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?"
Collective fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Combination (Score:3, Insightful)
How about the combination of the two? I remember seeing Y2K companies trading on the stock market with $10 billion market caps. But then I remember hearing legitimate stories about real world fixes.
It is like the Tsunami. Lots of people are going to make money unethically but, ultimately, we can't stop them unless we just cut off all help.
It was a non-event. Here's my theory. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, back in those days we had a problem every four years. Yep...you guessed it, some programmer had forgotten to take leap year into account.
And when that happened, programs broke. We fixed them in a few minutes and we were on our way. But companies didn't stop. Planes didn't fall out of the sky. Nothing bad happened, other than annoyed users and managers.
My point is that programmers have been screwing up dates and date routines since the computer was invented. We had instances of all the programs breaking on one days. And yet, nothing bad happened.
Hoax. Great for my career....I got a big house with a pool, and a BMW out of the whole Y2K thing, so I'm not complaining. But lets face it, it was a boondoggle.
I personally blame Yourdon. But only because the man is a complete idiot.
the big problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's the same mentality the apparently caused countries in the indian ocean region to decide that a tsunami warning system was not a high priority.
there was a time in early/mid 2000 that i got so tired of people deciding that y2k was a hoax that i wished really bad things had happened.
eric
The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:2, Insightful)
The tsunami was a relatively small scale event, affecting mainly small islands and long coastlines, but the backup effects (refugees, lack of drinkable water, damage to communication networks, the need to divert resources and the difficulty of doing so) will doubtless result in many more people dying over time. In the same way, I suspect that if we had done nothing about Y2K, the cumulative result of a lot of small disruptions would actually have resulted in major economic loss and many people dying.
It wasn't a hoax. (Score:5, Insightful)
The seriousness of the problem was exaggerated by the following misconceptions:
1. Everything that held a date in it with 2 digit years was going to have a problem.
2. Everything described in point 1 that was not fixed would fail in the most disastrous way - missiles being launched, planes falling from the sky.
In reality there could be no problem, or the problem might only be cosmetic. For example, a system I was testing would show the wrong status colour (meaning you haven't done a diagnostic in so many months) but it would not do anything wrong. Still, it had to be fixed to be Y2K ready.
Nonetheless, I was slightly under whelmed by what went wrong on the day. I knew society was not going to collapse, but I expected a few non-critical SNAFUs. I made sure I took out cash from the ATM before New Years, but I gave the water supplies and the bomb shelter a miss
Re:The current disaster shows the possible scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't believe the hype. Traffic lights for example have failsafes in them to stop such things... anyway why does a traffic light care about the year? The day of the week/month maybe.
Similarly, elevators don't give a hoot what year it is.
Contrary to the press your washing machine will *not* think "ooh it's 1900 I haven't been invented yet.. better explode".
pernicious economic fallacy (Score:4, Insightful)
No money was pumped "in" to the US economy. Money was merely moved from one use to another.
While the economy gained from the new spending, it lost from the lack of the default spending.
Without any hard data, one should assume that this was either a wash or - more likely - a net productivity hit.
People make this mistake all the time: "ooh! hurricane! I bet all that spending on new windows helped the economy!". No, it didn't. It took money that would have otherwise been spent at restaurants, book stores, etc., (or left in banks and brokerage accounts, where it helps build other sectors of the economy) and moved that money into glass repair shops and plywood factories.
Don't fall for the myth.
Re:Linux : Hoax, or Suck? (Score:3, Insightful)
How to install a network card driver in Linux:
21 month delay (Score:2, Insightful)
IIRC, there was an event on Sept. 11, 2001 that all but shut down the U.S. economy for 96 hours. It wasn't software generated, of course, but many of the back up sites, redundant networking and contingency plans that kept the world's largest companies from going into an immediate air-stall owed their existence to the pre-Y2K fervor. Sometimes it takes a little fear to get the suits to pry open the pocketbook.
Of course, now that the current security obsession is terrorism maybe we shouldn't be too surprised by recent software meltdowns. [eweek.com].
Um... it wasn't "solved", really. (Score:5, Insightful)
We got lucky. (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, the Y2K "crisis" only occurred because humanity as a whole can't seem to plan very far ahead. Or remember its lessons, it seems. The SARS
scare was something that happened a short while ago, and people are already lapsing back to bad habits like coughing with their mouths open in public, in my country.
It seems like most people are too goddamned lazy or apathetic to do the right thing, even if it's for their own good, unless there's threat of immediate pain.
Lastly, look at the tsunami situation. Everybody's going on about tsunami watch this and tsunami watch that, but I can assure you, in five years time, no one will give a shit.
Nobody remembers anything unless the fucking tv tells them to...
Economics 102... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't be silly (Score:3, Insightful)
To state that there is no 2038 problem simply because it's a reasonable amount of time in the future and
Y2K, how about every-Y (Score:2, Insightful)
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the same thing had happened to HSBC [bbc.co.uk] recently, although they obviously wouldn't come out and say it.
Re:Nobody would admit to y2k system glitches (Score:1, Insightful)
And it makes sense as companies would fear for their stocks and customer credibility. Any y2k problem was filed under the usual quirks that can interrupt production. Nobody missed their targets, and even if they had to put in some extra work that week then y2k was never blamed.
You do not want your company to be listed as the company that broke down under y2k problems, because:
1 you would loose face even if you did manage to fulfill your targets.
2 you would loose face, as your planning of solving the y2k bug (and save the company from not fulfilling targets) would be made an example failure.
3 Your entire company could be named a failure as the press seeks exciting story's to spice up the y2k problem.
So the public believes nothing went wrong that week as companies would say "Just regular maintenance. Nothing to see here please move along"
Hoax? Come on... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I understand Politics a little better after this - it is easier not to spend the money, wait for the disaster, then point fingers.
Why not write this off as a success? Are people just that used to not succeeding?
There WERE various y2k problems... just nothing in major industries like travel, banking, etc.
What about the recent bug mentioned here on slashdot about the airline flight booking system, failing when there were more than 32767 transactions in a given month? That is an example of the same kind of problem the y2k propbem was... I bet the head of Information Technology at that airline was making a 6 figure salary - how could he have the airline so reliant on software that didn't have a backup system, nor one he knew the performance characteristics of?
Re:Perl Script (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, that's the last second in 31-bit unix systems!
The 2038 limit is way overhyped. The only thing we have to do is change the definition of time_t from:
typedef long time_t;
to:
typedef unsigned long time_t;
And we can merrily keep using it on our 32-bit systems until 2106.
POSIX disallows negative time_t anyway, so if you've used it you deserve to have your system break.
(This rant is a dupe [slashdot.org] since I said the same thing here four years ago.)
Re:Collective fear (Score:5, Insightful)
Closer to home I did Y2K testing on my fathers amateur radio contact database. Much to his suprise it comprehensively failed.
Sure it was overhyped and the disaster-move division of the press got excited but it was most definitely real, 2038 will be just as big a deal.
If Y2K should have done one thing it would be to teach customers the dangers of being tied to a software provider who could say "oh yes we know, tough shit, upgrade for $1M". I'm not sure it did 8(
Alan
Re:Media Sensationalism (Score:1, Insightful)
The only control the media has is the one that the people accept.
Same IT perception problem as always (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the same promlem IT always faces. What we do is abstract enough that management can barely believe we do anything at all, but the fact that you are able to use your computer systems at work doesn't mean that you don't need any IT staff. Come on folks, just 'cause it's working doesn't mean we aren't doing something.
Is your car running? Then I guess you don't need gas, much less oil.
I know I averted a lot of problems for a lot of people. I was doing IT & POS Support, and spent a considerable amount of time dealing with Y2k issues, and my boss spent more time, including dealing with an unfixed Y2k bug in the most popular retail back-end system. But before the year end and after the bios updates & bug fixes, _our_ systems worked. I was on call that night, but I didn't get called. That certainly didn't convince me my Y2k work had been useless. Oh, and dates matter. Talk to anyone doing Sarbanes-Oxley work, or making sales projections, yadda-yadda.
I expect this kind of nincompoopery from the mainstream media, and that's where much of the panic came from. I didn't tell anyone to buy a generator. I expect better of
Re:pernicious economic fallacy (Score:2, Insightful)
Or to look at a real world example, US steel prodution is reliant on remarkably old and inefficient facilities, and is facing no small challenge in renovating them. Japan and Germany, on the other hand, have more modern and efficient facilities beacuse their old crappy ones were bombed into oblivion. Sometimes losses of infrastructure can create oppourtunity for improvement.
Slashdot redefines UTC? (Score:4, Insightful)
ROFL. That's so utterly incorrect.
Here are some links to the definition of UTC, although I guess the damage has already been done.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/Coordin
http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/dir-009/_1277.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universa
Re:Collective fear (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand what you are trying to say, but it doesn't reflect the whole story. For instance, we had pruchased 15 or so Dells sometime in 1999. We put them at a customer site in November and everything was fine. We shut down in December and didn't return until January 2000. It took us a few days, but we realized that the second time the computer was rebooted in January, we would get a BIOS prompt telling us of the imminent failure of the hard drive and replace immediately. I spent days working with Dell until they finally had a BIOS fix. They never admitted it was Y2K.
My point is that this was something that took my time, took Dell's time and interfered with a customer installation. It wasn't a catastrophe, but it certainly cost money. And I never found any mention of it as a Y2K problem. Multiply this by thousand or millions and it is serious lost productivity.
Also, take into account the millions of small businesses that ran accounting software that was going to fail to work on 2000. You couldn't fix it by turning the dates back, as you can't issue tax forms or checks with 1962 as the date. All of these people HAD to deal with the issue, and believe me, they spent collectively tens of millions of hours converting accounting systems for no reason other than they were going to stop working.
Re:pernicious economic fallacy (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't a myth. Yes, money is a closed system, but spending is not. The broken window fallacy is a fallacy. You can "pump money in" by having more money change hands more rapidly. There isn't actually more money, but everyone sees more money per unit time because it gets around faster.
Re:Collective fear (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It was a non-event. Here's my theory. (Score:4, Insightful)
The AC is right that temporal logic is hard, calendars are nastily irregular, and there are inevitable errors. As late as 1999 I bought new books with incorrect leap-years examples. Really silly, as unless you need to process birthdates or the like, the % 4 is the correct answer from 1804 to 2096 - more than adequate if you're dealing with the current timestamp.
The vast majority of real-world control systems are embedded systems, not running either mainframe or server or consumer OS -- both good and bad. Various tests of Y2K effects did trigger a few glitches, but the predictions of aircrashes, etc., were always overblown, and mocked at the time.
But! around 1 March 1992 I started to try to get people interested in starting to fix the problems during routine maintainance - too early, no one listened until at least 1998. Similarly, 2038 isn't the only epoch date around - 2036 for those same mainframes is another. In 2009, a number of Y2K "repairs" will need re-patched. Know your epoch!
Re:Mirror? (Score:2, Insightful)
I was working on ATM software at the time, and we did have two failures. 50% of the banks in the US run our software, so 2 failures isn't very bad. One of these failures was because the bank didn't install an upgraded version, while the other failure was in custom code that had been documented and specced to work only to the very end of 1999, but which both our QA team and the bank involved had forgotten.
Contrary to the doom and gloom that the media was painting about what would happen, these problems didn't interfere with the capability of the ATMs to dispense cash, etc. What it did was simply prevent the computer sytems from automatically notifying someone if the ATM had a problem (like running out of cash).
In both cases, there is a redundant monitor of people sitting in front of a screen, and while the automatic notification wasn't working, the screen was showing that the automatic notification was failing, and so the banks involved could fall back to a manual process of calling in problems.
You don't want to use long long -- use the ISO standard stdtypes.h, and if an implementation doesn't have it, then use one of the applications that can generate it automatically to compensate.
You should never make any assumptions of bit depth of integers in ISO C -- the standard doesn't define them. In the case of this code, on many 64 bit platforms, short is 16, int is 32, long is 64 and long long is 128 -- you almost certainly don't need 128 for this calculation