Not being in Y2K-related sofware, my direct experience was that it was quite hard to hire experienced software developers in the couple of years prior to Y2K. They had ample opportunities for work... for employers that were in a serious bind and would pay handsomely.
It amazes me that anyone today doesn't realize what a massive effort went into fixing all the possible Y2K problems before they happened. I guess thats gratitude for you.... :-(
I AM a software engineer who worked on that stuff since 1968 and worked on several of these alleged Y2K problems. Every one was total crap. Absolutely nothing would have happened.
Practically any critical system could have been put back in operation by having the date set to something like 1-1-1970. The data to be fixed could easily be identified by the date and fixed later once patches were done.
Now the real event comes in 2038 ;) time() returns 2147483647 (
I think you are right in a sense. There is no gratitude. Did we not see the millenium coming for the entire history of modern computing???
Duh...
Hmmm - Being that the spark occurs when the points *open*, worn breaker points would make the timing advanced (reduced dwell, but advanced timing). Unless you're going to say that the wear block wears down faster than the points burn back - which I don't think is generally the case.
That's my buttal. Do you have a rebuttal?
Oh - you just wait. I guarandamntee you that Al Gore or someone like him is just biding their time for a few years until we're 99% committed to the flourescents. *THEN* - just when we're over that transition (i.e., getting used to reduced light levels that are claimed to be the same light levels, and too late to re-tool and re-legislate for incandescents), someone will release the latest shocking "scientific" studies to start a HUGE environmental panic over the mercury being "released into the environment" from those bulbs (manufacturing, breakage, discarding into landfills, yadda, yadda, yadda), and some marvelous saviour will be waiting in the wings to "fix" the problem with a solution that he just happens to have ready, and charge us huge bucks in the process.
Anybody want to take bets on this?
I'm not an expert in this area, but street rumor over the years was that GM cams wore out so suddenly because they nitrided the cams (surface treatment). Nitride is super hard, but once it wore thru that layer, the cams wore like butter. I did have to replace a cam in a 1980 GM vehicle at about the mileage that "they" said was typical of the wearout.
I don't know if that relates to anything posted, but thought I'd throw that out there for comment.
No. because that's how the central control political-business partnership works. We will all be forced into even more expensive LED lamps.
The funny thing is that it's easy to find made in the USA incandescents. Being an older technology I'll guess it's largely automated so it makes no sense to move it to china. The costs would probably go up. However, the CFL's being expensive to make (and seemed pretty good when made in the USA and Germany) with the Hg content are now all or practically all made in China and pretty much crap all around. Just another blow to US manufacturing.
To get this back on the automotive topic, Al Gore is a major player in the companies that will be doing the carbon trading. No shock there. It must be nice to be able to pass tax legislation that allows one to personally profit from the money taken from people. Don't pay Al Gore? Go to prison.
I see some still deny it was a big issue. They obviously don't know how most mainframe systems with mmddyy dates did date calcs. I remember seeing it as a looming problem in the distance when I started programming in 1980. I was happy that I would be gone from that business by then. I put in century checks anyway on anything I wrote and anything I maintained doing date calcs. Still couldn't cover everything, most obviously birthdays. And I was still there when it came about. Not doing the changes, but marveling at what a boondoggle the contracting firms "specializing" in providing Y2K changes were pulling off. What a clusterfuck. But business began selling off their responsibilities in the '90's by paying premium prices for others to do the work and take the fall for anything that went wrong. Part of the "shareholder value" fantasy. Without widespread system changes which began in 1998 the major insurance company I worked at would have ground to a halt. I imagine there were plenty of other companies that would have suffered the same fate.
--Vic
According to my very level-headed daughter (who is into studying all kinds of ancient cultures), the truth behind that is that the Mayan priests were into writing predictive calendars that went far into the future - *AND* their civilization collapsed about the time they had their calendars written up to whatever year it is that modern "geniuses" are saying the Mayans predicted the end of the world.
IOW - the Mayans had only gotten that far in extending their calendar when their own civilization collapsed and they stopped adding to the calendar - but when "modern" man looks at that in retrospect, his interpretation of that observation is that the Mayans stopped updating the calendars at the point because they "knew" things were going to end at that point - i.e., there was no more work needed on the calendar, their work was finished.
I thought the Mayan prediction was sometime in 2012 - could be wrong.
Well - hey then - it's a darn good thing we had others besides you working on it!! (just kidding - I have no idea if the potential problems were real or not)
I have no opinion or knowledge on if it was real or not, but it would seem obvious to me that if it was real, your statement would be wrong about, say, the banking industry. Can you imagine the world calamity if interest calculations were all screwed up - even for a day? Stock market...?
Of course, idiots think that that type of work creates/increases wealth, when in fact it drains wealth. Just a variation of the "merchant's broken window" economic false-philosophy that a lot of idiots today, including, unfortunately, voters and Congressmen, believe in.
I see what your saying, but it doesn't work that way. Try checking the timing on an engine with well used set of points. Or just observe the gap of a worn set of points - is the gap wider or narrower? And yes I suppose wear to the rubbing block accounts for most of it - transfer of metal plays a role too.
-jim
For a programmer in the 1960s, trying to save space (which cost lots of both money and time) in a program *today* was important. The idea that the same code might really still be in use in 2000 -- when the programmer would be long retired -- was remote enough not to worry about. I haven't seen any real figures on percentage of new code needing fixes, but I expect somewhere around 1980 it probably started to decline, and aroung 1990 to decline sharply. Any programmer who wrote anything after about 1995 that needed to be fixed should be taken out back and shot.
You had an astonishingly unusual experience, at variance both with all the statistics and every other software engineer I've talked to who was involved.
Actually it's not where they just randomly stopped. It's the end of a cycle. The calendar is driven by astronomy with short and long cycles. It is a greater knowledge than conventional thought believed possible. These larger cycles were not unique to Maya but appear in many cultures. Anyway, the end of world as many people put it isn't so much the end of the world, but at worst the end of the world as we know it. The old cycle will end and the new cycle will begin. This may be about as eventful as new years' eve.
What people fear is that solar system is entering into a 'bad neigborhood' as it moves through the galaxy and that with it perhaps some event which we will have no power over will occur. We shall see :)
Some others think it will just be some sort of spirital change in society, again sparked by whatever 'neighborhood' the solor system is moving through.
The funny thing is, the sun is behaving rather odd already. Whatever is coming it's based on the movement of this planet through the universe and there ain't anything to do but ride it out :)
Like banking systems, where the rules to apply depend on the date? Set back to 1970, and refigure retirement year maybe?
Both from picking 1970, and from mentioning the Y38K problem, it sounds like you're a Unix guy (as am I, by the way, which is why I'm quoting statistics rather than regaling you with war stories) -- very few of the serious problems were in the sort of scientific and server enviroments where Unix is commonly used. It was in legacy databases.
Well I was speaking of life and death systems such as air traffic control and the like. Systems that really don't need to know what year it is. Banks would have had an entire holiday to come up with some sort of patch for business on the 2nd. I really didn't think the world as we knew it would have ended. Although, I wish I had stocked up gold and silver then... look at the price today! :)
I guess I just don't consider that a critical system that couldn't be fixed later. I'm talking about planes crashing into each other, traffic lights going green for all directions at the same time, etc... things that could get people killed, not a day or two without working ATMs.
I know. unix had little problem with Y2K. Although I needed to patch up my NeXT boxes. I think the patch was mostly to be able to set the correct date and stuff like that. I don't think anything major would have stopped working.
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