Y2k

[Yer_Maw]

The millennium bug.

How funny was that madness?

[Tuttle]

:-p

[Level]

Funny haha.

[Basic 2: The Revenge]

funny phonecall

[Lighter Thief]

A lot of people made a lot of money out of that. Surely one of the greatest cons of all time. What really got me though, was the fact that nobody batted an eyelid. Imagine if you owned a business that shelled out to be made "millenium compatible". You'd have been raging!

[love_tempo]

Nothing happened because computer consultants did a really good job of preparing for it, right?

[Yer_Maw]

nah, cos (x)consultants never do anything

[Hagbard]

I think the general public were conned into thinking it would affect their home computers.. which 99.9% of the time was obviously bullshit.

But there were a lot of businesses and services that could have been in a lot of trouble if a fuss hadn't been made.

[decadnids]

i was in a cave in the remote scotish islands - just in case. spent 8 months up there - just in case.

be prepared.

[Lighter Thief]

Originally posted by Steev
I think the general public were conned into thinking it would affect their home computers.. which 99.9% of the time was obviously bullshit.

But there were a lot of businesses and services that could have been in a lot of trouble if a fuss hadn't been made.

Really?

I'm not so sure. Did anybody hear of *ONE* business that was affected in the ENTIRE WORLD? I didn't. Surely not all of them made themselves millenium compatible.

[Hagbard]

well who really knows, this is from the BBC:

"But two facts suggest that a large part of the expenditure was money well spent. Firstly, there were actually plenty of Y2K problems.

They did not involve nuclear missiles accidentally launching or stock markets crashing into techno-meltdown, but they were genuine Y2K problems nonetheless. The millennium bug was real.

Some verged on the serious, like the glitches that hit the Japanese nuclear power plants and the US military satellite.

But most were mundane, from broken bus ticket machines in Tasmania to police breath-testing equipment in Hong Kong. Hundreds of document printers and websites also failed to cope with the rollover, with the year 2000 being rendered variously as 100, 1900, 3900, 19100 and 192000.

The fact that none of the glitches caused major incidents is widely seen as vindication of the Y2K preparation."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/590932.stm

[decadnids]

i recall a japanese nuclear power station had a minor hitch on they for mentioned day. - nothing too serious but it was effected by the bug.

[Yer_Maw]

Well the reason i find y2k mad is because its good old fashioned human superstition tacked onto modern technological story. Weve moved on from listening to some doomesday rhetoric about the year 2000, but tack on a story about computers and everyone is in a mad flap about it. How many critical operations involved deviding a number by a two digit representation of the year? I doubt that many.

I love it when society goes mad.

[Lighter Thief]

Well there you go. I never heard about any of that stuff. I honestly thought that absolutely nothing had gone wrong.

[Hagbard]

Originally posted by Yer_Maw
I love it when society goes mad.

It was the fault of the Media really.

[Yer_Maw]

Originally posted by Lighter Thief
Well there you go. I never heard about any of that stuff. I honestly thought that absolutely nothing had gone wrong.

well who knws what havoc those broken bus ticket machines could have caused. I dread to think what would happen if someone got their hands on a 1000 year all day ticket.

[wheezer]

Originally posted by Lighter Thief


Really?

I'm not so sure. Did anybody hear of *ONE* business that was affected in the ENTIRE WORLD? I didn't. Surely not all of them made themselves millenium compatible.

After the huge millenium hype, which BUSINESS would want to advertise that they still didn't manage to get with the program?

This is the same reason why you rarely hear of hacker breakins, btw.

There were problems, but they were blown way out of proportion ahead of time, and certainly wouldn't have been a huge issue for most typical desktop computer environments.

[Yer_Maw]

well sorry to enter yawnsville but i doubt there was many embedded systems built in the last 30 years that had such a premium cost on memory that they had to use only 2 digits to represent the year. then, on top of that actually have a critical function that devides the date by zero.

Quite a handy peice of spin to say the reason there wasnt any problems was because everyone did their job correctly. Especially after saying thinks like planes will fall out the sky, handily tacked onto peoples general irrational fear about the millenium. made a lot of people scared and a lot of people rich - and that usually says something.

[Hagbard]

I still think it was the Media who jumped to the conclusions about planes falling out of the sky etc though.

Maybe for once in human existance this thing was actually a success :)

I mean i'm just the same but when you need a tragedy to prove something is real you have to step back and wonder :)

[Lighter Thief]

I was gonna go looting. It was a huge disappointment.

[Yer_Maw]

Originally posted by Steev
I still think it was the Media who jumped to the conclusions about planes falling out of the sky etc though.

Maybe for once in human existance this thing was actually a success :)

I mean i'm just the same but when you need a tragedy to prove something is real you have to step back and wonder :)

media or not, it still caught on. However, the reason i like it is because it is a superstition for the modern age.

I for one cant wait for robot witch burning.

[Spandex]

There's another one in 2038.. where the number of seconds since the epoch exceeds the capacity of a 32bit number.

http://maul.deepsky.com/~merovech/2038.html

I started panicking LAST YEAR. When are YOU going to start panicking?

[Sheridan]

wasn't jesus also supposed to have shown up in 2000?
he's a bit late the wanker.

[Hagbard]

Originally posted by Spandex
There's another one in 2038.. where the number of seconds since the epoch exceeds the capacity of a 32bit number.

http://maul.deepsky.com/~merovech/2038.html

I started panicking LAST YEAR. When are YOU going to start panicking?

Everyone knows the world ends in 2012 so this is meaningless.