h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

if you're going to start a book of dates, i think that january 1st 2000 should make it into the book as the day that the world's largest predicted disaster (to that day) failed to happen. not to mention a case of one of the largest world-wide panic attacks to date. namely the millennium bug. i mean, for about two years people were panicking like nobody's business about the year 2000 because they realised that thanks to lack of foresight, they'd made things dd-mm-yy, and so on jan 1st 2000 all the computers in the world would fail because they'd get confused and all. remember? they were going on and on about how all the computers and appliances and traffic lights would fail and power stations would cease to function, and chaos would descend upon the world like some hell plague. heck, they even had computer games and movies portraying the horrors of this roll-over thingy. and then everybody everywhere was doing really severe upgrading and re-programming... and when the 'millennium' came, there was actually a morning *after*. (oh, and my digital watch still works fine)

I agree. That is something to remember!

Cissdur

I didn't mind as I was on call from work and got paid a load of money for doing nothing! Just about paid for the 'Millenium Eve' night out!

faith in technology is what keeps it working...

Yes, but ...

It was quite important that a lot of work (sadly costing zillions in every currency) was done fixing things in advance so that things wouldn't fail on Jan 1st. And they didn't. Oh good. Would you have preferred that the work wasn't done so that we could have experimented and see if things went pear-shaped on a day where everyone was too hungover to fix them?

My overtime on The Day got me a bonus (small, not everyone believed the newspapers), a bottle of champagne and a nice denim shirt, so I remember it!

? you misunderstand me. i was not implying that whether or not people did all that re-programming, the stuff would have continued to work; rather, that these people re-programmed the stuff with the faith in the technology that they were working on that they would be able to get it to keep working.

I just reread my message and it sounded ever so high, mighty and important, not to mention offended dignity - sorry!

What faith in the technology? Thirty years ago we were feeling in the dark (and it was fun) now we're feeling in a fog of Windows variants and it keeps me in a job fixing things that I wouldn't be doing if it all worked all the time like an astrolabe. The Millennium Bug we could point at, I keep wondering what's buried in there that'll bite us in the bum sometime in the future!

lol! well, i guess that if we'd all given up on technology, we'd be back to living in caves. no offence taken - i just happened to choose the wrong words, and you got them wrong. shake! ... rats, there's no shake-hand smiley...

an interesting (and for me, extremely funny) note about modern technology: my friends and i are all xp users. i have absolutely no problem with it - heck, my laptop loves it. my friends, however, are ready to fry their computers. see, the thing is, our country has just started this broadband service thingy (oh yeah, we've been using phonelines till now )... *all* of my xp-user friends who have signed up for it and bought new modems have been suddenly faced with the everyday horror of crashes and blue screens (we call the the blue screen of death). seems that the modem's been doing really foul things to xp. the tech help page is *flooded* with similar complaints, and the papers have been attacking the company as well... oh, and another thing: it seems that downloading the service pack actually messes up your computer if it's running on xp. happened to my best friend. ah, the wonders of modern technology!

A difficulty I have with my teenage son and my colleagues for whom I am the IT Support person they call when things go awry, is that they don't accept the computer as it was set up and just use it. No, they have to mess about with settings, tweak things, download patches that got advertised in the XP systray (sorry, Notification Area). My offspring loads every game demo he gets his claws on, and every extra the Internet will supply for the full versions when he's played them for a long time, like a day. And yet I don't get Blue Screens of Death, and my printers work, and modems, and speakers. But not Adobe Acrobat v5.05 with XP, oh gosh, there it goes again. Bring back the Apple Classic II with 2MB memory and a 30-meg hard drive and System 7. Better yet, bring back the leather ledger and quill pen, never broke down, just needed a goose feather and penknife, only hard bit was keeping two sets for the boss and for the taxman - so-called 'double-entry' bookkeeping ...[fades into distance muttering] [42, I tell you, the answer is 42!]

my friends are download freaks. my computer, however, is not hooked on to a phone line, so it's easier for me to stay away. (i'm using the computer lab pc) i find that in some cases the patches actually causes the system to go haywire... ironic, that... and yes, i know of a lot of people who mess around with their pcs, cause them to malfunction, and then call up the poor guy who set up their stuff to complain that their pcs don't work

speaking of which, my boss has this unfortunate inability to get along with her computer. there isn't a month that goes by without something weird happening to it, like for example, the printer starting to print jabberwocky, or the pc restarting itself without warning. of course when that happens she drags me in to show me what she'd gotten, and to check what's wrong. the thing is - every time i go, she gets embarrassed dreadfully because the system would then work *perfectly*

er, are we talking about the acrobat reader? i'm using version 5.0, which works beautifully. maybe you could switch to that? (if you haven't already tried)

No, the full version for making PDFs, not just reading them. I loaded Office XP and then it spat at me because I had acro 5 and it demanded upgrades with menaces so I gave in and then it worked but for larger things veeerrrrrryyyy sloooooooooooooowlyyyy and for very large things it gave up after a few hours or rather I gave up.

But we appear to be wandering somewhat off-message, as Mr Blair might say. We could start another date-related argument? Huh? Huh? Like whether 1.1.00 was the beginning of the last year of the 2nd millennium like I know, when world leaders thought it a good time for a fireworks display. Probably to blind everyone a la Day Of The Triffids so we wouldn't notice all the computer systems crashing.

You haven't argued with my other posting called AM1656, what did I do right?

[All these acerbic comments are purely humorous (houmourous?) and not to be taken as requiring gouts of blood in answer.
(
This emoticon denotes a bald man smiling.]

well, we could talk about how nobody can agree when the first millenium (and hence, the second as well) because they made a mess when they introduced the new calendar system, and consequently, nobody can agree on when the birth of christ actually occured as well...

Irrelevant now. So is the dropping of days to move from Julian to Gregorian and how much more accurate it would be to use the Mayan and what about all those important seconds that Scientists remove secretly every so often by changing the number of pips in the time clock. The fact is that for a long while we've been counting up from the (albeit notional) First Year of Our Lord that began when shepherds washed their socks by night. The last year of the First Century of our Lord would thus be AD 100. And so on. Ad nauseam. I win.

(You'd like AM 1656, I know you would)

1st 2000 is the date to set your calendar to if you are saving up for a second hand computer as firms upgrade every 3 years on average. So earlier this year was a premium for machines that were built in 2000. Well, supplied for 2000 that is.

In 2004 parts prices will reach a cyclical low to make up for the dearth of customers, so that is when to buy new.

2005 will put another batch of techies on the dole and close another herd of computer shops. Then its back to the feast in 2006.

Farlander, I too have had XPlurgydoses since a recent msnotwell thought out patch that was April. But how do your friends expect to get away without problems using broadband on modems?

By the way it is well known that Jesus was born in October two years before Christ.

1656 what Tafkar? 1656 years since Adam? 1656 years before two years before two years after Christ?