.. ;-P
  • http://www.fco.gov.uk/travel/dynpage.asp?Page=144
    This is where Hemos may have read the list of countries.
  • Congratulations! You've assisted in the creation of a new oxymoron:

    SMART RELIGIOUS EXTREMISTS

    Thank you for your participation. ^_^
    --

  • In developed countries there is very high reliance on computers to fly the plane. The flight plan is generated by a computer, the air-traffic control is managed by computer. The pilot doesn't really make a lot of decisions.

    In addition, newer aircraft are "fly-by-wire" - there is no direct connection between the pilot controls and the control surfaces. If the plane's electronics go you fall out of the sky.

    Contrast this with the small airport I landed at in rural India. The smallish jet actually did a VISUAL landing. The airport didn't have an instrument landing system even though it was actually quite busy.

  • Try This URL [ntlug.org] instead; it should work slightly better...

    Sorry about that...

  • You mean the media takes things out of context and then reports them as facts? Whoa, I bet that's never happened before.......
  • I have a friend who works for the WaterWorks in this city ("the best in the nation"). They, of course, run everything on NT and wrote it in VB. They are terribly buggy, and know it. However, three years ago, they looked at the sitiation and decided not to fix it. They will be going "manual" (and doubling their staff) in December. This means they will have hundreds of people in trucks running around the city turning on/off valves and checking gauges in closets all over the place.
    It is sickening that the government can get away with saying that this is "Y2K Preparedness" (which the city does) while every business has to provide real proof to their financial backers (you know, the banks) in order to keep their credit.

  • These aren't meant to be global status reports... They're "consular information summaries", i.e. reports for the information of Americans abroad, like those in the Foreign Service. Which is why they don't mention domestic problems.
  • I was surprised a little to see Malaysia there. When I checked the actually report I found only a good mention:

    "Malaysia is reliant on computerized systems. Awareness in Malaysia of the Y2K problem is high in all sectors of the economy and among senior leaders of the national government. The Government has established a Y2K steering committee to oversee public and private sector progress.

    Malaysia appears to be prepared to deal with the Y2K problem. It appears that there is a low risk of potential Y2K disruptions in the banking and finance, health, telecommunications, transportation, utilities and electric power sectors."

    I was recently in M'sia, and they seem to be ready, especially with airlines like Singapore and MAS. I would not be the least concerned about travel there.

  • Re:Testing (Score:1)

    by mce ( 509 )
    Has anyone out there run in to any real problems while doing Y2K testing?

    Yes. The HP-UX version of sccs failed on me on january 1, 1999 at 00:13 because for some insane reason it uses (used?) a date 1 year into the future when checking in a modification. The Solaris sccs was fine, though, and the HP-UX problem was fixed within hours by installing a patch that had been out for nearly half a year. But still...

    PS: Moderate this as funny if you like, but it really happened as described. The good thing about this was that it made a few people listen to my requests not to wait till now to update things.

    --

  • I think I've heard a rumor that the chinese government has ordered all the executives of the airlines that they must be in the air when the clock ticks over to the next millenium. This I suppose makes for a rather strong motivation to make sure that the airplanes will be functioning correctly.
  • Put your imagination caps on. Suppose Y2K shuts down electricy, causes stock market crashes arround the world, planes fall out of the air, rebels topple faililng governments, yadda, yadda, yadda ...

    In all this chaos, I think the worst thing about this scenario is that humans allowed themselvs to be dominated and controled by machines that we couldn't recover from the Y2K miscalculations. Nothing so dramatic as Hollywood created, but perhaps more sinister because we turned out lives over to computers slowly, silently and freely.

    As long as we still control the machines, Y2K will be nothing more than a blip in the steady noise of BSOD's, crashes, bugs, transfer errors, lost backups, curruptions, failures, etc that happen in our computerized lives every day.
  • I agree. Also, I don't limit that fear of extremist to Christian religions. No matter which religion an extremist worships, they are dangerous to the general public...
  • There is no mention of India in the CNN article. But the Slashdot blurb mentions India...
    And the Y2K section on India [state.gov] @ http://travel.state.gov/india.html seems to be pretty tame...
    Maybe Hemos just wanted add a few coutries of his own...
  • But the issue for people travelling to these countries (whom the releases are aimed at) is whether the infrastructure will collapse. This could effect rural areas that don't themselves use IT as emergency relief procedures that use the Telecom systems are required. For travellers its important to know that the country you are flying to has an Air Traffic Control system that will work. The report notes that for many parts of the Indian infrastructure Y2K isn't an issue (the FO notes that many power stations are analogue). India does have an IT Industry of some note, with many European and US companies having bases in India to take advantage of the reduced costs, its important for them to know what will happen as the New Year roles around.

    Todays India Fact: For people in the UK, turn an analogue watch upside down to get the time in India.
  • My brother reports that his 40 MHz computer (don't know what model or year, he doesn't know himself) reported a hard drive failure on 9/9/99. Says it's the CMOS. He set the date to somewhere in the 70's and is happy ever since.

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • I find the UK's government stance re: Y2K somewhat amusing. They're putting out a load of publicity aimed at companies, saying "you're running out of time, if your Y2K plans aren't already well underway, you're in deep shit. Y2K is a huuuuge problem."

    Then the other day, I got a leaflet posted through the door, aimed at private individuals, claiming that everything's under control, and that it's all been blown up out of proportion, and that Y2K will not actually affect very much anyway.

    So which is it, then? Is everything OK, or is the world going to end? Enquiring minds want to know!

  • Power outages.. big deal, Trains not working.. Who cares. I really don't think that computers will be responsible for the majority of Y2K problems. It's far more likely that public paranoia driven by our wonderful sensationalistic media will create artificial panic. People pulling out money from cash machines the night before Y2K driving the economy into chaos. I see that as a far more likely scenario.

    I mean think about it. The media got burned once with the "9/9/99 will be the death of us" stories. But man were they all waiting for something "BIG" to fail. I watched the evening news on the 8th and they were just itching for it, predicting all sorts of problems. Something tells me that they are going to do even better on the 31st.

    Ex-Nt-User
  • In an event like this, what's to stop pilots from just turning on thier radios and just start talking to eachother? It'd be less efficiant. but since there wouldn't be any planes taking off there would be twice as much room to land right?
  • Actually i think hemos missed the boat on this a bit. Specifically Malaysia.
    For those of you that dont know it, Malaysia has the newest airport in the world, KLIA. 'm not from there, nor am i malaysian, but it may be the most sophisticated airport in terms of its systems. Although it had a few initial glitches on its opening last year, it now operates extremely efficiently, (far better than any airport in the us).
    When they built KLIA they really did pull out all the stops. the KLIA Official website [jaring.my] shows it in its splendor
    AS for its airline, Malaysian Airlines, it has always shown itself of the highest safety records, as well as offering amenities that no US airlines offer at any price.
  • The US State Department is WAY paranoid. They make it sound like if a US citizen has ever been a victim at a certain place, you're doomed if you go there.
  • Visual Basic on NT was turning on and off valves while checking guages across a whole city?
  • what I've heard on NPR is these guidelines are
    rather biased. Apparently in terms of Y2K,
    Italy is as just unprepared as Ukraine, but
    since italy is US' ally (for god sake), the
    guidlines say something like 'Italy could have
    done more work', whereas Ukraine is simply rated
    as 'unsafe'.
  • None of the countries HAVE a full blown advisory against travel. READ before you point.. ;-P
  • Power outages.. big deal, Trains not working.. Who cares.

    Actually it is a very big deal... Victoria, Australia went through a similar scenario when there was an explosion at the major gas provider for the state late last year.

    The gas was off totally for 3 weeks across a large part of the state, affecting millions.

    In the days immediately following the blast, the only effect on the average person was to go to friends and relatives for electric hot water/heating/cooking etc. An inconvenience that could be lived with.

    However as it dragged on, the crisis worsened.

    Thousands upon thousands of workers were stood down as manufacturing plants and textile factories were forced to stop production lines. Manufactures in other states were forced to stop production lines as they relied on components from Melbourne.

    There was panic buying of food and essentials as farmers tipped milk down the drains (they needed gas for pastuerisation), and large bread factories ground to a halt.

    There was a shortage of electrical appliances as 100's of restraunts across the state tried to keep their doors open. Many failed and had to close for weeks.

    All of these people lost a lot of money, with many of those working in manufacturing industries already hard up for a buck. It created an immediate welfare problem.

    What I am getting at is that, whilst we should still heed the night, the Y2K problems on New Years eve are less of a concern than the amount of time it takes to rectify them and the ramifications of that delay.

    This all came about due to the failure of one utility in one state in one country. You don't necessarily need a wide-spread Y2K failure to stuff things things up.

    If you want a summary of the chain of events that took place then check out The Story so far... the gas crisis [theage.com.au] or the full coverage [theage.com.au]. It's a good indication of what might happen in the first few weeks of 2000.

    M@T
  • I had a payroll system running on an old dos 286, which was hardware compliant, but when we tried to set up the database for this fiscal year, the software crashed, and the upgrade only ran on Win95/98. So were were forced to upgrade, and then I had to spend weeks teaching the new system to book keeper, who would have been happy to stick to her dos program...
    it that a REAL problem? was for me :)
  • Has anyone out there run in to any real problems while doing Y2K testing?
    Did anyone fail at the April 9th date?
    What about at 9/9/99 (barring the tandy(?))?

    There is more to fear from people than there is from the computers...
  • The 9/9/99 problem was way overblown. Most of the programs I was familiar with actually used a flag like 99/99/99, and September 9th would look more like 09/09/99.


    ...phil
  • OK I missed this one.
    Why is April 9 important?

    As for testing - well we've run tests.
    There were problems. Some big (as in nothing worked), some small (as in well that's bad but we can live with it if need be).
    We fixed them.
    We tested.
    ...
    Current point - we've tested and things seem good now.

    #include
    This is in no way shape or form a legally binding statement that should be taken to hold any water whatsover for predicting my companies future.
  • Does anyone have a link or some insight as to what failed w.r.t. a Tandy on 9/9/99...

    I'm currious especially as my old TRS-80 didn't have a clock to suffer date problems on....
  • April 9th was the 99th day of 99, ie. 9999 using a modified georgian calendar, which the military often does.
  • No problems at all on Sep 9 at our side. We took the whole exercise as a full dress rehearsal for New Year's eve...complete with champaign ;-)
  • Found out today that my district council isn't certified Y2K ready yet.

    Not sure which I'd prefer -- not being billed for my council tax (and rubbish colletion etc not happening, cos they can't pay the workers), or being billed twice...
    --
  • April 9 was the 99th day of 1999. Some systems, in order to make sorting easier, use year number and day number: Jan 1, 1999 would be 99001, Jan 2 would be 99002, etc. The fear was that April 9 would look like 9999 and cause problems. That was a bogus worry, since it would really show up as 99099.


    ...phil
  • I suppose it's nice that the US and the UK have checked the globe for us, warning travellers about potential dangers. However, wouldn't it be a little more productive to stay focused on your own country first? For all of the "We're prepared!" strutting the US does, there is still work to be done. There are over 6000 small Electricity providers in this country, mainly in rural areas, that are not yet compliant. Instead of worrying about the Ukraine, shouldn't the US be worrying more about it's own backyard? Perhaps this is just another diversion in order to make the general public feel safe.

    Don't misunderstand me. I'm not preaching Armageddon at New Year's. My biggest fear is the religious extremists deciding to go out with a bang. As stated, even the UK's report pointed some fingers at the US...
  • This report is WAY out of taken WAY out of context. I happened to watch the press conference on CSPAN last night. No one beside's the UK issued ANY WARNINGS about travel to other contries.

    Overall, I think that their research is flawed and based on poorly used factors, but the press should at least report it as it was presented..

    The italy thing was a reporter taking a question by another reporter and mangling it.

  • 9/9/99 problems (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It might have been a coincidence, but on 9/9/99 some trains couldn't enter the Schiphol (.nl's primary airport) station. The driver(s) cited unspecified computer problems as the cause. You won't see me anywhere near a train at 31/12 and 01/01...
  • When I had a look at it in 96 it listed Scots as being the biggest "ethnic minority" in the United Kingdom.

    I figure this is kind off stretching the definition of "ethnic minority" a bit far even for the CIA ;)
  • My biggest fear is the religious extremists deciding to go out with a bang.

    Of course, that would be the dumb extremists, since most biblical scholars have found that the calculations for the date of Christ's birth are off by about 4 years, so the real millenium (for the Christian calendar, anyway) happened in 1996.


    ...phil

  • This can be a good thing... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There are going to be price wars come December.

    Because of hysteria and stupidity, people who don't know any better are avoiding planes like the plague around 01/01/2000. The result of this is that airlines aren't selling a whole lot of tickets. To make up for it, they drop prices in order to sell more tickets.

    If last-minute tickets to Mexico drop below $100, you can bet your boots that I'll be going, (clueless) government warning be damned! Bernoulli's principle still applies, even after the apocalypse. Besides, even if air traffic control systems go down, pilots are trained in how to set the plane down safely.

    So if Y2K *is* a problem (and it isn't, really), I'm still pretty safe, and I have a neat story to tell my family. If Y2K isn't an issue, I'm in Mexico. It's a win-win situation.

    Anybody wanna join me in Mexico?
  • Well, for a view that is both Linux-oriented and somewhat entertaining, see My Linux Y2K Page. [ntlug.org] It actually cites some ancient legislation of hundreds of years ago...

    As for the September 9th issue, this looks like it was largely an issue of incompetent journalists noticing that there are a whole lot of "9"'s together in 9/9/99.

    They failed to grasp that in order for this to actually represent days and months, which can number higher than 9, the representation actually needs to be like 09/09/99.

    There is a rumor that the Chinese stock exchange, running some six-year-old IBM AS/400 systems, ran into problems Sept 9 and is now down; I saw this in a news report reported on at work, which I would have hoped to be accurate. I have not found any independent verification, so this has to be considered mere rumor and not reality...

  • Larry Wall sez.... (Score:3)

    by Chip Salzenberg ( 1124 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @01:22AM (#1681385) Homepage
    ``It should be illegal to yell `Y2K' in a crowded economy.''
  • Well, my father is a plant manager...his job is to keep buildings/groups of buildings running. A few years ago they tested their massive heating and cooling system (basically the heart and soul of a medium sized state government office building) and it just stopped. I'm sure that since then they have been working hard to fix it.

    At the place he works now, the entire office staff (about 2 dozen people) spent about a month transfering records by hand and then learning the new Y2K safe computer system. The (unnamed) State (made (in)famous by a certain huge $oftware company) seems to have its head on straight and has been testing and fixing its systems for several years. Of course this is quite costly.
  • I would personally doubt the "flamebait" rating for this post. It is an insight. And actually a very bright one, because there are hardly any mission critical systems running on computers in the targeted countries/regions. There, even the water bills are still done by hand.

    Do not understand me wrong. I am not saying that these countries are computer retarted. But their municipal systems and other stuff mentioned in the report is. And it actually _is_ retarded to the point of not using computers. So no Y2K there.

    Overall the only reasonable note on Y2K in the entire report is the "small airports" stuff. As few of the readers may know Gabriel (the airline booking systems) used to run on X25. And most of the X25 stuff is not Y2k compliant. And in some of the remote areas around the world it still uses X25.

    I would rather worry about countries with idiotic schemes for selecting the local analogue of SSN. For example bulgaria uses SSNs with 2 digit numbers. And they are used everywhere - financial sofwtare, municipal software, etc. And there will be quite a lot of Y2K fun there (though it will actually start quite after new year).

  • I'm inclined to agree with this. Last year I was doing operating system upgrades in Portugal. Whilst I was there, I got talking to an American pilot who flies for an air cargo company. He suggested that places like the Southern States of the USA would be bad to fly in on the Big Day as the system there has come to rely on computers and he thought that some of those computers would fail. In contrast, he thought that sub-Saharan Africa really wouldn't be that much of an issue because they just don't trust the machinery implicitly.
  • If you check out http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/y2k.html, which is admittedly a bit more pessimistic (though only a bit) than I am, and click some of the links, you can see some bad test results. Like the Y2K test failure in California that caused tons of raw sewage to overflow. Yuck.


    Admittedly, the nuts are likely to be more of a problem than the computers where *I* live, but I'm not sure that holds true everywhere. In any case, I'm spending New Year's Eve with my SCA friends. That way, just in *case* something goes wrong, I know I'm around people with the brains and resources to deal with the situation appropriately.


    To sum up: Yes, silly people panicking and doing stupid things is a more pressing problem than the computer problem itself, but there are legit computer problems. And the legit problems and the panic feed off of each other in ways that are very not-good.

  • I predict that at some point in 2000 a snow storm will delay flights in the medwest, a hurricane will delay flights in the southeast, a Win NT box will crash, and widespread car crashes will cause traffic jams on highways. Instead of just focusing on January 1 we should be focusing on the entire year of problems this Y2K bug is going to cause.
  • It is partof the job of the US State Dept to
    look out for US citizen's abroad. So they issue warnings about things that they think may be a problem. This includes Y2K but it includes a lot of other stuff. There are a lot of americans who live abroad (I used to be one) and there are a lot of Americans who travel around the world. The State Dept has to do their best to try and keep them all as safe as posible. In that function one has to be a little paranoid to warn people about all the things that MIGHT go wrong.
  • The Y2K glitch could prevent some computers from distinguishing 2000 from 1900 because of an old shortcut that recorded the year with two digits only. Unless fixed, this could wreak havoc on everything from air travel to health care to automatic teller machines.

    IMO, that kind of statement is irresponsible journalism and and basically sensationalism (suprise). The statement implies that the unrediness described is the current state of all computerized institutions and that nothing has been done about it.

    Like the first poster said, the biggest threat of Y2K is the potential for panic by the paranoid. I guess media statements like that are a big part of the problem.

    On a final note, the obviously flawed book The Millenium Bug predicted the financial meltdown of Japan in April 1999 because that is when they close their fiscal year. I don't even recall Japan being a blip on the news in April. Add it the pile along with 9/9/99 and the other April prediction, I guess.

    That's my $0.02, probably redundant by now.
  • on New Years, just me, my Linux box, some mp3s, and a good ol' bottle of Chimay.


  • >If you look at it carefully, 2000 is not the beginning of a new millennium, but merely the last year of one.

    YES!

    I think of 1999 as the "penultimate year of the millenium" rather than "last year of the millenium." Not only is it correct, but it also sounds cooler.
  • I work in the IT dept at a Local Authority and we're currently working on Y2k compliancy. I believe the govt. set the Y2k-compliancy deadline as the beginning of the month. ATM we're a bit behind, although all we have left to do is put the SR2a for Office 97 on all the PCs (sigh) But all the council tax, billing etc systems (run on a UNIX/Oracle box) are (we are assured by the suppliers..) Y2k compliant. So long as our Novell servers tick over properly (I'm not convinced about those but I don't really know enough to say for sure) and the NT/Exchange server carries on going, we'll be OK. I'm pretty sure the Caldera OpenLinux box I have running as a DNS server will carry on regardless, tho :)
  • It's more than a rumor - The Central Treasury Bond Registration and Settlement Co. [slashdot.org], the only automated stock exchange in China (limited to government and some big, favored corporations), is down indefinitely. A spokesman says it's because of 9/9/99, a technician says it may or may not be. FWIW, the whole exchange apparently runs on a single '92 or '93 vintage AS/400.
  • Available here [fco.gov.uk]

    It seems to me that they're being very sensible. Some might call it FUD, but one person's FUD is another's reasonable, pragmatic reaction to an unclear future. Unless your crystal ball is functioning 100% error-free, there's no way you can tell me that Y2K will not be a problem in some way to someone somewhere.

    The chances are that most large organisations will escape scot-free, but it only takes a small cog to fail for the whole system to come down. "But for a nail, the shoe was lost ...."

    FUD is not always a bad thing, but you have to receive it with an open mind.
  • Bernoulli's principle still applies, even after the apocalypse.

    Sure, but if the fly-by-wire control systems decide to flip out, it doesn't matter if the wings are generating lift or not.

    I'm not too worried either, but I can't come to Mexico - the company has commanded all computer people be less than 4 hours away in order to respond in the event of a problem.


    ...phil

  • I do not think that this info would come anywhere near Fear, Uncertantiy and Doubt, at least not in the manner that we usually use this term. The information presented in the article is an attempt to inform the citizens of a country, who are traveling abroad what they might expect, there is no malice involved. Why would you not want this information made public ?

  • Ok, this is silly... (Score:4)

    by Ami Ganguli ( 921 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @12:40AM (#1681401) Homepage

    I was in rural India in March. Scheduled rotating blackouts were normal (due to power shortages). We heated water with a little wood stove. The motor-rickshaws are not computerized. The planes are the old-fashioned kind flown by people, not computers. Exactly how is the Y2K bug going to hurt you there?

    The reality is that people in remote areas are used to living without a high-tech infrastructure. If the rest of the world self-destructs they'll be the ones left to pick up the pieces.

  • That link doesn't seem to work, I'm afraid

    Have a look at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office's breakdown by country at http://www.fco.gov.uk/travel/dynpag e.asp?Page=144 [fco.gov.uk]
  • Would being billed twice mean that you got your rubbish collected twice? :-)

  • Pilot Training (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The problem isn't pilot skill. The problem is that it takes several minutes of lining up and preparing to land, at a busy airport that may see planes taking off or landing at a rate of more then 1 a minute thing will get awfully ugly and disorganized, or if navigation fails (you don't have street maps in most aircraft) The fears about y2k flight is that the system used to coordinate and direct air traffic will fail, not that the pilot will throw his hands up and and scream "oh no its the year 200, we're all gonna die"
  • I like the reference in the article to it as the 2000 challenge. I've gotten pretty dang sick of constantly hearing Y2K over the past months.

    Personally, I'm going to Germany in October, and I'm not concerned about problems, because if there's one thing the Germans can do it's make the trains run on time (more or less)
  • Yeah!!!!!

    Chimay! Blackjack! Hookers!

    Well... forget the Chimay and blackjack.


    -m

  • Re:Pilot Training (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Perhaps this is the fear, but it's not grounded in reality, at least not for here in the US, at major airports. The FAA has already conducted live tests that show everything will be just peachy. What if their tests were flawed? Well, ok, but that's no more likely than that *any* of the tests that the FAA/airlines/etc perform on their systems for any reason are flawed. So maybe you should just be paranoid about flying at any time. Me? I've got stuff to do, I don't have the luxury of being paranoid. Course, I don't usually tend to have flights scheduled for midnight new years eve anyway...

  • Re:FUD from .uk, .us (Score:3)

    by lordsutch ( 14777 ) <chris@lordsutch.com> on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @03:48AM (#1681415) Homepage
    The really interesting part here is that the actual report [fco.gov.uk] on the U.S. doesn't really say any of the things that the CNET article attributes to it. So it's closer to journalist FUD (an all-to-common phenomenon) than government FUD... but FUD nonetheless.

    Waiting to be moderated down...
  • While the company I work for is fine (ain't unix grand?) there are many which truly aren't.

    My father is in charge of for a large (read multi-billion dollar profit/year) chemical company. Fortunately, companies like this also have the resources to do GOOD y2k testing, but they found a lot of little snafu's. Things like control devices which died after y2k. This is likely to affect smaller companies harder as they don't have the time to test every widget in a complicated system. The effect of one of these failures actually wouldn't have been particularly nasty, except for the fact that an affected plant would shut down before y2k, attempt to start after y2k, and it would fail to start for mysterious reasons. This would mean lost revenue... etc etc.

    Personally, I'm going to be out of town for New Year's, and just in case there's a problem with something, I'll have a case of wine, and maybe some crackers. I'll be fine :)
  • Well, for a view that is both Linux-oriented and somewhat entertaining, see My Linux Y2K Page [ntlug.org]. It actually cites some ancient legislation of hundreds of years ago...

    Not Found

    The requested URL /linuxy2k.html was not found on this server.


    ...phil

  • OK. Now some m... has modified the rating to be off topic. Unfortunately it is right on.

    The most important thing about Y2K is that everyone is using it as a scarecrow. The problem is not in the bugs in some badly written OSes, languages, etc, but in the massive panic. And of course in the fact that some people use it to raise political or financial dividends.
  • Don't tell a Scot their not a minority though!
  • If you look at it carefully, 2000 is not the beginning of a new millennium, but merely the last year of one.

    (Ask yourself why Arthur C. Clarke named the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" if you're not sure of this...)

    People will hold "new millennium" parties, "new millennium riots," release "new millennium" models of both automobiles and soft drinks, because they were looking for an excuse to do so.

    This is true whether they're religious extremists, political extremists, marketing droids, or people that just want to party.

    The juxtaposition of a Whole Lot of Zeroes happens to provide a cover for there being an excuse.

    Take it further than that and you'll get dumb results.

    Whether you're concerned about Y2K from a technical perspective, [hex.net] or have religious concerns about Y2K. [hex.net]

  • My friend, in Scotland their not.

    Everybody's indiginous somewhere.

    Mark.

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