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Y2K Rollover - Post Your Experiences Here! 719

Posted by Roblimo from the live-from-the-front dept.
fredm8 writes "Since the Slashdot article, When Does Y2K Begin, New Zealand has experienced the Y2K rollover. Yes the power still works, the water still flows, my Windows98 PC still runs, my Linux box rocks, and my supported *nix boxes still run." We're getting lots of stories like this one submitted. We might as well have them all in one place, so please post yours below instead of sending it in as a story submission. This thread ought to make an interesting chronicle of Y2K events -- or non-events, as the case may be.
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Y2K Rollover - Post Your Experiences Here! More

Y2K Rollover - Post Your Experiences Here!

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  • Y2K rror (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'v found that for som r ason my comput r is no long r abl to print out th l tt r " ". And wh n I s t my syst m tim back to 12/31...
    it once again works! Unbelievable! Well, I'll just have to keep rolling back the date, I guess.

  • Some notes on your car design (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 31, 1999 @03:46AM (#1429467)
    I drive and engineer race cars in my spare time, so I figure I'd share some observations with you before you start wandering in the desert:

    - The Car: The 'Cuda is a good choice as far as technology goes - no EMP-sensitive ECU to blow out in case of a nearby nuke, and all the engine sytems are mechanical. This means you have wear issues to worry about (on things like ignition points) but it's a whole lot easier to fabricate a set of points in a high school metal shop that it is to fab a transistorized ignition.

    However, your fuel system needs some thought. At roughly 7 lbs/gal, your fuel tanks will mass 770 lbs when full. And then a trunk full of concrete (huh?) is probably on the order of 500lbs - for a total weight addition of 1320 lbs.

    Now a 'Cuda is probably 3700 lbs, and has a weight distribution of 60/40 - so that means roughly 1480 lbs over the rear wheels. All your new mass is right over the rear end, so now you've got 2800 lbs over the rear end.

    This changes your weight distribution to 44/56.

    Now to handle the extra weight, you welded the rear suspension solid. Yow! With a rear-weight bias and a solid rear suspension, this is going to be one EVIL handling car. It's going to be undrivable loose - the back end in going to keep trying to pass the front end.

    But before you even get to that point, you're going to have to locate a set of rear tires with a load capacity of 1400 lbs each - nearly 3 times higher than the rating on the stock tires. Good luck!

    And then there's the questionable wisdom of placing large, fixed masses directly _behind_ the driver. The first big impact is probably going to tear those tanks and that concrete block loose from their mountings, and you'll be crushed against the engine block. Ouch!

    No, the well-equipped post-apocolyptic car gang member is going to be driving a diesel AM General Hummer:

    - Diesel engines will run on damn near anything that will burn. In theory, you could filter the grease pit behind your local Burger King and run on the used cooking oil. And there's no ignition system to fail either.

    - The Hummer is rated to carry large loads. In fact, you've got enough capacity for 3 of those drums, plus a barrel of engine oil too.

    - Many Hummers, if sourced creatively, come already equipped with weaponry of various sorts. I, personally, would recommend a Browning .50 cal - dirt simple, highly reliable, easy to maintain, and ammo is simple to fabricate.

    Although it's hard to pass up on the TOW-2 pintle mount version. :)

    - The Hummer has lots of ground clearence - good for climbing over spurious obstacles.

    Good luck!

  • No RTFM (Score:2)

    by KMSelf ( 361 )

    You've got it all wrong:

    cat man

    While you're at it:

    apropos 'What to wear to the party?'

    What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

  • After seeing "Anna and the King" last night I wanted to know more about King Mongkut. I searched on "Mongkut" at Excite and tried the first reference:

    http://www.geocities.net/Athens/Aegean/7545/Mong kut.html

    IE took me to this disgusting site instead:

    http://www.youcansave.com/healthbeauty.html

    In fact, any attempt to access geocities seems to be routed to this site. Has geocities been hacked? Does my computer have a really sick URL reroute virus? I'd like to know!
  • Today I read in a local paper (sorry, no link (besides it would be in Dutch)) that someone from the organisation "owning" the problem with the 20000 credit card terminals in the UK said: "This was not a Y2K related issue. It was more like a century problem, but now try to explain that to people out there." Amazing. As if relabeling the error makes it more excusable to have a rollover bug in a system that was supposed to have been fixed for Y2K.

    I do agree that the name millenium bug is silly (for more reason than one), but somehow I seriously doubt that that's the idea was what that spokesperson wanted to express. :-)

    --

  • 2k = 2048


    Not neccessarily. 2Km = 2 Kilo meter = 2000 meter. Only in computerland 2K equals 2048, and while The Bug mainly is a computer problem, counting years is not a computer concept. Besides, what to do with paper forms on which the 19 has been preprinted? It's the basically same problem even with no computer in sight.

    --

  • Everything ok here in Texas so far. Power, water, TV, Phone, Internet etc...

    Linux says:
    Sat Jan 1 01:31:54 CST 2000

    No problems there...
  • The real interesting effects won't happen until 2038 when all 32 bit time structures roll over to 1901. Unfortunately, since the average suit can't relate to a base 16 rollover in the same way they can relate to a base 10 rollover you can be sure the 2038 overflow won't make so much as a blip on the public consciousness. Just think about how many programs hard code their time structures in int32 to avoid debugging on 64 bit chips, how many solid state devices rely on 32 bit registers to cut costs.
  • You're right, Tom, i phrased that badly. strftime() exists in Perl, within the POSIX module. BUT... i'll still say that it's somewhat more understandable that programmers would make the Y1C error (how's that for a turn of phrase?) in Perl than in C. ctime() is part of Perl without loading any modules. strftime() is not... unless you're already an experienced C programmer (enough to know about strftime()), or read a LOT of documentation on Perl, you won't know about it. In C, on the other hand, the standard libraries are MUCH smaller and easier to study, and more importantly, strftime() is documented right alongside ctime()... on the same page, iirc.

    So Perl is no more prone to Y1C than C. However, Perl *programmers* are more prone to Y1C than C programmers. Is that better phrasing?

    As for the prevalence of the Cut and Paste Programming Antipattern with Perl... again, it's a lot easier in Perl than it is in C. When i found 150+ scripts with the bug, many of those scripts didn't even USE the timestamp string generated. And virtually all of those scripts dated to Perl 4, or stuck to Perl 4 conventions. Was there a POSIX module then?

    ---
    120
    chars is barely sufficient

  • The 19100 bug... here's why (Score:5)

    by Frank Sullivan ( 2391 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @08:31PM (#1429489) Homepage
    I have now seen a few instances of the "19100" bug, sometimes as the 100 bug - 2000 gets displayed as either 100 or 19100. Several people have commented on this, but missed a crucial point. So i thought i'd explain this bug some.

    The 19100 bug comes from improper use of the header in the C standard library. It is much more common in Perl than C, but much more disappointing in C.

    To learn about this, get out your battered copy of K&R (you DO have K&R, don't you? _The C Programming Language_, by Kernigan and Richie. If you only have one book on C, it should be this one). Turn to the reference in the appendix. Look at the description of struct tm. You'll see that tm->tm_year is the years *since 1900*. So, to print years correctly, in either two-digit or four-digit form, we must add 1900 to tm->tm_year.

    Here's where naive, amateurish C programmers mess up. They do not learn their standard libraries, and thus reinvent them poorly. The strftime() function provides printf()-style formatting for struct tm. It will print the year correctly in either two-digit or four-digit form. Programmers who don't know their libraries just stick tm_year in a printf() somewhere, without accounting for the missing 1900, something like this:
    printf("19%d", tm->tm_year);
    which will print 1999, then 19100. The libraries are very good (with the glaring exception of some security holes!). Learn them and use them.

    Perl is where this bug comes into its own. For various reasons either obvious or opaque to you, strftime() does not exist in Perl. And the contents of struct tm are handed back from ctime() as an array. Therefore, more programmers are likely to not look deep enough to see how this SHOULD be handled, and do the 19100 bug, since they don't have a nice built-in library routine to do it for them.

    This is a tremendous problem. When doing Y2K checking for a previous job, i found this bug in over 150 Perl scripts, mostly due to cut-and-paste programming (Perl unfortunately encourages that approach). I also found it in the popular wwwboard online discussion script. I'll bet it's all over the place.

    Hopefully, someone finds this informative, and maybe moderates it up so it actually gets READ.

    ---
    120
    chars is barely sufficient
  • Obviously a Perl script written by a programmer who didn't RTFM!

    For those who don't know, perl gives you back a year value which is the number of years SINCE 1900. Therefore, you calculate your year with $year = $perlYear + 1900; .. they probably just did "print '19$perlYear';"

    AGH

    --

  • Oi! Why wouldn't they use an unsigned for the time? Seems like Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie were planning on negitive times ;)

    Or support for times prior to 1970, at least.

    However, the answer may be "what's an 'unsigned'?" According to the version of the C Reference Manual that came with 6th Edition UNIX, there was no unsigned data type - that was added later. That manual is online, but only in Postscript, and is linked to from Dennis Ritchie's home page [bell-labs.com]; here's the document itself [bell-labs.com].

    Wait a sec (pun intended)

    0111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111
    would incriment to
    1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
    then
    1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001
    which are -0 and -1 respectively, right?

    Right on machines using sign-magnitude representation, but not on machines using two's-complement representation, as most UNIX machines are (there existed, at least at one point, a UNIX port to the Univac 36-bit mainframes; those were, I think, one's complement).

    In two's complement, on a 32-bit machine,

    1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000

    is -2147483648, and

    1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001

    is -2147483647.

  • Optus Cable and Wireless is down now as far as I can tell and its 1:55am local time.

    Which doesn't necessarily mean it's down due to a Y2K bug; the San Jose, California, USA Mercury News had an article yesterday that began with:

    As New Year's Day 2000 rolls around, about all anyone can be certain of is that personal computers will crash, somewhere the power will fail, and airline flights will be canceled. You can bet that credit card billing statements will have mistakes and bank ATM machines will either refuse requests for money, keep your card, or both.

    In other words, it will be business as usual.

    Not all bugs that occur around the transition from 1999-12-31 to 2000-01-01 are Y2K bugs; there're plenty of bugs to go around....

    The Optus Y2K Site [optus.net.au] claims, as of when I last checked, that

    Saturday, January 01, 2000 at 7:33:07 AM

    We have no evidence of systems failure due to Y2K at this time.

    and, for what it's worth, the Optus home page [optus.com.au] says

    On the 31st December the analogue mobile network begins to close down. Find out how Optus will be keeping you covered into the new millenium in our updated mobile coverage section.
  • Notice the date on the pic from the webcame (1/1/9999)...

    It now, for what it's worth, says just "01 01 99".

    Of course, it also says "Fireworks New Years Eve", while displaying a picture that, if it's evening, is early evening (unless, just as it's summer this time of year in the Antipodes, it's "evening" at 7 AM :-)), and looks suspiciously as if it's morning, as per the "07:15:56" it was displaying when I checked it; there aren't any fireworks to be seen, either.

  • Heck, wonder if anybody would be interested in a Hot Grits IPO?

    Hot Grits, Inc.'ll have to buy out the domain name first [hotgrits.com].

  • To prove that you can take a look at http ://www.pbs.org/whatson/stations/calendar.html?date =2038-01-19&station=KHET [pbs.org] which works right and shows the calendar for January 2038. Now compare it with the next day at http ://www.pbs.org/whatson/stations/calendar.html?date =2038-01-20&station=KHET [pbs.org] which as expected shows December 1901!

    But I do not care, in 2038 I will sure wear my wooden suit :-)
  • Not strictly true, actually it's the underlying C localtime (or gmtime call), or rather
    the definition of 'struct tm' in time.h [or equivalent], on which the return list from localtime/gmtime is based. It could be written in C, or Perl, or just about anything that uses struct tm or a data structure based on it.
  • All systems (Optus, Telstra, Vodafone etc) have been up all night. The only reason you wouldn't have been able to get through is congested cell servers - which is why somepeople could get through and some couldn't. It is also why if you are in a non-popular area, your mobile phone will still work but if you are in the CBD, it won't.
  • Just a quick note from Tokyo.

    I'm a systems administrator at a large ISP in Tokyo, and we completed our first few rounds of systems testing and nervous anxiety after the 2000 rollover.

    Nothing to report, which is good. One interesting note, perhaps: I was asked to power down the Linux systems a few minutes before midnight because if the power went out, the filesystems would take too long to fsck (we have a large RAID connected to a couple of them).

    No power outages, sewage overflows, or anything abnormal. I'm ready to pop this bottle of Möet champagne now!

    ----
    Jack of all trades, master of none: http://whole.net/~pup/ [whole.net]

  • Tom, you're blessed with being surrounded by
    intelligent people.

    I'm not convinced the average american can count to 8.
  • Coming up 3am and doubtless a few other countries now have had midnight come and go without the world collapsing in a chaotic heap of doom. Come 2000/01/01 12:00:01 the power was still on, TV still broadcasting (although after a few minutes of the moron they had doing the presentation I was starting to wish the TVNZ studios would have a localised Y2K power problem), just checked and water is still flowing from the taps (I don't need to go wee-wee or poo-poo just now so I'll take it on faith that the sewage system is still working). My main Linux box is running and knows what time it is, Internet connectivity is fine, ssh'ed to work and all the servers are up and know what time it is, the work web site is happy as Larry etc. Haven't turned on the other PC or the Amiga yet. Will be interesting to see what the SparcStation 2 running non-Y2K-compliant SunOS 4.1.3 does when I try booting it up...

    Oh, in other news, I might've been on track for the first road accident of the new millenium when I found myself going sideways on a *very* slippery corner on a wet and windy road coming home a couple of hours ago. Managed to straighten up safely though, would have been heaps of fun if I'd done it deliberately :-)
  • Yes, I actually use Netscape for an email program. For me, it's more than adequate. However, after coming back from a lovely murder mystery party, I've tried to email several people. The error I recieve is 'cannot resolve name, please check address in preferences and try again' or something close. In Pine, however, I can email just fine. So I'm not sure what the problem is. Just my .02

    I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
    what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'

  • Oka [4wdonline.com]
  • or blocked.

    The main Australian site for Y2k event reports, http://www.y2kaustralia.gov.au/ [y2kaustralia.gov.au] clearly shows no events [203.2.193.77] in any sector, in any state. Yet, the ABC breaking news [abc.net.au] site has a story of Y2k problems hitting a transport ticketing system [abc.net.au] in one or two states.

    This is just one I've spotted. How many other events aren't being reported on official Y2k event reporting sites?

  • Now everyone will blame those Blue Screens of Death and random system crashes they are so used to on the year 2000, rather than Microsoft's abject software engineering practices. This has to be the best PR move by Microsoft since their proclimation of Windows NT being the "most popular UNIX" in the world.

    As for your web page, yup, as of 8:40 AM CDT it is still down. Before blaming Y2K or the apacolypse, may I suggest a good, hard look at the underlying system. After all, you did say IE, right?

    :-)
  • BCE and CE are used instead of BC and AD to avoid the religious connotations of Before Christ and Anno Domini. The year of our Lord is inappropriate/offensive if you are not a Christian. See http://www.radix.net/~dglenn/defs/ce.html [radix.net] for a discussion of the problem.
  • There was no "unsigned long" data type, just char, int, unsigned and long.
  • according to [cnet.com]
    this story on News.com, Startrek- voyeger's web site claims that the next episode will be aired.. 99 years and 364 days ago.

    check it out here. [startrek.com]

    (and it's running a ASP script... why isn't this suprising?)


    --------------------------------
  • I'm underground right now in the Graymalkompound. Topside it's raining and cold and the power has been poopie all day long. Luckily for those of us here underground our supply of Sweet Tarts and pepsi is going strong. I was kinda hoping I'd be one of the few people left to repopulate the planet. At least I get to be one of the last people to find out if I'm Y2K compliant. We love you Boris!!
  • I don't see why people have such a hard time handling this. Most people can accept the fact that the 20th century is the 1900's. The same principle is at work. We start counting from 1, not zero when it comes to centuries and years. It wouldn't make much sense to talk about the zeroth century, or the zeroth year of our Lord.
    ----
  • check out http://www.iy2kcc.org/summary_chart_az.ht ml [iy2kcc.org] for an alphabetical list of countries and their status.
    ----
  • yes, that would work. I guess we could just declare today to be December 31st, 1998. :)
    ----
  • What were we expecting, exactly? People writing in saying "The power's out, the phones are out, and I can't connect to the Internet"? One way or another, no one's gonna post comments like that ;-)

    David
  • Here, also in Minnesota, we've had a couple more-than-minor Y2K problems, but they started December 10th. The contact management database, Telemagic v14.0, is not Y2K compliant. It hit a recall date (take the current date and add 3 weeks) of past 2000. Once that happened, the entire customer database got hosed. All 55,000 records. On the 21st, Telemagic came out with a patch, but it only fixes the program so it won't screw up any more databases. This one is already screwed up...

    Also, the launcher program KickOff (from WordPerfect 6.0), like Cron, reports the next launch date as 6am on 1/1/100. It is used to start this report printing software every morning. There is only one server here with the problem, but I know of another site with over 200 installations of KickOff...
  • Two out of two Symbol SPT1500 Palm devices running PalmOS 3.0 here failed to rollover to 2000.

    The devices remained set at 31st December 1999 but did move to an AM time. They accepted a manual date change with no problems.

    The SPT1500 is basically the same as a Palm III but has a Symbol laser barcode scanner built in to the top.

    Vik :v)
  • Everything is running smooth as silk here. The check engine light on my car kicked in about 10:15, but that is because I have a clogged fuel filter I think. Yuck.

    One funny thing did happen though... on our ham radio emergency net the guy up at the Independence, MO police station had a bit of a scare. At precisely 12:00am the circuit breaker he was on popped. Guess it could not handle the load from the coffee pot, a computer, and a mobile rig.

    I was hoping that the power would at least go out for an hour or so.. would be nice to see the stars without any light pollution.
  • My IE homepage [msn.co.uk] is currently down with ERROR 312.

    Perhaps this is a Y2K problem.

    Well done Micros~1 :)
  • It's been up and down all day...

    More down than up... of course...
  • For those who don't know, perl gives you back a year value which is the number of years SINCE 1900. Therefore, you calculate your year with $year = $perlYear +1900; .. they probably just did "print '19$perlYear';"

    Same thing is true for Javascript date/time functions in web browsers. Though IE and Netscape handle it differently. I believe IE works like Perl does above, but netscape, once it gets to "2000" just jumps from 99 to 2000. I wrote a script to fix this over a year ago for all the dates we display on websites at work, but someone yesterday just meantioned that they rolled ahead to 2000 and were getting Jan 30, 192000 as the date. It's always nice when you have a code library for people to use, but they decide to go ahead and write there own code any way, and the wrong way. Ugh. Now I have to go in and fix 100 project sites because of some moron.
  • This website: www.millennium-centre.gov.uk [millennium-centre.gov.uk] claims to be monitoring things around the world.

    <gripe>
    Although judging by the leaflet every home in the country got sent, they may be more into the business of reassurance than information. Choice extract from that leaflet (paraphrased from memory): Q. Will nuclear weapons go off because of the Y2K bug? A. Don't worry! All of the UK's nuclear missiles have been tested and found to be safe. Phew.
    </gripe>

  • An observation (Score:3)

    by Stephen ( 20676 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @02:30AM (#1429603) Homepage
    Why is the Y2K problem known as the millennium bug? Leaving aside the issue of when the millennium begins, it's still only a centenary bug!

    It's to do with the second digit of the year changing, not the first. It would only have been a millennium bug if programmers had used the last three digits to represent the year!

  • Here at the office -- yes, like many geeks I'm in the office today & tomorrow -- we're discussing with amusement how everything is going fine around the world.

    OTOH, we're wondering if some problems couldn't have a time delay, and only crop up several days later? What do others think.

    As an aside, I think the media frenzy around Y2K is interesting. When Y2K first surfaced in the media, everyone was discussing how it would cause problems in billing. Nowadays, the media has been predicting everything from nukes going off to terrorist attacks. Sheesh.
  • It's down for me (I get error 502 from my firewall)
  • If you look up your local weather on weather.com by using their zip code box on the main page, it says that your low temperature today will be zero. Doesn't matter where you live, your low will be zero. The high is correct, though. Can't say for certain that this is y2k-related, but you know how it goes. Us users are going to see everything with y2k written all over it.

    Here's a link for an example. [weather.com]
  • You're about to hear it straight from the horses mouth, folks. Straight from a SysAdmin on the front lines!

    Uhm. Problems? What problems? Houston, we have a problem? Wait, no, yes, er, maybe?

    Well, save for probably 30-50 pieces of workstations and Axil hardware, everything's passed the preliminary tests.

    I can unofficially (IANACSP[1]) say that our network is 100% ready as far as the data side goes.

    We officially have 4 hours as of 4 minutes ago till the Trial By Fire, and we have an 'example' system - an Axil 320 - to see what actually happens - it's set to EST so it's one of the first to blow up - also about 5 minutes fast.

    From what I have heard from other locations and other companies, everything looks good to go. Some telcos, mostly cellphone companies and LD companies, are afraid of the load. But, all I can say is that it looks like a big NOTHING.

    That's right. Y2k is the big NOTHING.

    I hope everyone has a safe and happy new year, and remember to check your beer for Y2k compliance before drinking! ;)

    [1] I Am Not A Corporate SpokesPerson(tm).
    If you would like to quote me, please EMAIL ME FIRST. EMAIL ME HERE [mailto] first, actually. ;)

    =RISCy Business
  • Ah, yes, but if you have a portable generator, you are probably in the very small minority of those who may not care too much about when the power is restored. Catch 22

  • I had this Y2K problem with my Linux box: When I checked to see that my CMOS clock rolled over corectly, hwclock aborted with a message saying mktime(3) failed. If anyone else has the problem, the solution is to get the source to hwclock [unc.edu] and compile against an up-to-date version of libc (glibc2.1.2 worked for me).
  • My organization is searching for highly motivated, individuals with the ability to work well independently and in groups. Strong people and martial arts skills are a must. You must be willing to relocate.

    Our organization will have a dominant role in the new era. The empire headquarters will be in Central America, though there are opportunities in ALL locations around the world.
  • I wonder if the media will make a huge deal about January 18th, 2038, 22:14:07 EST in the same way they did about Y2K...

  • Re:Y2k != millenium (Score:5)

    by aithien ( 32819 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @07:30AM (#1429644)
    When does the Millennium Begin?

    The answer is if you use the Gregorian Calendar and start the first
    millennium with the year 1 AD then the third millennium begins with the year
    2001 AD. But if you use the Common Era Calendar, in which years are numbered
    -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ..., and you begin the first millennium with the year 0 CE
    then the third millennium begins with the year 2000 CE. You have a choice. And
    if you opt for the Common Era Calendar you no longer have to put up with the
    smug assertion that "there was no year zero (so the new millennium begins in
    2001)". There was no year zero when Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian
    Calendar in the 16th Century but there certainly is one now, and the new
    millennium in the Common Era Calendar begins in 2000 CE.

    The number zero was introduced into westerm circles, along with the
    Arabic numerals we use to day, in the 13th century, but the church refused to
    allow them to be used, simply on the grounds that they were invented by Muslims.
    However, zero and the numbering system we use today did eventually make it into
    acceptance by the 16th century, and greatly simplified mathematics in Europe.
    We can't really blame the church for 2000/2001 issue, because the current year
    numbering system that we used (2 BC, 1 BC, 1 AD, ...) was originally designed by
    a monk in either the 7th or 8th century, before we even heard of the Arabic
    numbering system or zero.

    Roman numerals do not have a figure designating zero, and treating zero
    as a number on an equal footing with other numbers was not common in the 6th
    century when our present year reckoning was established by Dionysius Exiguus.
    Dionysius let the year AD 1 start one week after what he believed to be Jesus'
    birthday. Therefore, AD 1 follows immediately after 1 BC with no intervening
    year zero. So a person who was born in 10 BC and died in AD 10, would have died
    at the age of 19, not 20. Furthermore, Dionysius' calculations were wrong. The
    Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus was born under the reign of King Herod the
    Great, and he died in 4 BC. It is likely that Jesus was actually born around 7
    BC. The date of his birth is unknown; it may or may not be 25 December.

    Since the "Anno Domini" system did not come into effect until the 6th
    Century A.D. it is artificial to speak of the years 1 A.D., 100 A.D., etc.,
    because people living at that time knew nothing of this system of numbering
    years (since it had not then been invented yet). Furthermore the Romans in the
    reign of Augustus (27 B.C. to 14 A.D.) were somewhat lax in the proper
    observance of leap years. But we can project backwards (and forwards) from 525
    A.D. by representing the succession of years by the series of natural numbers:
    1, 2, 3, ..., 100, ..., 500, ... Then we can say that the period from 1 A.D.
    through 10 A.D. (including both years) was a period of ten years (since there
    are ten numbers in the series 1, 2, ..., 10). Similarly from 1 A.D. through 100
    A.D. is a period of 100 years, and from 1 A.D. to 1000 A.D. is a period of 1000
    years.

    The word "millennium" means "a period of 1000 years" so we can conclude
    that the period from 1 A.D. through 1000 A.D. (including both years) constituted
    one millennium, and in fact, the first millennium of the Christian era. So the
    second millennium of the Christian era begins with the year 1001 A.D., or more
    exactly, on 1st January 1001 A.D. And the third millennium of the Christian era
    begins on 1st January 2001 A.D. So for Christians - or at least, for all who
    adhere to the Christian system of numbering years - the answer is clear: The new
    millennium begins on 1st January 2001 A.D. However, this is not the end of the
    matter, because the "Anno Domini" system of year numbering has a major flaw,
    namely, it may be OK for years since 1 A.D., but what happens when we consider
    earlier years? As is well known, such years are numbered in reverse order, and
    designated as years "Before Christ". Thus the year immediately before 1 A.D. is
    designated 1 B.C., and the series extends backwards: 2 B.C., 3 B.C., etc.

    With the rise of modern scholarship, particularly astronomy, archaeology
    and chronological studies, this system was felt to be inadequate for scientific
    purposes. For one thing it does not lend itself to calculation using dates. For
    example (a very simple one), how many years elapsed between 1st January 6 B.C.
    and 1st January 6 A.D.? Twelve years? No. The answer is not obvious (and still
    less obvious if we consider longer periods such as that from 535 B.C. to 481
    A.D.). So astronomers and chronologists decided to number years by representing
    the succession of years by the doubly-infinite series of positive and negative
    numbers: ..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3 ... This is called the "astronomical"
    system of numbering years. In this system years from 1 onwards have the same
    numbers as years A.D. (year 1 = 1 A.D., and so on), but years B.C. are related
    as follows: The year 0 in the astronomical system is the year 1 B.C., and the
    year -n in the astronomical system is the year n+1 B.C. (for n = 1, 2, 3, ...).
    Conversely, the year n B.C. is the year -(n-1) in the astronomical system. Thus
    year -1 = 2 B.C., year -2 = 3 B.C., and so on.

    A millennium is, by definition, a period of 1000 years. But it is no
    part of the definition that a millennium must begin or end with a particular
    year number. If we adopt the astronomical year numbering system then we can
    begin the "first" millennium with year 0 just as well as with year 1. Strictly
    speaking, there is no first millennium in the astronomical system, since it
    simply numbers years by mapping them onto the sequence ..., -2, -1, 0, 1, 2,
    ..., and we are free to begin millennia where we think fit. It is thus clear
    that the answer to the question as to when the new millennium begins depends on
    which system of year-numbering one chooses to use. Christians may prefer to stay
    with the system of years "Anno Domini", in which case they must answer that the
    new millennium begins on 1st January 2001 A.D. Scientists and others who prefer
    a more rational and useful system of numbering years may prefer to adopt
    explicitly the astronomical system. In this case they are free to begin
    millennia from the years 1, 1001, 2001, and so on (in which case the third
    millennium begins on 1st January 2001), or from the years 0, 1000, 2000, and so
    on (in which case the third millennium begins on 1st January 2000). Thus anyone
    who wishes, for whatever reason, to celebrate the start of the new millennium on
    1st January 2000 has entirely good and rational grounds for doing so, namely,
    (i) the adoption of the astronomical system for numbering years, combined with
    (ii) the convention of beginning millennia with years whose numbers end in "000"
    (and beginning centuries with years whose numbers end in "00"). Note that this
    article does not show that those who hold (as those who adhere to the Christian
    calendar must hold) that the new millennium begins on 1st January 2001 are
    mistaken. Such people have reasons to justify their preference. But this does
    show that anyone who prefers to think of the year 2000 as the first year of the
    new millennium has perfectly sound reasons for doing so.

    I plagorized the SHIT out of this from postings on slashdot and on the internet... no offense to anyone.
  • It is true that 2K would equal 2000 in a metric system, but time is not metric!

    SI prefixes (kilo, milli, deca, pico, et al) is not "metric only."

    look at kilovolt, microfarad, megohm, etc. Those are not metric units, yet they use SI prefixes.

    Note the MKS (metres, kilograms, seconds) and CGS (centimetres, grams, seconds) systems as well, for maintaining proper relationships in physics calculations.

    Finally, SI prefixes are used in time measurements. Ever hear of a millisecond?

    The SI system was designed to be ridiculously easy to use an can be applied to any unit, keeping consistency and simplicity. Imagine if we kept the imperial practise of making up new words for appropriate units? How about if a microfarad was called a flinker instead? Then change picofarad, nanofarad, millivolt... Life would be very painful for me.
  • Kilovolt, microfarad, and megohm are used in the metric system as well as the imperial system. They are universal units.

  • Re:19100?? (Score:3)

    by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @02:32AM (#1429650)
    http://www.swissinfo.net/cgi/worldtime/clock.pl?Au ckland,New=Zealand

    Current time in Auckland, New Zealand is: Saturday, January 1, 19100 - 00:34:31


    I dont think many people anticipated the 19100 problem, heheh.

    -- iCEBaLM
  • Same thing is true for Javascript date/time functions in web browsers. Though IE and Netscape handle it differently. I believe IE works like Perl does above, but netscape, once it gets to "2000" just jumps from 99 to 2000.
    That's not totally correct. My IE 4.0 on Windows NT behaves just like Netscape, provided it's the getYear() method we're talking about. Later versions of Netscape & IE support getFullYear() which returns the full four-digit year.

    The problem with getYear() is that in early implementations of JavaScript it returns a two-digit year for dates between 1900-01-01 and 1999-31-12, while for all other dates it returns a four-digit year. See Netscape's Client-Side JavaScript Reference getYear [netscape.com] under "Backward Compatibility". Later implementations always return the year minus 1900, just like Perl does. Netscape's reference says the turnover came with JS v1.2, so Netscape 4.x, IE4 & IE5 should in theory all do it right.

  • www.eyeonbrisbane.citec.com.au [citec.com.au]. Notice the date on the pic from the webcame (1/1/9999)...

    Your Friendly Neighborhood New Years Curmudgeon,
    Warren
  • Here in Brisbane, Australia. 1am (UTC+10). Windows 2000 beta 2 survived the rollover (I left the computer on). MacOS9 survived the rollover. I still have power. I still have phone. I still have water. We still have civil order. The cat still works. You get the picture.

    All I can think of is the horrendous waste of food and water as our Premier (equivalent of State Governer in the US) went on TV last night and told everyone to fill up bathtubs, buckets and water bottles as well as stockpile food for a fortnight. Now everyone is simply going to tip it down the drain.

    We have enough problems in Oz with drought and water shortages without idiot politicians telling us how to waste resources. For those in the USA - EVERYTHING IS GOING TO WORK. DON'T WASTE WATER AND FOOD BY STOCKPILING.

    Now at last this idiocy can end. Let's make the best of the new year for all of us.

    John Wiltshire
  • There is at least one problem in Melbourne Australia...
    Optus Cable and Wireless is down now as far as I can tell and its 1:55am local time. I can't get a connection to or from my mobile phone.
    Early in the night it did seem quite busy but now its just a mix between being dead and a noise recording. It even stoped sending out the message saying which tower the phone was reciving

    So if your counting on mobile as a backup...forget it.

  • Date: Sat, 1 Jan 100 00:50:01 +73100 (Score:4)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @03:00AM (#1429674) Homepage
    So my old sparc is just a few years behind.... but what a timezone offset. Well, its not sunos's fault, its that damn copy of elm compiled back in 1996. I am wondering about the old copy of innd which could have a few of these kinds of problems as well. Is it too late to start y2k fixes? If it is, I'll be heading down to the local pub to have a brew to two...

    Everyone have a happy 19100!

  • Y2K from the front line... (Score:4)

    by Nigel Bree ( 45256 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @02:48AM (#1429677) Homepage
    Lessee, 2:48AM here in Kaiwaka, New Zealand and no Y2K-related outages of any kind yet reported... the Win98 and Win2K boxes here at home went through it all fine.


    Just talking about general Y2K readiness, it was amusing to watch on TV how people living in cities behaved, with stocking up on water, toilet paper and batteries on the 31st. I'm in a rural community where we can get by without technology anyhow - our water supply is rainwater collected from the roof into a 20,000 litre tank and even without electricity all we need is a siphon hose :-).


    Anyhow, on general Y2K readiness it's been amusing since I used to work for a company that made the point-of-sale systems for the local oil companies. 20 years ago, most of the staff could deal with not having power at all, manually pumping the stuff using hand cranks. 10 years ago after we had computerised everything, that knowledge of how to operate had basically vanished. It's amazing how quickly people forgot how to operate in a manual world.


  • Basically, especially in the US, when ANYthing goes wrong tonight (and something inevitably will), it will be blamed on the rollover, whether or not that is actually the case. Not good.

    Mother Nature might not be Y2K compliant, and some storm somewhere could very well knock power off. And in Rochester, the local telephone company has been telling people "Don't pick up your phone at 12:01 to see if it works; you might overload the circuits," which leads me to believe that people might not be Y2K compliant even if machinery is.

  • Just about everything is working fine in Tampa, FL. Water works, phone works, and I crossed over into the New Year chatting on IRC just fine. The IRC server also crossed over jsut fine a hour later. A couple of my friends computer are slightly messed up, one says it's 1984 (hmmm, 1984....interesting.....) and another said his computer got really slow after Y2K. The only real y2k bug I noticed myself was in a CGI script I copied somewhere that counted down the millinnium. It says it's the year 19100 and there is -17101 years until 2000. The full thing can be found here [1wh.com]

    Also went looking for some of those "bunker" people who got parnoid and ran to the hills for Y2K. Here is one's [ntx.net] admission of embarrasment.

  • This morning (Score:3)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @04:43AM (#1429683)
    This morning a phone call woke me up. It was a telemarketer. I gave her about 5 words before I tolder her "I don't need credit card protection, thank you, bye".

    Also, my waffles were burned today. So I think my toaster may not be y2k compliant.

    A few horsemen and guys with trumpets showed up at my door asking directions to New York. Man, I hope they're not late for their party.

    Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]
  • What I'm really tiring of are these zealous self-righteous "the millennium begins in 2000" people. They're so fanatical about it. Their snide self-important comments are so annoying. For one thing by the Gregorian calender in which we live, 2000 is NOT the start of the milleNNium (most of the 2000-heads can't even spell it), and secondly you are exhibiting a very revealing characteristic about your personality, we've all heard it before, it's in every damn TV commercial, and it can be debated all you want... bu there isn't a point to it, we just want to have some fun, but the Cult of 2000 denies us the right to speak and threatens us with physical violence and social ostracism as they continue to paint their ignorance everywhere you care to look. Be careful not to show these people any shiny objects, they're easily distracted by them.
  • Well, it just turned midnight 10 minutes ago, and the power went out. I'm using NT, and the BSOD took over just as my clock was ringing! I tried to reboot, but that failed too. I have no idea why. I'm writing this by candlelight.

    My phone isn't working either - no dial tone. Just dead. I guess all the Y2K stuff wasn't just hype. Oh well, guess I'll hop over to my brokerage account and sell some stock.
  • The fact that people approximately 2000 years ago decided to start a new count does not seem to me to be particularly important

    (sigh) sorry to be pedantic, but the Gregorian calender wasn't invented until ~525A.D.

    See this [historyhouse.com] for the real skinny.

    And incidentally, hen people refer to the next millennium, they are generally speaking of the third millennium, which, in fact, begins 2001. Sheesh, you're being more pedantic about this than I am. See this [douglasadams.com] article by Douglas Adams to find out what happens to pedants.

    --GnrcMan--
  • nd I was in Bourke Street Mall (ie the centre of the city) watching a big LED screen count down to the year 2000. We didn't have a Y2K problem, but when the countdown rolled over, the following message appeared: Happy New Millenium That is exactly what the screen read... no typos here... just a small Y2K problem!
    No typos? Don't be to sure of yourself. I can plainly se a speling eror there on your scren. :-)

    ObHackery: perl -pe y/a-z//s

  • For a good time, type:
    % cal 9 1752
    September 1752
    Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    12 14 15 16
    17 18 19 20 21 22 23
    24 25 26 27 28 29 30
  • You have a restaurant with tables that seat four people each. As folks file in, you seat them sequentially until each table fills up.

    The only important question is this: does the 8th person sit at the end of 2nd table or the start of the 3rd one?

    Once you figure that out, everything is clear. I suspect that even hamburger flipsters can handle this one.

  • several millenii == several thousand assholes
    Close, but not quite.

    The only way you could get a -ii plural in Latin is if there were a -ius singular. For example, from radius you get radii and from genius, genii. The more common situation, that of second declension masculines, is just -us going to -i, as in abacus becoming abaci, or focus becoming foci. (We shan't get into corpus becoming corpora.)

    Note also that Latin had more than one meaning for anus. One [tufts.edu] takes the meaning you're assuming here, and is a second declension masculine. However, another [tufts.edu], which had a different meaning, was 4th not 2nd declension, so formed its plural the way status and apparatus did -- by converting the vowel in the -us from a short to a long u, which changed pronunciation but not spelling.

    Happy antemillennium. :-)

  • For various reasons either obvious or opaque to you, strftime() does not exist in Perl.
    That's not true.
    % perl -MPOSIX -e 'print strftime("It is now %A the %d of %B in %Y here.\n", localtime())'

    It is now Saturday the 01 of January in 2000 here.

    As for your cut-and-paste remarks, that can be attributed to how many desperate nonprogrammers use perl who wouldn't dream of trying to use C++. They're doing the best they can, but nobody ever told them the "right" way.

    I see you've neglected to cover Java and Javascript, too.

    I don't see how people who don't know libraries in Perl are any different that people who don't know libraries in C. I already mentioned this code:

    #include <time.h>

    char *months[] = {
    "January", "February", "March", "April", "May ", "June",
    "July ", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December",
    };

    main() {
    time_t now = time(0);
    struct tm *t = localtime(&now);
    printf("Y2K will begin on %s %d, 19%02d\n",
    months[t->tm_mon], t->tm_mday, t->tm_year);
    exit(0);
    }

    It's easy to make the same screw up in Perl:
    use Time::localtime;

    @months = (
    "January", "February", "March", "April", "May ", "June",
    "July ", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December",
    );

    $t = localtime();

    printf("Y2K will begin on %s %d, 19%02d\n",
    $months[$t->mon], $t->mday, $t->year);

    In both those programs, the result is:
    Y2K will begin on January 1, 19100
    Sure, I could have used strftime() in both of them. Or, I could have learned about what localtime() returns. But both require one thing: RingTFM. People don't do that. It doesn't matter the language. So they suffer.

    I think you are mistaken to say that Perl is any more prone to this than C. Both have a year back from struct tm that is offset from 1900 making it easy to screw up, and both provide strftime if you know about it.

  • I work for a tier 1 ISP, and just spoke with a colleague in the Network Operations Center. He said that the rollover had gone flawlessly in Hong Kong and Australia, where we have POPs. This may not be too indicative, however, as the Hong Kong POP has only been used for customer traffic in the last year, and the Australia POP is mostly used for large accounts, which have been Y2K ready for a while now. It does show that nothing unexpected is happening. Lets hope the trend continues!

    //Phizzy
  • Nice explanation, but this doesn't work how you think. The clock's not going to "run out of digits" and decide to set itself back to 0. It's going to keep on happily counting in binary, setting the most significant bit, which determines the sign of an integer. Thus it will roll back to -2^31, which is in 1901.
    --

  • Re:weather.com... (Score:3)

    by PurpleBob ( 63566 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @07:53AM (#1429718)
    Well, obviously they're just trying to get the computer to accept "plague of locusts" and "rain of frogs" as weather conditions.

    Or maybe their forecast is exactly right... hmm...
    --
  • My Linux Alpha from Microway stopped working sometime between 2am PST December 31st and noon December 31st when I woke up. I'm using a different machine to post this.

    When I got up this morning the power save on the monitor wouldn't go off, even after turning the monitor on and off again. We couldn't log in to it remotely. Ping returned nothing.

    As a last resort we tried turning it off and on again. The "Please select the operating system to start" screen gives Linux as its only choice. After choosing Linux it says, "The highlighted Operating System Selection is not valid. To modify an Operating System Selection enter Setup option."

    We've tried turning the date back on the bios, but that doesn't change anything. My husband suspects the hard drive. I'm not sure if there is a virus that does this. We've been attacked before, but it was the other machine (the one I'm writing this post from) that was compromised.

    If anyone has any ideas, I'd sure appreciate them. Normally I'd ask for e-mail, but Frost was our e-mail server and it is the one that is down... I just signed up for a yahoo mail account to take responses. Try mailing beth_leonard@yahoo.com [mailto].

    I tried calling Microway, but their number just rang until I got the operator's "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again," message.

  • # hwclock
    Sat Jan 1 00:00:00 2000 -0.000000
    #

    Whoo hooo!

    Happy New Year!
  • Diesel engine on fast food grease pits has been done. Go to http://www.veggievan.org [veggievan.org]. The guy who did it is a friend of mine. It's a great story.
  • You can watch those lovely-useful TV bore-oadcasts using battery-powered televisions, and sometimes listen to their audio channels on battery-powered radios (as in a PBS station I once listened to). Also, don't forget portable generators.

  • Me, I'm all set with my '72 Mercedes 240D, which has almost as much carrying capacity of a Hummer, and a lot more class. Armaments are wanting though. I'll have to mount a custom potato cannon on the roof.

    Hah - my solar powered electric motor scooter will keep running for years longer than your monstrosity .... and my spud gun will continue to defend me long after you run out of hairspray for your cannon ...... mind you potatos are going to be worth their weight in gold .... people will be lining up to be shot at ......

  • Not that I joined into the buying of canned food shared neurosis, but spending the next month reading "news" about how this webpage or that MS product thinks its 1900 makes me wish the power was out.

    A 1900 web clock is about as interesting and noteworthy as a page defacement, CNET is gonna have a great month.

  • The executive officer of a bank here in Brazil had a great idea: he went to Australia to spend the weekend, all expenses payed by his employer, to "observe the Y2K onset and report back to headquarters". Why didn't I think of it??

  • Y2k problems here. (Score:5)

    by Lerc ( 71477 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @04:00AM (#1429747)
    My system seems to be suffering from the Y2k bug. It's 3:58am and my monitor is all blurry. My keyboard is broken too. The keys seem to be swimming around and trying to escape my fingers.


    On the brighter side, my girlfriend is looking even cuter than usual.
  • Yup - all systems go. Was too busy having fun to have the laptop turned on but it's fired up OK here (yes, Win95 - byte me :)

    Next major point will be some time this morning when we cross 00:00 UTC (airtraffic control, etc).

    Check out Australia's government Y2K update site [y2kaustralia.gov.au] for more info. You'll need to follow the link to the public site - they've password protected the main sections.
  • And in Rochester, the local telephone company has been telling people "Don't pick up your phone at 12:01 to see if it works; you might overload the circuits," which leads me to believe that people might not be Y2K compliant even if machinery is.

    Okay, I have two comments on this. First, I'm familiar with the issue with getting dial tone. The dial tone is generated by the switch and it can only generate dial tone for a fraction of the total lines it is connected to. It makes sense when you think about the facts. Dialing only happens during a small fraction of the duration of the call and only one party to the call needs that dial tone.

    The second is for fable2112 herself. It's nice to see that I'm not the only person here from sunny Rochester.
  • I work at Symantec, and CNN is shivering with anticipation waiting in our antivirus research lab to hear about juicy computer problems. Me and some friends were thinking it would be fun to pull a couple breakers at 4:00 Pacific (GMT midnight) after hyping it up to them to see if we could get them to broadcast live panic.

    I think, given the likely reactions of your employers, their customers, the government and the public, you should follow the example of a group of Iraqi soldiers from the beginning of the decade. Surrender to the CNN news crew when you are done. It is your only hope to avoid an early and unpleasant death. And it is a slim hope.
  • Now that the "millenium" is almost over, Tom, I have a confession. I want some of your karma. I've wanted it for years. Say you'll be a donor for a karma-transplant operation...:)

    Wow, a karma transplant to an anonymous coward. That's going to be a challenge. How will we know it's you? Will you be the one wearing a Slashdot T-shirt and running Linux? Seriously, if you want karma, you could try posting under your own name. It isn't like anything you said was controversial.
  • I turned on CNBC a little while ago. The US markets closed up. In fact, they were reporting that every major index closed at a record high today. Here's [yahoo.com] a story about it. That is a sure indication that there is very little Y2K panic going on.
  • I made this point yesterday [slashdot.org] when I suggested that we should track Y2K non-events here. It is as valid now as it was then.
  • I haven't been able to find a story on this online yet, but CNN (on cable) did a live broadcast from the FAA command center in Herndon, Virginia a couple of minutes ago. They pointed out that all of the air traffic control and aviation systems are on GMT (I suspect they meant UTC, but I'm not sure about that). They reported that there were no planes reporting problems. I guess if we want to see planes falling out of the sky we have to head to a war zone. No thanks, I'll pass on that.
  • A few things here... this was an attempt at humor. I am not the hot grits AC nor the open source (insert female here)AC. It was an attempt (aparrently lame) to get a few laughs out of y2k since it was blown so out of proportion.

    Geez... get a life people.

  • Sampling Bias (Score:5)

    by Sajma ( 78337 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @04:59AM (#1429761) Homepage
    Has anyone noticed that the "Y2K Experiences" posted here necessarily come from people who:
    1) Have electricity
    2) Have an OS that still works
    3) Have a browser that still works, and
    4) Have an ISP that still works

    With this sort of sampling bias, we really shouldn't be expecting too many "horror" stories... Most will be "yeah, my stuff still works, which is why I can post this..."

    :) awaiting "Smartass" moderation...
  • I live in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which are the mountains that border Silicon Valley to the south.

    The power's on.
    The phones work.
    The ISP's up.
    The toaster still gets my toast oh, so perfect.

    Happy New Year!

  • http://readplease.com/
    _________________________
  • !Run! one minute till auckland.nz.undernet.org (the machine) realizes it is 2000 (auckland.nz.undernet.org 946638231 255 : Friday December 31 1999 -- 23:59 +13:00(from auckland.nz.undernet.org))
    -
    !Run! Or did it just halt there?
    -
    !Run! BWWWHAHAHAH!!! A BUG!
    -
    !Run! *** auckland.nz.undernet.org 946638290 255 : Saturday January 1 2000 -- 00:00 -35:00(from auckland.nz.undernet.org)
    -
    !Run! ROFL!!! Note the -35:00 :))))

  • well the year 2000 just hit here in korea, and i must say i have a different story than all the 'everything is the same' stories from the kiwis and aussies.

    see, it's the year 2000 now, and as we all know, 2000 is the future. for one thing, the silly boxes you call 'cars' have all been replaced by bubble cars from the jetsons. we all have robot maids, the wallpaper is metallic, and my wardrobe is now sharp and plasticy. we live in a utopian society under the care and guidance of the big brother, and there's no disease, hunger, or crime. because it's the future, you see; no need for bad things here. in fact, our genes have been altered to weed out such impure thoughts.

    anyway, i have to go to a 4d holographic cybertechnotrendybuzzword videotelephonographic conference now. just remember, the y2k rollover wasn't that bad. unless of course you start hearing the trumpets of gabriel, then you're going to hell.

  • We've got Y2K problems. (Score:3)

    by c+era ( 102193 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @03:17AM (#1429816)
    I live in Minnesota, US (CST), and when I came into work this morning I was told that some people can't login to the NT workstations. It turns out that last night the server team decided they needed better security (they should of switch to Solaris, we have very few problems with Solaris). Unfortunately they hosed the DNS for the domain controllers and now the part of the NT network is down (but the suns run just fine). Luckily only administrative assistants are on NT, all of our critical systems are on Solaris.

    I think the biggest Y2K problem will be quick changes that are not thought through.

  • Well... 12:00 AM just rolled around and I am still alive and connected to the Net. No services seem to have been interrupted, and I doubt any will be.

    I don't know if it's just plain silly or oddly appropriate that I'm ushering in the new year/decade/century/millennium on the Internet (something which will likely have a profound influence on our future).

    A lot of people will be feeling very silly tomorrow morning. Happy New Year everyone!

  • "Well, well, well. Less than twenty-four hours 'til Ragnarok and I haven't a stitch to wear."

    Billions of people around the globe are thinking this very thought. Don't be part of the mass of cannon fodder awaiting their fate on January 1st. I'd like to help others survive and prosper after the Y2K "situation" by describing the preparations I've made over the past year for tonight's Big Event.

    1. The Car
    Nothing says "I'm a survivor!" like a cool set of wheels, which is why I have a 1971 Plymouth HemiCuda [prodigy.net] with a 426ci/425hp V8.
    I took out the rear window and rear seats, and welded in two 55-gallon drums as reserve fuel tanks.
    I filled the trunk with cement so I could ram other vehicles in reverse during "Road Warrior"-type scenarios.
    Due to the weight of the cement in the trunk, I had to replace the rear shocks with solid steel bars, so the suspension is pretty stiff, but boy does it have some range!
    I've mounted a 20mm cannon (originally from a AH-1 Cobra helicopter) - that I bought on eBay [ebay.com] for $35K - to the roof of the car so it faces forward.
    It fires when the left turn signal is activated.
    I use a Xybernaut [xybernaut.com] wearable PC for aiming, and I adapted the anti-wobble feature of my camcorder to stabilize the cannon during vehicle movement and firing.
    There is a radiacmeter attached to the grill, so I'll know when I'm approaching former urban areas.
    I didn't have time to cut a hole in the hood to accommodate the huge intake of the supercharger attached to the engine, so I just left the hood off.
    The exhaust system has been removed as a vestigial performance-hindering remnant of a civilized era.

    2. The Duds
    I have a fire-resistant Nomex jumpsuit dyed to match desert terrain, as all terrain will soon be desert terrain.
    For formal occasions, black leather chaps are acceptable, but the buttless kind will make you the laughing-stock of Bartertown.
    Accessorize with low-slung pistol holster [brigadegunleather.com], gas mask [gasmasks.com], and black leather jackboots [dehner.com].
    Bandoleers are in this year, but only for survivors with crew-served weapons.
    Fine-grain leather driving gloves will assist you in controlling your vehicle when driving through fallout-blighted areas.

    3. Food
    Pound-for-pound, dry dog food has ten times the nutritional value of boiled potatoes, and it can be stored longer, too!
    Dog food for older dogs is often packed with fillers that you just don't need, but Puppy Chow [puppychow.com] is geared towards growing dogs, and has more than enough nutrition.
    I'm towing a U-Haul trailer [uhaul.com] full of it, with a few cases of surplus MREs from the Gulf War for special occasions.

    I hope I've provided some insight into the preparations necessary for surviving the coming hard times.
    I am interested in having a traveling companion to help with driving.
    Any fertile females interested in repopulating the planet should contact me at TheSurvivor@militia.mt.us

  • 19100?? (Score:4)

    by sh ( 125304 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @02:18AM (#1429871)

    one interesting thing after a /date on my local irc network:

    [t/v] [client.oz.org] 946646223 0 saturday january 1 19100 -- 00:17 -37:00

    whoops!

  • Dam (Score:3)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Friday December 31, 1999 @03:03AM (#1429886) Homepage
    OH MY GOD

    Everything is burning, my servers are all crashed and there are thousands of the undead on my door step. The HORROR the HORROR of it all. Please God save me from this world. There is massive amounts of radation leaking in though the vents, and the smell of Death is all around me. Most of my fellow brothers are dead, and those still living are praying and begging for the sweet grip of death to choke out their last breaths. Please death save me from this. Pleaes death, take it all away. The End is Here

    Oh, wait. Dam, sorry false alarm. I forgot I am in Central time zone and it is only 8:02AM on Dec 31/99 still. Sorry my bad. I still got 15-16 hours left.

    I will keep your posted.

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