Y2k is the most perplexing issue to me. How is apperantly windowing or seting back 1972 hard reset going to help billing, accounting and adminstration functions. This will have to be a nightmare. Maybe chips 1% failure is a scam. Who told us 70 billion with minimum of 1% failure. Misleading... but why state this fact... if not even close. Could nobody even check chip manufactures and ask them if date function would fail. If they did not know.. then who? Why was this foisted upon us. If last minute date rollbacks to 1972 and windowing was all that was necessary to avert major infrastructure collapse. Why did official build multi-million dollar bunkers and scare most. WHY BUILD IT. WHY SCARE WORLD POPULATION. WHY NOW...PROBLEM NOT RELATED TO Y2k. THIS SHOULD BE INTERESTING TOPIC. THINK HARD as in HARD RESET. WE NEED TO REBOOT THIS TO NEWSMEDIA.

-- fixer (fixitnow@dont buyitnow.com), January 06, 2000

Answers

Yes, I can see that you're perplexed.

Setting back to 1972 works best when the machine does not insert that date into the data. Many machines are just pipelines for data, never alter it, but they need a valid date for their internal purposes. We set some here to 1972, runs fine. It's a very limited solution, works for maybe half a percent of computers. Doesn't work for big mainframes; I'd never do it for an accounting system.

We don't know how many chips might fail because the people who wrote the code inside them are gone, the companies don't track chip numbers and programming well enough, companies have gone out of business, etc. Foisted? Well, we have laser vision correction now, but that doesn't mean eyeglasses were foisted on us - they were the best we had at the time, and we live with the results.

The population never got scared - just a small percentage. That's because the powers that be pooh-poohed the real danger, and so far we've dodged the bullet. To a polly that means total victory, to a GI it means so far so good. We'd be much safer as a country if we all were a little nervous - like Mormons, with full pantries, able to take a hit on our supply lines and still survive. Instead we are brittle, highly dependent on grocery deliveries every day, but so far so good.

If you feel you were needlessly frightened, sorry about that. Are you needlessly frightened by warnings to put on a seat belt? Do you just hate to think about saturated fat in your diet? Reality is sometimes scary, and there are things like famine and plague and war in the world. In the 1950's we were ready for a nuclear war any minute, and it was considered smart to be ready. Now it's considered stupid. Go figure.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), January 06, 2000.

20000106 Thursday

There's only ONE "FIX": YYYYMMDD

[ ISO 8601:1988, Data elements and interchange formats -- Information interchange -- Representation of dates and times ]

Regards, Bob Mangus

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-- Robert Mangus (rmangus1@yahoo.com), January 06, 2000.