Y2K: Hoax, Or Averted Disaster? 625
Allnighterking writes "Y2K -- remember the fear it generated? Cartoons were written about it. The dried food industry saw a boom. Doomsayers abounded. But in the end, no planes fell, no one died and the electric grid stayed up for three more years. Was it all a hoax? Or was it the result of careful and complete planning and upgrading. American RadioWorks has a series of articles talking about the disaster that never happened called Y2K You can either Listen in or read the Transcripts of each of the 3 broadcasts and decide for yourself. The over 100 Billion pumped into the US economy alone may well have fueled the boom and predicated the bust. Could the success at Y2K prevention have made the coming problem in 2038 something people will ignore?"
2038bug.com mirror (Score:5, Informative)
mirror: http://mirrordot.org/stories/c3714b90fba0ed06b444
Re:Collective fear (Score:5, Informative)
No, it was two things - firstly it was a genuine problem with many back-end financial (and other) systems that had a huge amount of effort and expense spent on them and were fixed, invisibly (to the general public) thanks to a great effort by many in the IT industry. Secondly it was an over-hyped problem that was never really going to affect desktop PC's and the like, which was over-sold to the public and never materialised.
So, for most people's point of view it was a lot of fuss about nothing, because they never saw the real problem, which could have caused serious problems, and only saw the hyped, non problem.
Disclaimer: I did technical support for a Y2K team for a large bank. I know what I'm talking about. I saw the systems that would fail, and what it would do. I saw them fixed.
Perl Script (Score:5, Informative)
(Shamelessly stolen from http://www.gsp.com/2038/ )
Re:Mirror? (Score:5, Informative)
Update: 01/2004 The first 2038 problems are already here. Many 32-bit programs calculate time averages using (t1 + t2)/2. It should be quite obvious that this calculation fails when the time values pass 30 bits. The exact day can be calculated by making a small Unix C program, as follows:
In other words, on the 10th of January 2004 the occasional system will perform an incorrect time calculation until its code is corrected. Thanks to Ray Boucher for this observation.
The temporary solution is to replace all (t1 + t2)/2 with (((long long) t1 + t2) / 2) (POSIX/SuS) or (((double) t1 + t2) / 2) (ANSI). (Note that using t1/2 + t2/2 gives a roundoff error.)
The year-2038 bug is similar to the Y2K bug in that it involves a time wrap not coped for by programmers. In the case of Y2K, many older machines did not store the century digits of the date year, hence the year 2000 and the year 1900 would appear the same.
Of course we now know that the prevalence of computers that would fail because of this error was greatly exaggerated by the media. Computer scientists were generally aware that most machines would continue operating as usual through the century turnover, with the worst result being an incorrect date. This prediction withstood through to the new millennium.
There are however several other problems with date handling on machines in the world today. Some are less prevalent than others, but it is true that almost all computers suffer from one critical limitation. Most programs use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to work out their dates. Simply, UTC is the number of seconds elapsed since Jan 1 1970. A recent milestone was Sep 9 2001, where this value wrapped from 999'999'999 seconds to 1'000'000'000 seconds. Very few programs anywhere store time as a 9 digit number, and therefore this was not a problem.
Modern computers use a standard 4 byte integer for this second count. This is 31 bits, storing a value of 231. The remaining bit is the sign. This means that when the second count reaches 2147483647, it will wrap to -2147483648.
The precise date of this occurrence is Tue Jan 19 03:14:07 2038. At this time, a machine prone to this bug will show the time Fri Dec 13 20:45:52 1901, hence it is possible that the media will call this The Friday 13th Bug.
Economics 101 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Collective fear (Score:5, Informative)
All the while the fixes were slowly, calmly being instituted.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Very real, saw it myself. (Score:1, Informative)
Big iron hardware / OS vendors and our in house trading system developers fixed and tested and fixed and tested for 4 years to make sure 2000 would not be a problem for us.
It was most certainly very real. Imagine if your country suddenly just stopped electronic trading and it would take at least months of frantic auditing and coding to fix and any amount of money.
Systems that mattered, systems which would have lots of nervous heads on the chopping block, got fixed well before 2000.
People who say Y2K was a "hoax", were NOT there in the thick of it and did not see real, top priority nation or life critical systems fail under test or the process to have them fixed.
Now, if you said Y2K was over hyped, then I could not argue. Especially when the news is saying things like "planes will fall out of the sky" and "there will be no electricity".
Not a hoax (Score:2, Informative)
A railroad I know of had to manually route trains for about two to three weeks because of a couple of missed Y2K parameters. Had it not been for a few old-timers who were still around from when that was done a couple of decades ago, all of the predictions about crashes and whatever would have come true for this particular company.
The company covered up the problems in order to protect their stock price. I imagine a few other companies had similar results.
I heard on the radio that in the city where I live, a couple of prison inmates were mistakenly released due to the Y2K bug. At first I thought that was a bogus cover story, but then I remembered that I had worked with the contractor who was supposed to be in charge of the Y2K clean-up at the prison system. He was working multiple projects at that time. Appearently, he could not handle the pressure and he had a nervous breakdown in late 1999. If he did not finish (and I always assumed he did not because he was really falling behind when I was working with him, which of course increased his stress level), I could easily see this story being true.
Re:Collective fear (Score:3, Informative)
Same here, but for a small bank. The one thing that royally sucked about it was that the regulators got their hands into it - and decided that the proper way to prepare for Y2K was to paper it over instead of getting work done. They made it a safety and soundness issue so everyone in the industry had to jump for them.
What he said. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Anecdotal ... (Score:3, Informative)
Banks, government offices, airtraffic control, medical instrumentation
The bank I work at started working on y2k in 1995...we were recognised as early adopters of y2k thinking although the majority of our competition were well underway in 1996.
The bigger you were, the older you were, the earlier you needed to start and the more money you needed to spend. Small to mid-sized companies, or companies that started in the 1990s, never had to worry about y2k. PCs have a shelf-life of about 3-5 years; Windows 95/NT were Y2k compliant so if you were running a 'modern' PC you were not at risk. And most embedded electronic components did NOT have a date dependency.
Re:Collective fear (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, our vendor found "one more bug" late in December 1999. We had to install a Y2K patch while we were doing year-end processing on 30 December. Fortunately, I had insisted we close 31 December to give us time for just such emergencies.
Re:Mirror? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:damn right! was: [Re:Collective fear] (Score:5, Informative)
What? :-) Look, there's always an April 29th, the leap day being added always to February. And the year 2000 was a leap year, though many thought it so for the wrong reason. The rule is: if year is evenly divisible by 4 if not divisible by 100 unless divisible by 400. Which makes year 2000 a very special leap year as it is indeed divisible by 400.
Re:Perl Script (Score:2, Informative)
Re:pernicious economic fallacy (Score:2, Informative)
Andy Mukherjee, a Bloomberg columnist wrote this article [bloomberg.com]; to paraphrase their argument "Yes, [they argue that] disasters can generate economic growth so long as they are predictable and frequent. Every time annual floods or hurricanes levels a house or factory or some other physical capital, the replacement usually involves some technological improvement, which is good for economic growth.".
To which one blogger on Mises.org responded "Would he argue that beatings administered to economists can do them a world of good, as long as they are predictable and frequent? That way, their old and broken hypotheses can be beaten out of them and replaced with newer, better hypotheses."
Re:Collective fear (Score:2, Informative)
I worked as a consultant from early 1998 until mid-2000 at a major financial institution helping fix all the shit that was broken. YES it was real. YES things would have blown up had we not fixed them. YES a distaster on some unknown scale was averted.
not a hoax (Score:2, Informative)
What we did do is leave several servers in different datacenters that were going to be retired unpatched and running. As midnight swept across those datacenters and the patched machines kept running the unpatched ones would fail. Some right at midnight and some a few minutes later. It was a nice verification that all the work we had put in was worth the effort.
-CZ
PS - Yes the unpatched machines ran fine after a reboot. That's not the point of the story.
Re:Economics 101 (Score:4, Informative)
The wiki article people keep pointing to also makes connections to outsourcing and a whole host of related issues that relate to bogus ideas of a free market. Clue to all: free markets are a myth sold to you to make someone's subsidy more palatable. So yes, the existence of free markets is a bold lie.
Can anyone show me a free market anywhere on earth?
Not in theory, mind you - where a lot of you libertarian/republican eggheads live - but in REALITY. Show me a real free market - where people live and die by the price of goods and services.
The moment any market is fed a subsidy by the government, it is not a free market - the system will have been gamed for the benefit of a few against the many. But - and this a BIG BUT - all countries have gamed their systems exactly this way and supposedly for the benefit of their people. And when such gamed systems work for large populations, I don't really have a problem with it. Example: I like throwing money at farmers (sadly, usually republican and pyscho Xtian assholes) because I think it is in the interest of national security to have an independent food supply - in my example the farmers gain a monetary benefit, while the rest of us gain something a little less tangible in the way of national security.
It is when the numbers of people benefitted by such a gamed system become so few that we may call this "looting" instead. I don't know that many of us are benefitted by the oil wars we fight such that the same or greater benefits could not be derived from some other energy source which might also have hidden benefits for the environment if they are cleaner energy sources.
So yeah, Bastiat is great. Really. But he also assumes facts not in evidence. And most of us have to live in the really real world.
Re:pernicious economic fallacy (Score:2, Informative)
Doesn't this mean that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world, and economics is just moving it around?
No, because labor and knowledge are not fixed quantities.
Suppose I own a gold mine. There is a fixed quantity of gold in that mine (even though I may not know what it is). That represents a fixed quantity of wealth that I possess, right? Not really. Because the gold is of little value where it sits in the ground. By applying labor, I remove the gold from the ground so that I can sell it to others. The application of labor here has increased my wealth. The wealth of others has been decreased by some amount, but not by the same amount of my increase. Why not by the same amount? Because the people who purchased my gold were able to generate part of the wealth they gave me from their own labor.
Suppose the buyer of my gold is a jeweler. He purchased $x of gold from me, and then applied creativity and labor to produce $y worth of jewelry, where y > x. Distributors and retailers buy his jewelry and apply the labor necessary distribute and sell the jewelry to others. The end consumers of the jewelry acquire the resources with which to purchase it through their own labors, whether it be building highways, growing food, writing software, or whatever.
If you assume that every person applies themeselves all of the time to the fullest of their physical and intellectual capacity, then you can say that wealth is a constant. But it's an invalid assumption. The ditch digger who wants to buy his wife a necklace to apologize for staying out too late playing poker with his buddies is motivated to work some extra hours to earn the cash. If he's also smart, he may realize that if he can come up with a more efficient way of digging ditches, he can acquire the extra money (plus maybe a bit of extra poker cash, too!) without having to work so much. Maybe he invents a better shovel, or maybe he takes out a loan to buy a backhoe, but whatever it is, he can apply ingenuity to make himself more efficient.
Wealth is created by producing goods that add to what's available to society. The availability of goods provides motivation for individuals to acquire them, which inspires them to work harder and/or smarter to produce more of whatever they produce in order to acquire a surplus to exchange for the desired goods.
This applies at all levels. I have a gold mine, but my first assumption, that there was a fixed amount of gold in the mine, isn't entirely correct. Perhaps by using a different refining process I can get more gold out of it, or maybe I can recover other valuable metals as well. And maybe I can apply some of my wealth to build/acquire other ways to generate more wealth.
So, to answer your question: Where does created wealth come from? Sweat. Whether skull sweat or the more physical kind. It's worth keeping in mind, though, that the people who talk most about wealth creation arguably do the least of it. Most of them really accumulate or concentrate wealth created by others, rather than creating it themselves. In fairness, those people are good at creating opportunities for others to create wealth, so there is often a net benefit to their activities.