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

My boyfriend asked me this and as I couldn't find a good answer, I hereby forward it to the best forum of Q&A available!

We all know about it - those of us knowing about the world surrounding us - the dreaded Y2K problem, or Year Two Thousand menace! Computers world wide are expected to crash or worse as some of them are lead to believe that we are (once again) at the start of the twentieth century rather than the twentyfirst.
This problem is a threat to microwaves, videos, power supply, banks and (AAAARGH!) home computers.
But why - oh why - is it almost impossible to get any kind of damages when our machines fail? Why are we to suffer because the programmers did not want to waste two bytes? Why is there nowhere to go for help?
Is this reasonable? No.
But then what?

Insurance companies look upon this situation as one that is foreseen and therefore - in theory - preventable, therefore they will not pay damages.

Also, don't take this two far : Some microwaves may fail, but in the most part they're ok.

I think you need to worry more about the Utilities market. What happens if some essential water purification/sewage sytem component fails, does this lead to disease or not.

You misunderstand somewhat, my friend.
It's not the insurance-companies we are annoyed with. It's more that, say, older MicroSoft products or other things with a date-system built in like that can be sold without any mention that they expire at midnight in less than a month - and yet MicroSoft and all the others don't stand responsible for it. The only one to pay is the consumer!
As for the risk of, say waterpurification, powersupply or important health-care machinery failing, well, the mere thought is awful!

Not that I often do this (in fact would prefer not to at all) but in fairness to the big guys in the IT industry, and software that can be updated has been/or their is a downloadable attempt at a fix for it. Given the average lifecycle of most hardware products (a couple of months) they wouldn't have expected it to be an issue anyway.

Should you find someone now selling kit that blatantly isn't Y2K compliant, I believe you stand a fair chance of prosecuting succesfully.

One thing that amazed me about one of the major airline builders in the states: they built an aircraft (passenger) with all computer controlled components, sold it internationally and will not work to make it compliant as the brief at the time did not specify this was a requirement.

It strikes me that a lot of crap has been pedelled out under the Y2K banner, Most hardware devices either don't know or don't care about what date it is! that also goes for most parts of airliners the only bits which might be date dependant are parts of the navigation system (but these tend to get their info from the ground or satelites.)and the in flight sandwhiches!
So I assume the aircraft your talking about probably has no serious Y2K defects, At least not safety ones, It probably means the vidio recorder for the in flight movie will be unable to be pre programmed across the millenium divide (what a relief given the normal choice of films!)
There must be some systems around which are genuinely date dependent,but most of the Hype has surrounded alleged 3rd party fixes for home computors which the hype masters were trying to sell before the real software and hardware companies finished testing their updates and released them for free.
Which for once (just this once) does as you say make them the good guys.

PS I just noticed the date on my PC is about four days out
So if I disapear off the face of the earth on 04/01/2000 you may assume I was wrong!

Granted theres a lot of hype, but there are nevertheless some issues. A couple of years ago, I worked as project manager for Y2K issues for a collective body, and part of this entailed researching the status of many organisations in the UK, and at the time the data returned was very frightening. Ok most of this has been resolved to date, but please don't make the mistake of completely trivialising the issue.

The aircraft I was talking about was tested for defects, and over 60% of the critical systems failed to operate. I'm not saying this is the case now, but it was at the time.

If you look at the recent(ish) fiasco over the Swanick Centre in the UK, you may get a clearer picture of the situation re : ground based control systems.

Also consider that most electronics are based round the BIOS, countless numbers of none compliant ones were (and I stress were) being sold by established chains as late as December 97).

I would say it's certainly going to be interesting to find out what - if anything - happens over this period. All going well, the most major effect is going to be a massive, global hangover.

I'm not trivialising the real problems, But I am having a go at the hype merchants who have been trying to flog all sorts of dodgy half thought out alleged solutions to problems which even if they do occur are trivial to fix and dont cause any more than a minor hiccup.

Pauses for breath

Together with the media who want to make a big story to get more veiwers, listners, readers and so give them more air time / space to the hype merchants than the real Y2K issues.

Like yourself I have had some dealings with Y2K compliance issues, some of them on safety critical systems, Most of them have complience issues but they are of a pain in the arse nature rather than oops apocalypse.
for instance the systems will carry on working correctly but the date shown on the log printout will be wrong.
Its suprising how many systems only use the time / date for the logging functions, with all the internal time critical functions working on sofware counters counting the clock ticks directly
One of the most reliable tests to date has been the CEGB reset,
Pull the plug out, kill the back up batteries including the clock, then power the system back up and see if it runs correctly without human intervention.

With regard to the Swanwick cock up (ongoing)I dont know anthing about it beyond what appears in the press.
But it strikes me as much more of a project specification / management issue with lots of people wanting lots of things and no properly tied down specification,add in gung ho contractors tendering on what they hope to develope in time: end result it don't work and costs lots to put right.

Best balls up found to date:
This ones a few years old before Y2K was the news
on a non safety critical but very important Real Time information system with duplicated everything, and all system changes are done in the middle of the night when if the system goes down it won't cause a big problem.
The cold boot code for restarting the system after a complete failure had gone missing in a software update.
So we shut down the A system, loaded the update, brought it back up, the machine came up saw the B system was running read in the current data and worked fine.
looks good so we switch over to A and down B, load the new software, reboot B, everything hunky dory.
Last test not in the manual, Kill the mains supply, Kill the memory back up batteries on both machines power back up and ..........PANIC
Its getting close to having to have it back on line time (or else).
Reload old software Shit its mising in that as well.
Load very old software bring system up and then upgrade.
Spend the next week hoping there isn't a complete power failure, while the software guru's get to work.

Swanwick? Would any of you guys mind trying to explain this mess to a foreigner?

Anyho, I am merely presenting an interesting issue for debate here, other than that I fully agree that the Y2K problem is vastly exaggerated in the press. There are tales of people who stock supplies for the dark months to follow the great millenium break-down, and all though most of those are but stories, rumours persistently maintain that it happens regularly.

And well, if the turn of the century leads to a new dark age, at least we'll have some interesting stories to tell our grandchildren - provided we manage to have any!

No matter what, selling systems that cannot deal with a four-digit year is, in my mind, daft!
But I refuse to panic quite yet.

A couple of years back - I think it was 93 - It was determined that the current air traffic control system implemented in The UK couldn't possibly cope with the amount of traffic and some serious accidents were set to happen.

Therefore, a new system was commissioned in Swanwick UK to deal with this. A couple of years in the making, it was initially due to go on-line around 95, but failed miserably. Subsequent efforts resulted in a system about to go live at the end of 98, when it was discovered that none of the system was millennium compliant.

They have been working on this ever since, and the next target date for going live has been set back to 2005 I think it is. Meanwhile, the old system that 'simply couldn't cope' is the only one we have to fall back on. Now, as far as I am aware, no-one has yet specified this old system is even Y2K compliant, or what steps can be taken to ensure this.

How reassuring to know!

Well... the Y2K bug is now so far in the past that we are farther from this conversation than we are from the date of the 2038 bug... anyone worried about that one?

Anyone KNOW about that one?

I always thought the Y2K thing was a load of crap at the time. And I laughed hard when whatsisname (that bloke that did the swingometer during elections at the time) did a Y2K bug sweep around the globe and countries like Italy who spent NTFA on the Y2K bug compared to the UK who spend BILLIONS on it had almost zero problems.

The accountancy firms who were refusing to sign off the audits of 'non-compliant' companies, of course were wiping their hands with glee. I expect they lost most of it in 2008 of course.

Anyway. Nowadays, if our wifi goes down at work I am *completely* hamstrung because I can barely do anything without the cloud and its associated computer network.

I don't *know* anything about this per se.... but this time I would be *much* more worried than back in 1999/2000. Now we really are much more dependent on the computers working and much more vulnerable to them failing back then I reckon.