We’ve had a bunch of Y2Kyoto posts recently, so just as a refresher let’s dredge up what some of the experts were saying as Y2K approached. Lot’s of these have attempted to erase this history and replace it with post-apocalypse spin, but fortunately we have the Wayback machine.
Here’s TimeBomb2000 Author Ed Yourdon in A Year of Disruptions, A Decade of Depression:
But I believe that we will begin seeing Y2K problems that do cause noticeable disruptions in our day to day lives; I believe we’ll start seeing them by this summer, and I believe they’ll continue for at least a year. As many people are now aware, 46 states (along with Australia and New Zealand) will begin their 1999-2000 fiscal year on July 1, 1999; New York (and Canada) will already have gone through their Y2K fiscal rollover on April 1, and the remaining three states begin their new fiscal year on August 1, September 1, and October 1. We also have the GPS rollover problem to look forward to on August 22nd, as well as the Federal government’s new fiscal year on October 1st. There is, of course, some finite probability that all of these rollover events will occur without any problems; but there’s also a finite probability that pigs will learn to fly.
Ed Yourdon now says:
Although the Yourdons expressed a largely optimistic view — and while Y2K turned out to be a non-event — the tragedy of 9/11 demonstrated the virtues of having backup plans for infrastructure disruptions, the likes of which were once attributed to innocent technology failures.
Yourdon recovered quickly with another book Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11 on Information Technology. Fearmongers have a talent for recovery, evidently.
James Kunstler had this to say:
Writing this in April of ‘99, I believe that we are in for a serious event. Systems will fail, crash, seize up, cease to function. Not all systems, maybe only a fraction, but enough, and enough interdependent systems to affect many other systems. Y2K is real. Y2K is going to rock our world.
People will consequently suffer.
Have no fear for Jim, though. He’s moved on to peak oil:
The world – and of course the US – now faces an epochal predicament: the global oil production peak and the arc of depletion that follows. We are unprepared for this crisis of industrial civilization. We are sleepwalking into the future.
And Margaret Wheatley had this to say:
We will finally see the extent of the networked and interdependent processes we have created. At the stroke of midnight, the new millenium heralds the greatest challenge to modern society we have yet to face as a planetary community.
[…]
Y2K is a technology-induced problem, but it will not and cannot be solved by technology. It creates societal problems that can only be solved by humans. We must begin to address potential social responses. We need to be engaged in this discourse within our organizations, our communities, and across the traditional boundaries of competition and national borders. Without such planning, we will slide into the Year 2000 as hapless victims of our technology.
Naturally, the solution is to return to a pre-industrial state and live at harmony with nature and without technology. Y2K, global warming, peak oil – you can recycle these doomsayers with almost any cause.
Oh. My. God.
Being the owner of a couple of small businesses, this is terrifying news indeed! The prospect of power outages, disruption of telephone service, having my computers crash, my suppliers unavailable…why, the only worse thing that I can possibly imagine is…errrrrrr…climate change, yes that’s it, climate change.
Oh wait… Y2k turned out to be bullshit, didn’t it?
Whew, there’s a load off my mind…
Next item for the Wayback Machine:-Global cooling from the 80s. How many names are predicting disaster re cooling are the same names predicting disaster from warming. And, most important, how many real scientists and climatolagists called it crap.
BTW, where is this author now and what is he doing. Probably with the suzuki or algore team.
I’m no fan of global warming alarmism, but …
Y2K problems didn’t happen in part due to a LOT of programming changes made to prevent them. There were human-created vulnerabilities. Humans fixed most of them in time.
The climate’s a whole nuther issue.
And yeah, there does seem to be a disaster industry ….
Bruce, Y2K WASN’T bullshit!
For example, the two Spanish nuclear power plants that had to be put in emergency shutdown and taken off the European power grid, after the Y2K moment fritzed out the controlling computers.
Then, there was the (classified) number of US military satellites that went out of commission for a period (classified, but variously believed to be days to a week or so).
I’d call those non-bullshit problems.
And that’s just the problems that became public knowledge. What went on behind the scenes that never became public knowledge???
Western governments and businesses spent billions working to correct this UNIX-derived problem. And they didn’t spend that kind of very serious money for no reason.
Is the Y2K problem now over and for the history books? Nope.
Not having either the billions or the tech experts, the developing nations in the third world using older mainframes and mid-range computers mostly handled the problem simply by just turning their clocks back several decades.
So, in this ever more inter-connected world, Y2K is still waiting to rear it’s ugly head again. The clocks are literally ticking as the third world mainframes and mid-range computers that operate on UNIX inexorably march – again – towards 00/00/00.
Why do so many people NEED to have a global crisis to believe in? Are peoples lives so boring that they need to invent global crisis scenarios in order to make their lives more exciting?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the two-digit-year rollover problem we addressed in the late ’90s was in fact not trivial. Many engineers and software developers worked diligently to mitigate the negative effects that would have been caused if we had done nothing about it, and we were largely successful: only a handful of notable cases slipped through.
That said, I have no doubt that the leadership of many organizations, and many pundits, dramatically overstated the degree of risk involved. This is, unfortunately, normal behaviour for some humans, because it benefited their power, prestige, and budgets (unlike the technicians, who benefited from actually fixing actual problems before they occurred).
So there is, I think, a degree to which comparing the current fear-mongering about the earth’s climate to the Y2K fear-mongering is valid, namely, that the engineers and technologists are working diligently to ever improve our quality of life, while many organizations and pundits are grossly overstating the situational risks, because it benefits their power, prestige, and budget.
The biggest problem though is the anti-technology luddites, people who are not so concerned about fraudulent power battles, but are really, really concerned that technology is the root of all evil. In terms of the future of man, the anti-technology luddites are one of the greatest evils of all.
Here’s a simple test you can use to separate the good from the bad. Ask people: “If the sky were falling, would you be more likely to (1) run around screaming, ‘The sky is falling’, or (2) work to design and deploy something to hold the sky up?”.
Valuable people choose the second option, and, indeed, engineers and technologists all over the world are working to mitigate the potential negative effects of our current technologies by inventing and deploying even better technologies tomorrow.
Since the dawn of man, humans have been primarily working on two things: trying to make our lives better, and fixing the problems caused by the last time we tried to make our lives better. If you care about this stuff, trust this little boy: youtube.com/watch?v=nfSyfxemFKA
(PS to Dave: The two-digit year rollover problem was not related to Unix. The 32-bit Unix time value rollover won’t happen until 2038. Long term solutions have already been planned and specified by engineering standards organizations, and will be implemented and deployed over the next 30 years. The 32-bit Unix time value rollover will not be a problem.)
Ed Yourdon had a long history of doomsaying: prior to his latching onto the Y2K stuff, he was playing up the possibilities of the Second Coming of Christ and the end of history.
Seriously.
The reason he got more “airtime” about Y2K than he ever did about the Rapture is because of the fame-amplifying effects of the Internet — his website managed to reach, if only tangentially, many hundreds of times more people than his Xeroxed letters concerning the chaos of the End Times ever did.
I like the Y2Kyoto tag line used here but, trying to compare Y2K and climate change as the same weakens the argument against the Al Gore’s of the world.
I work at a Telecomunications company and we did alot of behind the scene activity to make sure nothing happened.
Sure there was alot of hype, remember people saying your toaster might not work? But many big mainframe systems were fixed before Y2K.
As a side note, Y2K did force some companies to upgrade and or completly refurbish/reprogram/replace their computer networks. Now who profited and who benifeted has got to be a good subject for a book(ah prob already is one)
Anyway….it is not the same apples to oranges I guess. My 2 cents
Dave & Vitruvius:
Allow me to clarify; I expressed myself a little carelessly. I acknowledge that there was a technical problem that was resolved through technical means. The “BS” to which I was referring was the seemingly endless hysteria extant throughout the media and elsewhere as to the dire consequences that were almost certainly to befall the world during the years leading up to 2000.
Reminiscent of what we’re experiencing these days…any change in the “weather” seems to be automatically translated to being “climate”.
I’d like some of these scientists and reporters to do a little research as to why the Vikings called the land mass to the east of us “Greenland”…they would probably discover that Greenland was GREEN a thousand or so years ago.
Then perhaps some of them would start to question why the Medieval Warm Period data was deleted in the preparation of the infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph.
vitruvius
‘cept for the bit about the unix roll over, that wuz a funny read
and actually man have been working on two things since the begining, how to make “money” and how to spend said money
in other words, greed is the motivator
“…discover that Greenland was GREEN…”
Before someone jacks me on it, I don’t mean to imply that it was ALL green.
*memo to self: try to post with a little more precision*
*response to memo: geez, it’s the internet, already* 🙂
Hmmm … let’s see … we didn’t have a Y2K problem.
What didn’t happen?
-We didn’t have a lot of government involved in directing Y2K
-We had almost no UN involvement
What did happen?
-we had incredible global industrial co-operation, amongst global banks and communications companies for example.
-There was no panic, lots of lead-time was wisely used to come up with innovative solutions on old legacy systems.
-Both buyers and sellers of computer equipment co-operated on innovations.
Hmmm … it seems if we want to repeat that Y2K non-disaster then what should happen and not happen with climate change should mimic that success.
It was not my intent to attack you, Bruce, I was just writing a general essay on my understanding of the situation. Sorry if it came across as otherwise.
While I agree that for some (probably many) humans, greed is the motivator, GYM, I do not think that it is a valid universal. Of course, technically, I can only speak for myself; perhaps I’m just not greedy and/or cynical enough. But even for those for whom greed is the motivator, for most of them it is never just about money, for example, non-monetary power greed is often a factor in the equation.
Upon rereading Dave’s comment, I think I misunderstood his point about old technology running on set-back clocks. That may be a valid risk; I have no data on the matter. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the two-digit year roll-over problem was not related to Unix, indeed, it was generally independent of operating system and of programming language.
No offense taken whatever, V. I should have been more precise in my original post…
Now wait a sec, vitruvius. If the sky IS falling, as in right now, right this very absolute right now second – well, you know, I just might run around yelling ‘The sky is falling, the sky is….”.
The time to actually stop that sky from falling is not now,.. as the Great Sea that was resting on top of the sky rushes through the holes in the falling sky. It’s before – when you have to cut down all the trees and build really tall columns to prop up the sky (and therefore, the sea above the sky). It’s also wise to collect stones and build dikes at the edge of the earth, so that any water that falls from the Great Sea Above the Sky – and this water is sacred – well, it will stay on the earth.
You might well ask – what’s beneath the earth? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Everything is layered on top.
What emerges from this Nothing? It’s the home of the luddites. From nothing comes nothing.
GYM:
The term “greed” is generally used as a perjorative; witness the famous phrase “Greed is good” in the movie “Wall Street”.
I didn’t invest my capital and time and effort in my businesses to benefit the common good. I did so because I wanted to make a decent living, provide support for my family (before and after I’m dead) and to perhaps enjoy a few of the luxuries and toys that success can bring. If what I do does in fact benefit the common good, fine. If not, well that’s OK too, at least to me. But I’ve never considered myself as being greedy.
And I don’t equate someone who initiates a business enterprise of some sort as being necessarily motivated by greed. There are a lot of motivations, probably the rush that one experiences in creating something that didn’t exist before is likely the strongest factor, at least it was for me.
Witness Bill Gates. When I think of him, I think of an enormously successful entrepreneur who ran with an idea, had a bit luck and good timing along the way, and has become arguably the biggest business success in history. But I’ve never thought of him as being primarily motivated by “greed”. I’m certainly no billionaire, but it strikes me that at some point, the magnitude of one’s net worth isn’t that important, it’s just a convenient means of keeping score.
For those saying Y2K wasn’t BS – well, obviously at its core there genuinely was a problem. But these quotes came from 1999 after most of the problems had already been resolved and these were predictions on how successful or unsuccessful those efforts were likely to have been.
Yourdon was THE go-to “expert” for the media, and testified to Congress, much as Hansen is the poster boy for global warming.
Margaret Wheatley was published in CIO magazine.
And the other thing not widely known is that the Y2K hype was almost exclusively an English-speaking phenomenon. Russia, Japan, Germany, Korea and Latin America largely ignored the problem, leaving it to individuals and businesses to deal with as they saw fit. And those countries dealt with it just as successfully at a tiny fraction of the cost.
What always causes the big trouble is not the original problem but the hype, the BS, the exageration, the calamity callers, the doomsayers, the Gores, the Suzukis, the Maurice Strongs, the United Nationers. But mostly, MOSTLY, it is the friggin media in their hell bent drive for money. And in the process cutting down a hell of a lot of trees.
Kate, please make ‘Wayback’ and the ‘end-of-the-world’ predictions gone amuck a regular here. There is enough material to last decades!!!
Global cooling doom and gloom of the 70s would be a good start.
Did the third world spend a pile of $$$ on Y2K ??
Did all their computers crash ??
I remember hearing all 84 Oldsmobiles would stop in their tracks because of dead 00 brains.
Airliners would fall from the sky.
Air traffic control systems would shut down.
My old PC would shut down at the stroke of midnight. I took a chance. No probs. Did anyone have a 00 crash ??
The programers knew what they were doing. The Media doesn’t know it’s ass from a h …
Damn media hype and doom. Should be charged for yelling fire in a theatre.
3w.benbest.com/computer/y2kfeb.html A Y2K expert eats his words.
Y2K 99.9% hype .1% reality.
Climate change has always occurred. Global warming has always occurred as has global cooling. Media hype and an ignorant populous feed the illusion of crisis.
Pollution is real and China is set to make it worse with five hundred coal fired generating plants slated to come on line in the next decade. Even if the signatories of Kyoto could meet their commitments within the next five years, will the Chinese want to stop progress in 2012 and sign a new deal? Or for that matter will India?
The Liberal Party has a plan. They plan to force Alberta to buy green power from Quebec to offset oil sands emissions.
Charest has stated that he wants Quebec to be the Canadian leader in green power. A east west transmission of energy is the stated goal. He has also expressed support for a world authority to punish offending polluter nations. This plan has been put forth by another Frenchman, citizen Chirac.
The government of Quebec and Hydro Quebec are planning massive hydro developments in Northern Quebec. Andre Caille, president of Hydro Quebec has stated that Kyoto will shorten the required environmental review time.
The Northern Cree have been bought off and the environmentalists have turned a blind eye, after all how can one attack clean hydro?
Why doesn’t the media care about the destruction of thousands of square kilometers of boreal forest? Quebec is busy destroying the land and the Canadian msm media attacks Alberta. Will Alberta pay up or will Albertans finally give Canada “the finger”?
Stay tuned for the next federal election when these and many more questions will be answered!
Last semester my son came home from school with a report that his teacher claimed that GREENLAND was never green. They said that it was a lie told by Erik the Red to lure people from Iceland to somewhere even colder. So that is what the climate change fanatics are saying now.
My son would have none of it, of course, and looked up the facts for himself.
You can take the boy out of Alberta, but you can’t take Alberta out of the boy.
I was involved in a Y2K conversion project of medium proportion. There were ten analysts involved and the project lasted one year. The problem leading to the project was recognized five years in advance, and the project was completed successfully two full years in advance of the time at which a problem might have arisen. It involved recognition by private sector management that a problem existed, and a plan to correct the potential problem well in advance of the time when it might become serious. This was the way that most of the private sector dealt with Y2K. The media generated hysteria promoted by journalists who had no idea what they were talking about basically ignored the fact that most of the major potential problems were solved well before they became real problems.
Good, point, up to a point, ET. Indeed, it’s a fun question to ask at parties (at least with the kind of people I hang out with): “If a neutron star traveling at 50,000 miles per second away from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy (yes, there is one) was found out for the first time, and announced to you, 24 hours before it was about to hit our star Sol and turn our solar system into a gas cloud, what would you do?”
Speaking only personally, of course, and given that there would be no possibility of us stopping such a neutron star and the concomitant effects of such a collision, and that we would all die in a fraction of a second when the first shock wave hit Terra Firma, I would be running around yelling: “Hear ye, Hear ye, I’ve got a stock of vintage port, artisan cheese, and top-quality cigars that I don’t want to waste: Party at my house!”
I don’t think, Greg, that “Y2K 99.9% hype .1% reality” makes any sense in any way at all. Y2K was a multi-dimensional problem. On the technological axis, the problem was real. On the largely orthogonal anthropological axis, the problem was fraudulently over-hyped for the reasons I have alluded to above.
So I do agree, Kevin and Aware, that the biggest problem with most modern problems isn’t the problem per se, it’s the problem of people who are, in the name of personal gain, fraudulently misrepresenting the relative risks of the problem they are fraudulently over-hyping in the name of personal gain.
For example, I recently developed a thesis, here at SDA, which suggests that if Canada were to cut its total human-effected CO2 output by 40% as required by bill C-288, then we would have a net effect on the global green-house gas phenomenon of reducing it by about 34 millionths – it’s available here: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/005610.html#c141040
If I may put it in terms that have emerged in this discussion, even if one takes the normative high-end changes to the global atmospheric gas concentrations predicted by current climate-change models, contrary to what the fear-mongering fraud-artist scam-shysters are trying to sell you: the sky isn’t falling.
Caveat emptor; emptor culpa.
B. Hoax Aware posted:
“My old PC would shut down at the stroke of midnight. I took a chance. No probs. Did anyone have a 00 crash ??”
Heh. I have to confess that, come Jan 1, 2000, I turned on my business and personal) computers gingerly, wondering if the apocalypse had actually materialized. They worked fine. I had not hired any techies to rework them. Of course, I have no idea if the programs had performed an automatic download from whatever support site they access, and that, in fact, had resolved any potential problems.
But as I do recall, it was akin to waiting for the results of the lottery as the machines were booting up. Funny to think of it now…
OK – Computers are based on timing … everything runs on clock cycle(s). If we look at applications/transactions there are 2 basic types 1) timing doesn’t matter or 2) timing matters.
Usually, when computers are networked, timing matters. For most business stand-alone systems, timing also matters (a lot of large companies will tell you their #1 application is the payroll system … the dates matter).
For a simple thing, like this post, I type it out in notepad on my PC … timing doesn’t matter. When I post it on SDA timing does matter … postings are listed in the order they are received. Ordering by time helps the postings on any topic make sense.
If more money was spent in NA then the ROTW – so what. I think we had/have a lot more networked computers and, when the companies opened this can of worms they decided to make their systems more robust … they addressed more than just Y2K. Like what? … like business continuance … like disaster recovery.
If the other stuff wasn’t done, there would have been a lot more businesses that would have gone belly up because 9/11 – the WTC had a lot of computers in them.
As far as old computers being deployed … maybe … where are they getting parts? The maintenance costs of old computers exceed the cost of getting a new one after about 5 or 6 years … maybe less now.
BTW: I never made a dime on Y2K. We knew exactly what the problem was, exactly how to solve it, and exactly when we had to solve it by.
Vitruvius: ” … what would you do?”
What, no call to the UN?
In the late ’90s, I wasn’t responsible for mega-LOC of software, and it was already quite modern regarding things like fixed-length persistent storage layout, so it only took us about a week to audit our code base. We found and fixed two problems, neither of which would have been catastrophic, but they would have both been a very annoying P.I.T.A.
On December 31, 1999, and the following day, I and many others of my ilk manned our workstations and monitored the effects as they first started rolling in from the other side of the international date line. And as it happened, it turns out that, as has been discussed above, in the previous many years we had solved the vast majority of the problems. At 17:00 local time I was particularly alert, as that was the moment Greenwich Mean Time clicked over.
At 2000-01-01 00:00:03 GMT I refreshed the web browser window I had open at the U.S. Naval Observatory time standard site. A screen snapshot of what I saw is available here: sagaciousiconoclast.blogspot.com/2007/01/usno-y2k-time.html
Of course, this is a classic Perl year handling error; prepending “19” instead of adding 1900. Anyway, fortunately (and I have no doubt that due to changes made before then, or at least audited as correct), the USNO NTP (network time protocol) worked flawlessly, and all our servers synchronized with it correctly early in the morning on New Year’s Day.
After I audited the passage of that temporal synchronization point, I took a nap.
The company, a large commodity moving company, was and is virtually run by computers the quantity recieving and delivering, measuring and computing all done by the machines. There was a major worry about a year or year and a half.
I got the task to test the computer that was at the beginning of the chain, not terribly critical but important non the less.
It turned out that the computer would roll over as if nathing happened, so testing further, it turned out that it would give up on calender some time in 2072 in the middle of the year or so.
Needless to say, that computer will be in the museun by then.
OT: Does anyone know if there have been any beheadings yet on Little Mosque on the Prairie. I’m guessing they are saving it for sweeps week.
Ural’s note to the effect that “we knew exactly what the problem was, exactly how to solve it, and exactly when we had to solve it by” addresses the significant ways in which climate is different from time.
When it comes to our planet’s climate, we don’t know exactly what the problem is (if, indeed, there is a problem), we don’t know exactly how to solve it, and we don’t know when we have to solve it by.
It is the combination of these uncertainties, and the negative effects of some local whether phenomena, that particularly benefit the fear-mongering shysters attempting to fradulently scam the unsuspecting public.
And from the WayForward machine: the Fanatical Muslim Peril and the Godless Yellow Peril are in cahoots to destroy democracy and freedom! And outbreed us!
As a point of order, if you don’t terribly mind my pointing it out, Johny Canuck & Justzumgai, in light of Kate’s 2007-02-23.11:34 request that we “Please […] try to stay on topic,” might I ask you to, in the sense that and as far as your comments on Muslims are completely irrelevant to the topic of this thread, bugger off?
Precautionary Principle
“Three elements appear to be central to the Precautionary Principle. First, there must be some factual basis that raises a legitimate reason for concern; second, there is no certainty as to whether the concern will turn out to be justified—or whether the proposed remedy will be effective; and third, the remedy has a reasonably substantial economic or societal cost.”
“Some environmental commentators take a more stringent interpretation of the precautionary principle, stating that proponents of a potentially harmful technology must show the new technology is harmless before the new technology is used.(Montague, 1998)”
“The World Charter for Nature, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1982, was the first international endorsement of the precautionary principle. The principle was implemented in an international treaty as early as the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and among other international treaties and declarations [4] is reflected in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (signed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development).”
Guilty until proven innocent – you have to prove innocence … then labelled as a denier … nice circular thinking.
http://tinyurl.com/2llbvz
It is true that just about anyone that actually studied the issue in late 1999 knew two things: a) Airliners were not going to fall out of the sky at the stroke of midnight, and b)Most if not all potential difficulties had already been identified and dealt with.
But the lesson of hysterical extremism is that governments apparently lack the ability to learn this type of information. I worked for a company providing services to government agencies. In late 1999, some federal ministries started handing out large sums of cash to their private sector partners in order to prepare for Y2K worldwide chaos. We got thousands of dollars to buy electrical generators and flashlights etc. so we wouldn’t freeze in the dark when all the power generation in the country went off line.
It was embarrassing to see that kind of waste of taxpayer’s money “just in case” the doomsayers were right.
Imagine how the same politicians and bureaucrats will respond to the hysterical pronouncements of some global warming “experts”.
Got caught in the s**m filter – try 2.
Precautionary Principle
“Three elements appear to be central to the Precautionary Principle. First, there must be some factual basis that raises a legitimate reason for concern; second, there is no certainty as to whether the concern will turn out to be justified—or whether the proposed remedy will be effective; and third, the remedy has a reasonably substantial economic or societal cost.”
“Some environmental commentators take a more stringent interpretation of the precautionary principle, stating that proponents of a potentially harmful technology must show the new technology is harmless before the new technology is used.(Montague, 1998)”
“The World Charter for Nature, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1982, was the first international endorsement of the precautionary principle. The principle was implemented in an international treaty as early as the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and among other international treaties and declarations is reflected in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (signed at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development).”
Guilty until proven innocent – you have to prove innocence … then labelled as a denier … nice circular banishment.
tinyurl.com/2llbvz
The deep, undergirding, central problem we face is not the technology of the day, it’s the timeless human propensity to aggrandize in the name of illegitimate benefit. This is, at its heart, a moral issue.
It’s not business that is the principal culprit in this matter: if we honestly tell business what we actually want, business will do its utmost to provide it. The ultimate problem is people who accumulate power for the purpose of being in a position to dictate by edict and decree upon us what we want, not in our name but in theirs, by taking advantage of our good nature and honest concern. And the principal offenders in this case are the pseudo-utopian statists like Mr. Strong.
I think that one of the foundation principals we must ever apply in attempting to filter out the shysters, is, if I may riff off Ural’s last comment: Shouldn’t we apply the precautionary principle to the precautionary principle too?
my y2k preparation consisted of setting the date of my 486 to just prior to the stroke of 2000 and watching what happened. as I recollect the built in clock really boffoed the job.
I then set the date to some time *after* 01-01-2000 and checked the date stamps on some files. they were glitchy in the display (Win 3.1) but seemed to still be correct in the bits.
I then advanced the date by years to see what that limit was and concluded I would have a new y2k compliant system long before reaching that ultimate moment.
y2k was real, come on people, computers only do what theyre told and we didnt tell them how to handle the absence of the 2 upper digits of the date. realizing this, we fixed it in time.
didnt stop the hype and portable generator sales.
Hilarious take on enviro-hysteria and the newest doomsday scenario, asteroid-fear, from local Toronto humourist Bernie O’Neill:
http://flaggman.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/humourist-asteroid-fear-trumps-global-warming-hysteria/
Ahh!
The millenium bug…
http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxvi/11.13.98/exclusive/
I made no out of the ordinary preparations whatsoever for 2000. Midnight came and went, we went to bed, and the next morning my computer registered the year correctly. Life went on, as usual.
I guess I was suspicious of the fearmongers and trusted that those in charge of the problem would take care of it. They did.
The MSM are such scum, and hype and spin everything quite monstrously. E.g., The other day TVO’s (taxpayer funded TV Ontario) flagship public affairs show, The Agenda, pitted capitalism against environmentalism. My hackles rose immediately. Fortunately, one of the panelists led the discussion by deconstructing the erroneous, misleading, and sensationalist dichotomy. Then John Duffy–THAT John Duffy–ever so chummy with Steve Paikin, the moderator, was given plenty of opportunity to dissemble like mad.
First–and I agree with him here–he said that economic activity and growth are important: he should know, shouldn’t he? (Elizabeth May–what an arrogant, self-important pRig: she looks just like one: sorry!–pontificated that no economic growth should be our goal, but–no problem–we could all prosper anyway. Steve Paikin didn’t stop the show to demand that she explain this non-sequitur. I guess not: he seemed in awe of this larger than life “guru”.)
Duffy then dissed the Chicken Littles: so far, so good. But then, speaking out of both sides of his big mouth, he took a swipe at the Conservative government by stating that they’re the fear mongers because Kyoto can be implemented with none of the economic doom and gloom the Conservatives say will happen. Of course, Steve didn’t question him closely on this very dubious claim, which, unfairly, counted as both cheerleading for the Liberals and a frontal attack the Conservatives.
Fortunately, Andrew Coyne was there–outnumbered 4 to 1 on the panel–to point out the absurdity of the Liberal driven Bill C288, which requires the Conservatives to plan, in a mere 60 days, a viable response to comply with Kyoto, a feat the Liberals, who had signed the treaty, had failed to do in years as a majority government. Steve Paikin then moved briskly along, as did the other panelists.
I just hope that Canadians are beginning to distrust the MSM. If not, then we really are doomed.
OK, here’s a question:
Are the people, or their offspring, that wrote the programming that brought us the Y2K problem the same ones who wrote (or are writing) the climate modeling programs?
Inquiring minds need to know.
I certainly wouldn’t go on about Y2K. A literaly army of programmers were employed for about two years to make sure that problems did not arise. Lord knows how many computers were junked early for the same reason. Even so, I did read that some problems in handling bond maturity dates led to some very expensive lawsuits.
The public hype was excessive, for sure.
But the lessons of Y2K lend themselves to misinterpretation.
Stick AL GORE and the rest of the eco-wacko community in to the WAYBAC MACHINE AND HAVE SHERAMN SET IT FOR THE YEAR 1347 AND LET THEM SEE THE DEVISTAION OF THE BLACK DEATH