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Admin
One Australian bastard on your side there bud. I missed the same gravy train by virtue of being otherwise occupied. Now everyone tells me they're earning 100,000+ AU$ a year for crappy jobs. That's the real wtf, I've not met a single IT who actually earns anywhere near these fabled numbers.
Admin
I'm just getting a mortgage. Let's just hope they don't want me to pay it back by 1901... (Which is now+30 years in a signed 32-bit integer)
Admin
Actually the Y2K38 bug is already firmly entrenched. It'll be another 25 years or so before anybody can cash in, but I've already broken out my ANSI C books, studying the date_t type in various unix systems!
Admin
It was pretty easy to get a flight on Dec 31, 1999, I remember. I flew Seattle -> San Francisco that evening and we had plenty of empty seats to stretch out on.
Admin
I just managed to find a y2k10 bug in one of our major systems.
A financial system tracking fortnightly pay periods, usually stored in the form: YYYYPP.
eg. 200713
for year 2007 pay 13
I just found a table that stores a 3 digit version. ie. 713.
Various bits of code add 200 to the front in order to join to other tables.
I can't wait till 2010 comes around, and our systems are trying to compare 200013 with 201013
Admin
Nobody ever accused COBOL of being smart.
Admin
Could you explain why, in this scenario, the fact that you have an ill behaved child with poor impulse control makes you want to strangle the liberal arts major? Or are you trying to show where the little bastard gets it from?
Admin
Having recently moved to Texas, I was both surprised and happy when I turned on the radio during the holiday season and heard a public service announcement telling people not to fire their guns in the air in celebration. Only in Texas.
Admin
What's the 2012 bug? The next one I know of is around Feb 2034 when the 32-bit time_t values run out.
Admin
I see a small bug in this: if any of the participants works at your bank, and (s)he isn't a knowingly participant, your account might be zeroed out at 01/01/2012 and you will have to continue working...... But why wait until 2011? Why not create some scheme that because of the rising oil prizes the computers will fail to work in 2009, unless we all enable some form of solar power code injection - the word is close enough to 'fuel injection' to work -.
Java example:
package world.domination
import alt.power.Solar
class TellMeAll() { .... private Long solarPower = null; ....
public void setSolarPower(Long solarPower) { this.solarPower = solarPower; } ... }
you need not do anything with the field... just inject Solar Power and the world will be saved!
Admin
I only saw one real bug in our stuff on Jan 1 2000 (we worked for a solid six months leading up to that, finding about 30 problems though none were serious). One of our web pages proudly proclaimed the date as 1/1/19100; those familiar with 'struct tm' will know why.
Then on Jan 2, my pancreas packed it in and I spent 8 months in hospital. Guys at work had a great laugh wondering why no-one had checked staff for Y2K-compliance.
Admin
If I don't have quite enough cash to retire by 2038, I'm planning to do remediation consulting to finish up my nest egg. The fact that I got through Y2K without incident should be of at least some interest to potential clients.....
Admin
Admin
Dude, no freaking way.
I was in that part of the grid. My house (zip code 75229) lost power at exactly the same time. We went up on the roof of the house to survey the damage. Before I could come to grips with never being on IRC again (I was 14), it came back on.
So thank you, kind sir, for saving the day. :)
Admin
As if the American Idiots were not war-pushing enough. Let them swallow their guns.
Admin
And just briefly, I don't appreciate the sweeping stereotypes being made of Dallasites in this thread. There are far more (several orders of magnitude) Mexican and various Latino immigrants in Dallas than there are gun-toting, shit-kicking cowboys.
(you have to go to Fort Worth for the real rednecks :)
Admin
Sounds interesting. And even achievable. Would be a kind of conspiracy but in the end... When I think how companies treated me, I must say: WHY NOT???
Admin
Admin
Yeah, I'm aware of the unix epoch bug, but not of any problem with 2012. I've even googled it just now with such cryptic search terms as 2012 time bug IT y2k -maya -mayan -olympics
I got nothing. I think you're inventing this issue now, just to try to fire up media hysteria. There is no 2012 bug.
Admin
Now just wait for the Y2K38 Bug X-D
Edit: Or the Y10K Bug ;)
Admin
Admin
:)
One of the other things I fondly remember from Y2K was that even offhanded jokes were taken seriously. I think it was one of India's Ministers of Energy or some position like that who when asked about the state of their nuclear reactors joked:
Our plan is to watch Australia and fix things they find. They are 5 hours ahead of us.
Most people took that to mean:
We aren't doing anything at all, but if Australia has a problem, we are going to try to bust our humps for 5 hours before we experience meltdown.
Admin
It's all rather confusing really...
Admin
I always expected the macs to be affected most by Y2K problems. Everyone else was busy looking for problems and fixing them. Most mac users just said "Macs don't store dates, they count seconds sence 1904" (whatever the date was - different from unix or dos epoc). It never occured to them that unix and dos uses the same trick, but users of those systems were still careful to find and fix problems. I guess mac programmers were busy fixing things even while users remained ignorant.
Admin
Admin
I too had to scramble to clear out many potential glitches and apply fixes and updates to prevent the Y2K bug. Out IT Manager thought it was all done and that nothing was going to happen, but we ended up with one little glitch in a credit card authorization software, which saved all its install files in a read-only folder called "00", and also all its transactions to authorize in clear in folders by year then month, all coded in 2-digit. So when it did find a "00" folder for "2000", it failed to create the "01" for "January" as the folder was read only. Besides that, no Y2K bugs.
I remember seeing some White supremacist weirdo wearing a "Y2K 00:00:01 am : a new beginning" T-Shirt, as these idiots believed the entire governmental "mainframe" would go down in flames so they could start their little rebellion.
Admin
I think the point is that he's giving his child the wisdom to stand up for truth rather than drinking whatever flavor of kool-aid they're passing around on Air America today.
Admin
Hehe.. reminds me of some practical joke one colleague played during my then-company's 2000 new years party.
It involved a shitload of booze, a screw driver (to open the main fuse box) and a good sense of timing (10 seconds past midnight) - but after the initial shock was over, even the company owner had a good laugh (lucky for that guy)...
But you should have seen the faces! LOL!
Da' Man
Admin
Google is your friend; learn to use it.
Quote from Wikipedia:
Admin
Admin
Why? Are you going to try to argue that your child should be forgiven for the fight because he was in the right in the argument? If your child starts throwing punches over whether y2k was a problem, then he needs to sit in that detention and learn about the proper way to resolve differences.
Admin
Admin
And instead passing him the dumb idea that starting a fight is the best way to win an argument? They should be able to make the parents sit in detention as well, when it's obvious that they're the real problem.
Admin
The two most common problems with downed telephone/power/etc lines:
Admin
Oh, don't mind him, he's just a Texan. They have to talk that way cause they're nervous about their small penises.
Admin
Oh, I think it's way worse than that. I used to be involved in state and local politics -- not that I was some big-time politician, just a small-fry -- but it wasn't uncommon then for me to see a story in the newspaper or on TV about an event that I had first-hand knowledge of. And at one point I started keeping track, and found that they had important facts wrong in 45-50% of the stories. One example: A reporter interviewed me about education policy for about an hour. I said many things that I considered intelligent and coherent. But when the story was printed, nothing said in the interview was even mentioned. Instead he reported that I supported a proposal that was never mentioned in the interview, that I had never heard of before reading that I was backing it, and that from the brief description in that story, I thought sounded rather impractical. Whether the error rate is bias or sloppiness, it's pretty depressing. Every now and then I say to myself, Given that when I actually knew the facts, the media were wrong half the time, why do I continue to believe what they report on subjects that I know nothing about?
When they talk about technical subjects, I often find myself trying to read between the lines to see what really happened.
Admin
On Dec 31, 1999 I was in a restaurant, and I happened to overheard one waitress telling another that she didn't plan to punch out on the time clock until 12:01. That way if the computers went down at midnight, she wouldn't be able to punch out, and so they'd have to pay her for the time until they got the computers up again. Sounded like a good plan to me.
At the time I worked with a guy named Tom who was convinced that civilization was going to end on Y2K. A group of us from the office were having lunch together one day where he explained how he had bought a generator and was stockpiling food in his basement and so on. Then someone asked me what I was doing to prepare for Y2K. I replied, "I bought a gun. If anything happens, I'm going to take it and go to Tom's house."
Admin
Around here, the only eventful thing was that precisely at midnight, cable tv throughout the town went down. All you could get was static.
After about two minutes, it came back on with a message that said something to the effect of "just kidding".
Admin
Admin
Two of the medias most profitable stories are:
Obviously they're lying SOBs about the "being wrong" part, but idiots in the general public bought it.
Admin
No, not particularly interesting to me. Why? Are you interested in my penis?
Admin
Admin
TRWTF is that people were expecting Y2K to take place in the year 2000. In computer terms "K" means 1024, so Y2K will take place in the year 2048.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19991231 ;)
Admin
Well, first, a leap year does not have to be evenly divisible by 1000 but 400 instead.
Secondly, the next "catastrophy" will happen in 2038 or more precisely: 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038 as the number of seconds since 1970 will overflow signed 32-bit integers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Admin
Actually what that situation showed, is that, as usual the screamers were wet.
Yes, it was an important job, but no, the sky was not going to fall, the job will get managed, as necessary. Like bird flu, like climate shift. Everything seems be be described in apocalyptic terms.
captcha 'appellatio' sounds like it's NSFW
Admin
Here in AUS, the financial services arm of a Major International Car Company (our client) had been told that if there were any Y2K problems, people would be fired. All development was put on hold: all systems were reviewed. It's all about priorities.
After Y2K, that left the local branch with exactly 6 months to get ready for the Australian introduction of GST (VAT) on July 1, 2000. Come the day, they weren't ready. 3 weeks later they were authorising payments to the large suppliers (the $10,000,000 cheques) on trust, because the accounting system was still down and they couldn't get any more cars on credit.
Admin
The Chinese beat us to it. Damn! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y1C_Problem
Admin
Just remember this quote from Albert Einstein: "Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them."
Then you can apologize for being a genius and not providing enough problems for him to remember Y2K by. ;)
Admin
"How I destroyed the world's economy" is not a story you would want to tell your grand children.
Admin
I know that you were just kidding, but Y2K is not in the computer "realm", so K means 1000. It's like saying that a computer weights 2Kg, and someone saying that it is actually 2048 grams