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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: 3, Insightful) by gidds on Monday January 05 2015, @01:56PM
...just not as much of a problem as all the hype led some people to think.
But some hype was necessary: if no-one had made a fuss, lots of things wouldn't have got fixed in time, and there would have been lots more serious failures.
As I said in a previous comment [soylentnews.org], it was a catch-22 situation.
And there's always room for asking yourself what could go wrong, thinking ahead, and trying to prevent problems before they happen.
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