“Whatever happened with the ozone layer panic, if scientists are so smart?”
We listened to the scientists, and the problem went away.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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It's the same as people using the example of the Y2K bug being a non event. Yeah, because globally trillions of dollars were spent fixing it before it became an event.
Didn't go away, just stopped getting worse at an alarming rate.
No
Get that marble brain Reddit-style bs outta here. If you wanna deny, you’re gonna have to come up with a reason that you could be right. Otherwise, we’re just gonna point al laugh at your dumbassery.
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
Y2K is similar. Most people will remember not much happening at all. Lots of people worked hard to solve the problem and prevent disaster.
Was there ever really a threat to begin with? The whole thing sounds like Jewish space lasers to me.
Edit: Gotta love getting downvoted for asking a question.
Yes, most administrative programs, think hospitals, municipal, etc had a year set only in 2 digits. Yesterdays timestamp will read as 99 years in the future, since the year is 00. Imagine every todo item of the last 20 odd years suddenly being pushed onto your todo list. Timers set to take place every x time can't check when last something happend. Time critical nuclear safety mechanisms, computers getting stuck due to data overload, everything needed to be looked at to determine risk.
So you take all the dates, add size to store additional data, add 1900 to the years and you are set. In principle a very straight forward fix, but it takes time to properly implement. Because everyone was made aware of the potential issue IT professionals could more easily lobby for the time and funds to make the necessary changes before things went awry.
That's fuckin wild and seems like a massive oversight.
Did they just not expect us all to live that long or did they just not think of it at all?
Yeah I would imagine poor/lazy planning or they either thought their tools would be replaced by then and/or that computers were just a fad so there's no way they'd be used in the year 2000.
Depends on the "they"...
But generally, back in the day data storage, memory and processing power were expensive. Multiple factors more expensive than they are now. Storing a year with two digits instead of four was a saving worth making. Over time, some people just kept doing what they had been doing. Some people just learned from mentors to do it that way, and kept doing it.
It was somewhat expected that systems would improve and over time that saving wouldn't be needed. Which was true. By the year 2000 "modern" systems didn't need to make that saving. But there was a lot of old code and systems that were still running just fine, that hadn't been updated to modern code/hardware. it became a bit of a rush job at the end to make the same upgrade.
There is a similar issue coming up in the year 2038. A lot of computing platforms store dates as the number of seconds since the beginning of 1970-01-01 UTC. As I type this comment there have been 1,710,757,161 seconds since that date. It's a simple way to store time/date in a way that can be converted back to a human readable format quite easily. I've written a lot of code which does exactly this. I've also written lot of code and data storage systems that store this number as a 32bit integer. Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296. That means at 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, some of my old code will break, because it wont be able to properly store the dates.
I no longer work for that employer, I no longer maintain that code. Back when I wrote that code, a 32bit integer made sense. If I wrote new code now, I would use a different data type that would last longer. If my old code is still in use then someone is going to have to update it. Because of the way business, software and humans work. I don't expect anyone will patch that code until sometime around the year 2037.
Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296.
A little nitpick: the count at that time will be 2,147,483,647. time_t is usually a signed integer.
Yes. A massive amount of work went in to making sure the transition wnet smooth.
You're probably getting down voted because you asked here instead of a search engine, and many people think it's common knowledge, and it was already answered in this thread.
Sometimes an innocent question looks like someone JAQing off.
Sounds like a great way to keep people from interacting at all.
TBH “The whole world agreed on something” narrative doesn’t really reflect what happened.
Actually, The Industry dropped using CFC after a cheaper and luckily safer alternative has been discovered right around that time.
Imagine if we did this with climate change. Imagine if we tried to switch to renewable energy en masse 20 years ago.
like as if we wanted to live
Similar with Y2K
it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, "yeah lol it was a dud."
All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We've known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn't been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They're harmless
I can't remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.
Like the preventative measures we're so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.
The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
It's already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you're around then.
Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900...
Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You've got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.
The issue wasn't using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.
I'm going to assume you aren't old enough to remember, but the "only two digits to represent the year" issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.
I remember paper forms having "19__" in the year field. Good times