Non-Audi Y2K, was Millenium Compliance

[John Cunningham <johnc@together.net>]

right on Steve.  Extreme Rant Mode On.  Not suitable for sensitive listeners,
small children or household pets.

i am WAY sick of stupid self proclaimed Y2K experts running around whipping the
ignorant into a frenzy.  and are they ever engineers who have been working on
the inside and know all about non-compliant software and hardware?  typically
not.  typically they are technology generalists (ok so am i.. but that's a
different story) with some vague kind of 'i'm a computer person' credential.
our public radio station has been having periodic call in shows with just this
type of moron telling everyone how catastrophic things will be.  like
proclaiming that Sept. 9 of this year will result in armageddon because 'oh no
mr. bill it's 9/9/99!' (of course to a programmer that's more like 09/09/99 and
if he DID use it as some kind of foolish invalid flag, he would have likely used
99/99/99 )

i'm sure there will be some failures.  for the most part, those failures will be
in high level business software resulting in:
 - your bill being wrong.
NOT
- in the lights going out.

I know, i've been there, i've seen and written lots of telephone call rating
code (probably still in production).  i suppose i've even probably written or
updated non-compliant code, although i don't recall it.  and your bill is almost
certainly wrong from time to time already due to a plethora of code errors and
the complexity of the utility rating schemes, trust me.

and if some embedded system does fail due to an internal date problem, this will
be apparent right away as all hell breaks loose in CO's and substations, but
some hardware tech will reboot the thing, and he'll tell it that it's 1987 for
the time being and service will be restored to Happyland in no time.

of course now your bill will be wrong again as the billing software tries to
process weird dates coming down from the hardware --->. see above.

ERM off.  you can bring the kids back in the room.

"Buchholz, Steven" wrote:

> Some people think that there's some sort of X-files hidden function built
> into every chip that will cause them all to self destruct (a la ... what was
> that movie with Tom Selleck and errant automatons? ... Runaway?).  Let me
> tell you as someone involved with the semiconductor business ... people have
> a hard enough time getting the chips to do what they promised their
> customers it would do to think about such subterfuge ...