NationStates Jolt Archive

The Y2K bug or the millennium bug gave programmers worldwide food and shelter. Zillion of them were beating the beast.

The ordinary people were living in fear. Airplanes should have crashed, elevators frozen, hospitals and banks would have collapsed, but...

...nothing happened.

So where is that millennium bug now?

A similar event is hitting the news now. Some geek, Patrick Geryl, is traveling around the world TV stations to say that the entire world will collapse in...2012.

Partly his foundations come from the Maya culture. From the popular media, I learned that they have a calendar, which ends in...2012 right!

So what will you do? Follow the geek to a mountain in Africa? End your life today? Or stop working and take a nice holiday till 2012? Or something else?


Millennium bug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K

Maya bug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012

The Geek:
http://www.world-mysteries.com/newgw/patrickg.jpg

The Official website of the Geek:
http://www.howtosurvive2012.com/

Okay, here's something I don't get. Wouldn't we be more upset if we spent all that time and money on the Y2K bug and something still did happen? It always seems a little silly that we're pissed off that that the fix worked instead of resulting in the largest, most cartoonish possibilities.

A similar event is hitting the news now. Some geek, Patrick Geryl, is traveling around the world TV stations to say that the entire world will collapse in...2012.

Partly his foundations come from the Maya culture. From the popular media, I learned that they have a calendar, which ends in...2012 right!You act like that is an amazing coincidence, or is that just me?

why do people care about the mayans' alleged predictions again? i mean, it's not like these same people want to bring back the mass human sacrifice the mayans thought were necessary, right?

But maybe they are?

"Every day, Federal scientists are looking for new ways to kill bugs"

Okay, here's something I don't get. Wouldn't we be more upset if we spent all that time and money on the Y2K bug and something still did happen? It always seems a little silly that we're pissed off that that the fix worked instead of resulting in the largest, most cartoonish possibilities.
I see a parallel here. What if the topic was global warming? We will potentially spend gazillions of dollars and lower our standard of living in order to attempt the prevention of something that will happen anyway. Maybe.

But with Y2K, we did fix some things that needed fixing and probably fixed a few that didn't need it. To tell the truth, I have more problems with the expanded Daylight Savings Time than I ever did with Y2K.

Really? I know this was a whole 12 days ago, but do you remember hearing anything about the thousands upon thousands of Microsoft Zune mp3 players that simultaneously stopped functioning at the end of last year due to the same sort of date issue?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/31/zune.player.failures/index.html?iref=newssearch

Y2K bug is Vista :P


I friggin' hate vista.

Well, according to my calculations, the world should end right about n

Well, according to my calculations, the world should end right about n

Odd, I don't think he mentioned Candlejack, or di

Mayan 2012 will matter even less than y2k.

Oh, I would like to wish you all a happy 1909!

ssshhh, it's 19109!

The Y2K bug or the millennium bug gave programmers worldwide food and shelter. Zillion of them were beating the beast.

The ordinary people were living in fear. Airplanes should have crashed, elevators frozen, hospitals and banks would have collapsed, but...

...nothing happened.Because the world took preventative measures.

So where is that millennium bug now? No longer a threat. now the Y10K bug that will occure after the Year 9999 needs to be addressed.

A similar event is hitting the news now. Some geek, Patrick Geryl, is traveling around the world TV stations to say that the entire world will collapse in...2012.

Partly his foundations come from the Maya culture. From the popular media, I learned that they have a calendar, which ends in...2012 right!

So what will you do? Follow the geek to a mountain in Africa? End your life today? Or stop working and take a nice holiday till 2012? Or something else?
the solution is to spend Trillions world wide to update the Mayan calendar of course. :rolleyes: :D

I was working quite hard during the run upt to Y2K precisly so that no ill effects would be had, so the fact that there were none means I can say job well done.

Nothing happened to my family computer back in 2000, and that wasn't reprogammed, so I dunno what all the fuss was about.

I was working quite hard during the run upt to Y2K precisly so that no ill effects would be had, so the fact that there were none means I can say job well done.
Yeah, my dad was working his arse off over that, too.

I think a lot of people think it was a fuss over nothing, but I suppose it's because there were a lot of people beavering away in the background that nothing did indeed happen.

Would be cool to know what might have happened, though.

I was working quite hard during the run upt to Y2K precisly so that no ill effects would be had, so the fact that there were none means I can say job well done.
I Remember spending the new years at my office to make sure everything went smoothly.

Nothing happened to my family computer back in 2000, and that wasn't reprogammed, so I dunno what all the fuss was about.when did you get the pc and what OS was it running?

So where is that millennium bug now?
It was killed by the millennium fly swatter.
What? Shut the Hell up, not every thing can be A-list material.

I have a working 286,386,p133hz and p166hz with turbo function ,).
Their OS´s are win 3.11,win 3.11, win95 and win 98.
None of them had any problems back then.

So I think it was scaremongering for the most part,
like with the bird-flu..last year? ...
Maybe some birth certificates and other date related events would have gone wrong.

The Y2K bug or the millennium bug gave programmers worldwide food and shelter. Zillion of them were beating the beast.

The ordinary people were living in fear. Airplanes should have crashed, elevators frozen, hospitals and banks would have collapsed, but...

...nothing happened.

Because it was bogus to begin with all that would happen is your computer would roll over to 1900 and continue working.


So where is that millennium bug now?

Same place where global cooling theory is I imagine.
The y2K bug was a bag of shite. Most computer experts new this, much like global cooling in the 60's-70's.
The ones advocating it were those seeking to make money from fixing it.
Countries like South Korea that have an even higher dependence on computers (highest internet connection rate) did not take any measures to prevent this and guess what nothing happened.

when did you get the pc and what OS was it running?

98 maybe? And it was running Windows 95.

Eh, we fixed it. Problem solved, bug squished.


Really? I know this was a whole 12 days ago, but do you remember hearing anything about the thousands upon thousands of Microsoft Zune mp3 players that simultaneously stopped functioning at the end of last year due to the same sort of date issue?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/31/zune.player.failures/index.html?iref=newssearch

I heard about that. Made me pleased that I didn't have a Zune.

I was working quite hard during the run upt to Y2K precisly so that no ill effects would be had, so the fact that there were none means I can say job well done.

And I've been keeping the tigers away!

And I've been keeping the tigers away!

Why do we need you? I've got this rock right here that repels tigers. I've had it for years and not a single tiger attack.

I have a working 286,386,p133hz and p166hz with turbo function ,).
Their OS´s are win 3.11,win 3.11, win95 and win 98.
None of them had any problems back then.

So I think it was scaremongering for the most part

It was never about PCs. Y2K worries were based on systems that grew out of old mainframe servers in the 50s and 60s where space was at such a premium that making dates 2 digit rather than 4 digit actually saved significant space. By the time PCs came out in the 80s, everyone was aware that 4 digit dates were essential, and even 286s had plenty of storage space. That fact that you thought it might affect you only shows that you weren't paying attention at the time.

Y2K was never about the end of the world (except maybe for a few lunatics), it was about lazy coding. There's no connection between Y2K, the Mayan calendar, or that unwashed guy on the street with the sandwich board shouting about the end of the world. It's not even apples and oranges - it's apples and wingnuts.

How is the Mayan calendar crap news to anyone anymore? I mean, please.

"I swallowed a bug", eh?

How is the Mayan calendar crap news to anyone anymore? I mean, please.

HK seems to insist that it's relevant to modern life somehow. Hell if I know how.

Because it was bogus to begin with all that would happen is your computer would roll over to 1900 and continue working.

<snippety>

Your computer would. Not so good if the bank's computer does. That's what people were working on fixing. They did.

It has long been said that a good system administrator is always on the brink of being fired: they are being paid a lot, and nothing ever goes wrong. This seems to be a classic demonstration of the same principle - a lot of work was done, to make sure that nothing out of the ordinary happened. For a change, it was completely successful.

As far as I'm aware, the next date which actually has some possibility of interesting failure is 2038, when Unix time will overflow a signed 32bit integer, and cause certain interesting problems for badly programmed computers.

Fortunately, consumer machines and any new boxen should be fixed by then, leaving just embedded stuff - you know, flight control boxes and the likes - to get very confused.

Bah. We have less than a year before civilization collapses. My calendar ends Dec. 31, 2009! Send all your worldly posessions to Lord Tothe and call 1-800-U-R-A-FOOL to cater to my every wish in order to achieve salvation from the impending doom!

in the 50s and 60s where space was at such a premium that making dates 2 digit rather than 4 digit actually saved significant space.
On our punchcard records for Grad School Admissions, we used overpunches on the two digits (a "+" overpunch turns 1-9 into A-I, a "-" makes J-R) so those two columns also encoded male/female and instate/outstate besides the year of birth.

It is living under the assumed name Y10K Bug

It was never about PCs. Y2K worries were based on systems that grew out of old mainframe servers in the 50s and 60s where space was at such a premium that making dates 2 digit rather than 4 digit actually saved significant space. By the time PCs came out in the 80s, everyone was aware that 4 digit dates were essential, and even 286s had plenty of storage space. That fact that you thought it might affect you only shows that you weren't paying attention at the time.

Y2K was never about the end of the world (except maybe for a few lunatics), it was about lazy coding. There's no connection between Y2K, the Mayan calendar, or that unwashed guy on the street with the sandwich board shouting about the end of the world. It's not even apples and oranges - it's apples and wingnuts.

Now, to be fair, you left out the last thing I wrote,
which said that I only thought date related problems might have been affected.
And I also do not believe in doomsday prophecies at all.
I am in fact quite optimistic and somewhat idealistic concerning the future.
I fervently hope that technology will solve most of our problems.
It´s people I don't trust. ,)

The Y2K bug or the millennium bug gave programmers worldwide food and shelter. Zillion of them were beating the beast.

The ordinary people were living in fear. Airplanes should have crashed, elevators frozen, hospitals and banks would have collapsed, but...

...nothing happened.

So where is that millennium bug now?

A similar event is hitting the news now. Some geek, Patrick Geryl, is traveling around the world TV stations to say that the entire world will collapse in...2012.

Partly his foundations come from the Maya culture. From the popular media, I learned that they have a calendar, which ends in...2012 right!

So what will you do? Follow the geek to a mountain in Africa? End your life today? Or stop working and take a nice holiday till 2012? Or something else?


Millennium bug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K

Maya bug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012

The Geek:
http://www.world-mysteries.com/newgw/patrickg.jpg

The Official website of the Geek:
http://www.howtosurvive2012.com/

The total cost of the work done in preparation for Y2K is estimated at over 300 billion US dollars.[20] (Wiki)

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

BBC says $500 billion
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/590932.stm

I mean that money could almost end poverty, what a waste of money...

The thing is, it's something we can only view in hindsight. It isn't really possible to know for sure whether or not there would have been major problems had companies not invested so heavily in IT for Y2K compliance; suffice to say that it's clear it didn't pose a problem in the end, but whether that's due to overhyped concerns (of which there were some) or the timely investments that averted disaster or both, it's not really easy to tell. Since I prefer erring on the side of caution, I'd say it was a good idea in the end...at the very least, the global technology infrastructure was greatly improved by Y2K investments and that's something we have to thank for the productivity boom of the past decade.

That being said, one thing that's for sure is the Y2K bug was the massive impetus behind the dot-com bubble's last push to Nasdaq 5,000 and the massive investment overhang created by it played a major role in the 2001 recession. For those of us interested in economic cycles, examining the major stock indices in the first quarter can reveal just where the 1990's expansion crested and receded.

The idea that y2k would screw up everything and send us back to the stone age came from the same people who believed that SARS and bird flu really would wipe out all of humanity. I stopped listening to them the moment I started listening to them and realized they were full of shit.

As for the Mayan calendar, it does have a surprisingly good track record. It successfully predicted, to the day, eclipses, catastrophies, and even the arrival of Europeans. All of these things happening CENTURIES after the Mayans sort of went away for some reason. With a track record that accurate, they have to know something. Maybe they know someone from the future who had a time machine and went back in time to tell them this stuff?

They could predict the future, but still got raped by the Europeans.

:pThey could predict the future, but still got raped by the Europeans.

Sort of like the saying, I have yet to hear of a psychic winning the lottery:p

:p

Sort of like the saying, I have yet to hear of a psychic winning the lottery:p

The Mayans did, but they lost the ticket.

...
Do all the actors die when their TV series ends?
Do all the people involved in building a skyscraper die when their job ends?

Why are people hell-bent on scaring themselves for no good reason?

...
Do all the actors die when their TV series ends?
Do all the people involved in building a skyscraper die when their job ends?

Why are people hell-bent on scaring themselves for no good reason?

Paranoia is patriotic.

Y2k9 happened, every Zune 30 on the planet shut down for a day.

Y2k9 happened, every Zune 30 on the planet shut down for a day.

The horror!
The world must surely have perished, right?
,)

When the loonies STOP squawking about the end of the world, I'll know the jig is really up. As long as the amateur prophets continue to preach, we're all dandy.

They could predict the future, but still got raped by the Europeans.

You're thinking of the Incas. The Mayans disappeared centuries before the Europeans showed up to rape everyone and take their gold.

You're thinking of the Incas. The Mayans disappeared centuries before the Europeans showed up to rape everyone and take their gold.

Pfft. Incan, Mayan, same thing.

Microsoft Came up with the perfect solution to stop Y2K in the XBox...

You simply cant set the year to '00' in it....It goes from '99' to '01' lol...

And, so, Microsoft defeated the Y2K bug in the brilliant way they have become known for..:rolleyes:

They could predict the future, but still got raped by the Europeans.

Obviously they knew this was going to happen, and before their genocide they set matters up so the world really would end in 2012. The only question is, did they put a giant bomb in the centre of the earth guarded by chainsaw-wielding robots, or did they put a detonator in the centre of the earth to activate many smaller bombs all over the earth which are also guarded by chainsaw-wielding robots?

The horror!
The world must surely have perished, right?
,)

It annoyed the hell out of me.

I loved Y2K, thought it was fantastic. Hope there is lots of hype with 2012. Makes it interesting.

...
Do all the actors die when their TV series ends?
Do all the people involved in building a skyscraper die when their job ends?

Why are people hell-bent on scaring themselves for no good reason?
actually, depending on the TV Series... yes, actors do dissappear and are rarely, if ever, seen again. How many 'friends' stars are currently sill working? a small fraction.

same with Seinfeld, M*A*S*H*, Hill Street Blues...

So I think it was scaremongering for the most part,
like with the bird-flu..last year? ...
Maybe some birth certificates and other date related events would have gone wrong.yet Bird-flu, is a problem in areas like China. given some bird's migratory habits, one does need to be vigilant.

You're thinking of the Incas. The Mayans disappeared centuries before the Europeans showed up to rape everyone and take their gold.
as if they knew the Europeans were comming...

as if they knew the Europeans were comming...

Well, they did predict "white gods" would come to Latin America on date x (I forget the exact date). And what do you know, white Europeans showed up on date x and were believed, by the natives that were still around, to be gods. And they wiped out entire civilizations with their horses and their guns. If you were a native at the time and you learned that such a small number of people wiped out such a large number of people, you'd think they were pissed off gods or something.

Well, they did predict "white gods" would come to Latin America on date x (I forget the exact date). And what do you know, white Europeans showed up on date x and were believed, by the natives that were still around, to be gods. And they wiped out entire civilizations with their horses and their guns. If you were a native at the time and you learned that such a small number of people wiped out such a large number of people, you'd think they were pissed off gods or something.

So you're saying that white Europeans are gods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_supremacy)?

Your computer would. Not so good if the bank's computer does. That's what people were working on fixing. They did.

It has long been said that a good system administrator is always on the brink of being fired: they are being paid a lot, and nothing ever goes wrong. This seems to be a classic demonstration of the same principle - a lot of work was done, to make sure that nothing out of the ordinary happened. For a change, it was completely successful.


Wrong. Countries like south Korea and Italy did almost nothing to update their systems for Y2K, and didn't suffer a single failure.
it was just something that caught the imagination of gullible Americans, and a few programmers ran with it to up their hours and pay.
In fact the only Y2K failures were attributed to programmers screwing up programs they updated for Y2K.

So you're saying that white Europeans are gods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_supremacy)?

No. I'm saying the natives thought the white people were gods. Are you going to cry racism at everything?

So you're saying that white Europeans are gods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_supremacy)?

Then does that make White Americans demons are something? lol...

Afterall, if they were gods, our Revolution wouldnt be that unlike Lucifer's, lol...

At this point, I'd welcome the end of the world, just so people will shut up about it.

I always thought that calender ended on 2012 because the guy making it went, "No, fuck you. 2012(equivalent) is enough. Maybe in the thousands of years between then and now you can find someone else to do more. I'm done. No, fuck off, I'm not doing any more, you get the fucking idea, I quit."

The only thing I remember that went wrong due to Y2K was this 105yo guy in Switzerland who was fined for not showing up to kindergarten :rolleyes:

Do you guys remember Art Bell. He was this radio show guy who explored unexplained phenomenon, UFO and such. His program was From Dreamland somewhere in the Nevada Desert. He made a killing off y2k. He sold those radio you have to power up by winding a hand crank.

Do you guys remember Art Bell. He was this radio show guy who explored unexplained phenomenon, UFO and such. His program was From Dreamland somewhere in the Nevada Desert. He made a killing off y2k. He sold those radio you have to power up by winding a hand crank.
Ayup.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

It was killed by the millennium fly swatter.
What? Shut the Hell up, not every thing can be A-list material.

I'll say. :rolleyes:
You know, you should've said ...


...it evolved.
*ba-dum-tish*

The Y2K bug or the millennium bug gave programmers worldwide food and shelter. Zillion of them were beating the beast.

The ordinary people were living in fear. Airplanes should have crashed, elevators frozen, hospitals and banks would have collapsed, but...

...nothing happened.

So where is that millennium bug now?

A similar event is hitting the news now. Some geek, Patrick Geryl, is traveling around the world TV stations to say that the entire world will collapse in...2012.

Partly his foundations come from the Maya culture. From the popular media, I learned that they have a calendar, which ends in...2012 right!

So what will you do? Follow the geek to a mountain in Africa? End your life today? Or stop working and take a nice holiday till 2012? Or something else?


Millennium bug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K

Maya bug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012

The Geek:
http://www.world-mysteries.com/newgw/patrickg.jpg

The Official website of the Geek:
http://www.howtosurvive2012.com/

The bug evolved into a new strain of bug known as the Maya bug.

I see a parallel here. What if the topic was global warming? We will potentially spend gazillions of dollars and lower our standard of living in order to attempt the prevention of something that will happen anyway. Maybe.

But with Y2K, we did fix some things that needed fixing and probably fixed a few that didn't need it. To tell the truth, I have more problems with the expanded Daylight Savings Time than I ever did with Y2K.

That's a mighty knotted pretzel.

well most of the apocraphal predictions origenated from sources that were perhapse not all that tecnology literate. the only bug, this was back in messydos and that era, was that os's, and thus aps that ran on them, those that relied on their os to do so, didn't store the first two digits of the year. this is understandable since they'd been around a lot less then a century, and nobody figured they'd be using the same os's into the next century anyway.

of course, what anybody with any sense realzed, was the only thing this would mess up when the century, which was also the end of a millinium, rolled over, was that things like payrolls running on mainfraims might issue checks to people who had been dead for a while. no big concern for most of us, but a major headache for fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

pretty much they were the only ones in any real danger from it. but you know how media loves two headed cows and making a big deal out of everything, especially if that will get people to listen so they can sell more advertising space, so of course, for profit media played it up for all it was worth.

i think by now, most people have figgured that out.

as for global warming, it takes an equal kind of illiteracy to buy into the notion of having to lower standard of living to reduce carbon footprint. this is pure vested economic intrests propiganda, and the unwashed multitudes buying into it. except i think even most of us mere mortals see through that claim and know better. noncombustion ways of generating energy and propelling transportation are know, established and proven, not inadiquite pie in the sky robber barons of fossil fuel what brainwash us into believing.

the only thing that lowers standards of living connected with dealing with it is the exploitation by greed of the means of doing so. thus making it look like we have to short chainge ourselves. this is great political spin, but it just don't wash honest critical inspection. global climate chainge IS real, IS, if not entirely caused, AT LEAST excerbated by, the use of combustion to generate electricity and propell transporation, and there's really no other reason, then corporate greed, to continue economically coercing people into continuing to rely on methods that contribute to it. to remaining emotionally attatched to doing so.

so this is nothing but propiganda spin to try and equate the two.

nature's cycles of renewal ARE where the air we breathe comes for, along with food and health, the use of combustion DOES threaten that, and we CAN stop using combustion for energy and transportation WITHOUT lowering any standard of anything. just adopting methods slightly less familiar then those we are for the most part currently.

I think the Mayans said that something big and cataclysmic would happen on Dec. 21, 2012. Could be a big earthquake that strikes a nuke silo, causing it to launch. Could be a world war that easily dwarfs WWII. Of course, we modern folk applied Okraim's Razor and came to the logical conclusion that "big event=doomsday". Logical indeed. After all, didn't Y2K screw up everything and didn't SARS and bird flu kill off every living thing on earth?

I think the Mayans said that something big and cataclysmic would happen on Dec. 21, 2012. Could be a big earthquake that strikes a nuke silo, causing it to launch. Could be a world war that easily dwarfs WWII. Of course, we modern folk applied Okraim's Razor and came to the logical conclusion that "big event=doomsday". Logical indeed. After all, didn't Y2K screw up everything and didn't SARS and bird flu kill off every living thing on earth?

could just as easily be a major change in how people look at things, and not an end but a beginning. and i do believe we can look to see something of THAT sort, over the next few decades.

wars won't end all at once, probably. and global climate chainge WILL bring about even more starvation and epidemic, but the revolution that won't be televised is a maturing of how the survivors look at things.

a whole realignment of cultural motivations from what is dominant now, with the resault of diminishment and eventual complete faiding away of market for things like war and destructive environmental exploitation.

not something that can or will happen in one day, or at least not that i would expect to, but over a few decades, or at most centuries, i fully expect can and will.

The millenium came up and everyone was there to celebrate, what could be considered to be the mayan equivalant comes up and everyone panics. All calendars have an end date before they loop round, I dont see people panicing every year as their calendars come to an end.

The millenium came up and everyone was there to celebrate, what could be considered to be the mayan equivalant comes up and everyone panics. All calendars have an end date before they loop round, I dont see people panicing every year as their calendars come to an end.

That Patrick Geryl creature from my original posting, his idea is partly based on the Maya calendar, but not all. He's mixing all kind of things together.

There was an interview in some local magazine and well, he's weird. However, he managed to get worldwide attention for an idea which is so old and absurd. He's selling books about his idea, he sold 50,000 copies in Poland :)

Or he’s just a little mentally ill or he truly believes what he’s saying or he’s a good businessman. :)

The idea that y2k would screw up everything and send us back to the stone age came from the same people who believed that SARS and bird flu really would wipe out all of humanity. I stopped listening to them the moment I started listening to them and realized they were full of shit.

As for the Mayan calendar, it does have a surprisingly good track record. It successfully predicted, to the day, eclipses, catastrophies, and even the arrival of Europeans. All of these things happening CENTURIES after the Mayans sort of went away for some reason. With a track record that accurate, they have to know something. Maybe they know someone from the future who had a time machine and went back in time to tell them this stuff?

Bolded for irony.

I don't know why you all said nothing happened... our report cards in that year listed it as 1999/100 The school was apparently pretty surprised about that but couldn't replace the program.