Computers: why nothing has happened...yet

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Grassroots Information Coordination Center (GICC) : One Thread

With the first six rollovers and nothing happening yet, one possible explanation for this comes from the webmaster at the Canadian y2k website albertanews.com He suggests [from reading various internet sites] that the unix computers and their imbedded chips are actually set to Greenich mean time not necessarily local time, so while technically they entered 2000 the computers have not... interesting...five or so more hours to see if this is valid

-- tom schimick (tomytri@aol.com), December 31, 1999

Answers

Response to why nothing has happened...yet

Our servers are all set to local time. Although some systems are set globally this is no tthe norm (at least in Australia). So far the change-over has been without incident and I am looking forward to going to bed shortly. No reasons for failure to provide excitement except perhaps the hard work has paid off. I sincerely hope it continues.

-- Ralph Forster (ralph@newcrest.com.au), December 31, 1999.

Response to why nothing has happened...yet

As the previous response stated, few use UTC. The only people who would be using UTC or something based off a GMT offset would be those who need to maintain a log from global sites. However, it is indeed rare (speaking as an administrator) to set your clock to anything but local time. If you need logs based on some central timing mechanism, you send log entries to a central machine which handles the syncronization of log entries. It would seem to be another futile attempt to prove oneself right by obfuscating the facts.

As I have said before, if you believe there will be problems, you will see problems, even if you have to distort minor glitches (like the place in the UK that had to manually call in credit card verification)

-- Fuzzy (fuzzman@m-net.arbornet.org), December 31, 1999.


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