Now what... Y2K is a dud!

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers,,,781-647-1813)]

 Kris <kancer at kancer.978.ORG> writes:

	 $ uptime
	3:23am  up 160 days,  6:24,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00

My RedHat system was at around 160 days last October, when we  had  a
power failure that lasted a couple of hours. Grrr. It's up to 71 days
now, since the grid seems to have survived into  the  new  millenium.
But eventually a squirrel will chew through another wire ...

	On Sat, 1 Jan 2000 linuxguy at ici.net wrote:
	> 
	> I'll be the first to admit that there's a lot of over paid Y2K shamen
	> on the planet that frankly have nothing left to do.  

Don't bet on it.  They'll be able to milk it for a lot more,  as  the
motley bugs slowly pop up.

The Boston Globe did report two cute problems. One was four days ago,
in the UK, where thousands of point-of-sale machines suddenly started
rejecting all credit cards.  They had checked the code that  did  the
usual verification of expire date.  But they had some sort of special
check to make sure that the card was valid for the  next  four  days,
and  this  code  failed  for  the  last  four  days of 1999.  Lots of
retailers are filing lawsuits over losing most  of  their  sales  for
what should have been a very profitable sales period.

This morning, the Globe had an article telling readers all about  how
the airlines have had no problems at all. They went into great detail
about all the things that didn't go wrong. In the middle, they made a
brief  mention  of  one  minor  glitch:   At the international flight
control centers in NY,  Oakland  and  Hawaii,  as  the  clock  passed
midnight  GMT,  their  computers  quietly stopped delivering messages
about international flights.  They expected to have the problem fixed
in  a  few hours, of course, and it probably wasn't what you'd call a
life-threatening  problem.   But  the  flight-control  system  wasn't
tracking  international  flights  for  some period of time, and a few
programmers there will earn a few bucks.

In any case, this article is probably a good illustration of how  the
media  will  handle  it.   Lots  of  reassurances  that  there are no
problems; no need to worry your little heads  about  it.   Meanwhile,
lots of hours by lots of programmers spent tracking down obscure bugs
that turn out to be yet another flakey date calculation.  And the fix
will  mostly  be  the usual windowing approach, guaranteeing that the
code will break again in the ("distant") future as the  clock  passes
out of the window.

	> ERRRR.... I'm drunk... I'm pissed...  I'm still connected after midnight!

Are you sure you don't need to get a life? ;-)

(I did check after I got home around 1:10 am, and couldn't  find  any
problems  on  my  linux  machine.   But I do have my end-of-millenium
backup tape as a souvenir.  I wonder if all those tapes will end up a
resource for historians in a few decades?  That is, assuming that any
of them are still readable by then.)

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