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As we head into 2015, it's hard to think of any technical skill set less relevant than Y2K - the identification and fixing of computer systems and applications that used two decimal digits rather than four to store the year component of each date. As you may recall, the discovery of the problem (or perhaps, that the deadline to fix it was finally approaching) in the late '90s led to media hysteria and dire warnings about a world full of computers simultaneously losing their bearings, like HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. An artist has assembled a memorial to the crisis, in the form of a web site presenting photos of dozens of books dealing with Y2K from various perspectives.
This site could be seen as mindless diversion, but also as a digest of reaction likely to repeat itself in a subsequent "crisis", albeit with different media next time (blogging, for one, had yet to be invented).
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday January 04 2015, @03:06PM
And the stupidity I'm referring to is that of the chicken lickens who said the sky was going to cave in, more than the programmers who had saved a couple of bytes a few decades earlier.
In 1994 I took out a 15-year mortgage on a house. Nothing crashed. "09" was 2009 and not less than "94", at least in that bank. My electricity contract signed in 1999 for a year didn't explode either, so clearly March 00 was later than March 99 also. There was no business that I had dealt with before the turn of 2000 which had not had to cope with the concept of a date after 2000, and everything was coping just fine. It was obvious that at least where I was living the turn of 2000 would be a complete non-event.
It's not just a mindless diversion, it's good to preserve a library of the bogus predictions. Nobody with a brain burns copies of Nostradamus or the Bible, despite their failings.
I glad to see at least 3 of the books in that archive called it like it was (in the perhaps misnamed 'hoax' section).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04 2015, @04:06PM
> And the stupidity I'm referring to is that of the chicken lickens who said the sky was going to cave in
You've got it completely wrong. Y2K was a situation in which the 'chicken lickens' actually prompted the necessary response. The very fact that there were only minor problems was the direct result of billions of dollars of effort fixing shit. Sure, not 100% of it was necessary, but expecting that level of precision on a problem of that scale would be myopic.
> In 1994 I took out a 15-year mortgage on a house. Nothing crashed. "09" was 2009 and not less than "94", at least in that bank.
Because you were not the first person to take out a mortgage with a term extending past 2000. That rubicon was passed well over a decade before you walked in the door and was discovered and fixed then because it meant all new business ground to a halt. Find the first guy to apply for such a mortgage at that bank and ask them how much of a hassle it was. 10 to 1, they ended up just going to some other bank that had already fixed the problem.