OT Mad old woman syndrome and bird flu

[The Natural Philosopher]

Actually it wasn't like that at all.

Essentially the millennium bug never existed.

Ok maybe some old Cobol or BASIC Fortran software...written in 1960's...

Just about everything else either didn't use the time at all, or used e.g. the 64 bit seconds from Jan 1 1970 format. I.e. all Unix and most PC time systems.

Now however, as a purveyor or equipment we found ourselves having to GUARANTEE to stupid suppliers that e.g. a network card was millennium compliant.

Like WMD it never existed except as a useful thing to put in peoples minds..it was concocted by a bunch of software consultants, who made a fortune out of it: Largely to everyone else it was a complete pain in the ass.

How can you *prove* that something that is not there is not there?

Like WMD, not finding it merely meant you hadn't looked hard enough..

Its one of the many many reasons I left the IT industry. Having to disprove undisprovable assertions made by snake oil salesmen.

Lately I have sen this logic become a global political technique.

- You can't prove WMD aren't in Iraq, so we will invade Iraq

- You can't prove God doesn't exist, so we want creationism taught as valid science.

However in the case of global warming and global epidemics, they really ARE there..its just perfect conditions for diseases to spread rapidly through human populations.

It may not be Ebola, green monkey fever, or SARS or bird flu, but SOMETHING will come along and waste us.

AIDS nearly *did*. It's smashing Africa as it is.. Its very dangerous to compare 'things that didn't happen' in a casual and uninformed way, and conclude that none of them ever WILL happen..or nothing like them ever will.

The millenium bug never bothered me. I knew almost from the word go there were no WMD in Iraq.

I do know that the chances of an epidemic of global proportions wrecking even more havoc than AIDS is about 50/50 in the next 20 years.

I do know that some adverse effects of climate change are seriously going to affect everyone in the next ten - you CAN argue that high petrol prices re Katrina are linked to overall higher sea temperatures...well its forecast to be another bumper hurricane season this year, as well.

[Gordon Henderson]

Millions of lines of old cobol more like ... and theres still the occsional old web site that has the date wrong.

It's 32-bit, and it runs out in 2038. We recently hit the half-way mark where it might be interpreted as going from positive to negative if you'd not treated it as unsigned...

You need to read comp.risks. Every year when the clocks go forwards or back theres a whole slew of problems worldwide, and it's not getting any better.

However, this is way off-topic....

Gordon (A boring old geek who also keeps chickens - see

:-)

[Mary Fisher]

I thought that's what John was saying!

And still do.

We didn't buy new equipment.

...

KNEW?

As you said, "You can't prove WMD aren't in Iraq". So you might believe that there aren't (as I do and did) but you can't know.

Mary

>

[Mary Fisher]

But that isn't!

According to some, that is.

Edith looks a bit like Zen - a barred Wyandotte bantam.

Mary

[Geo]

"Our" birds don't have much to fear from the unsubtle approach of a neighbour's cat:-

- in case of wrap:- morning pic so grainy)

Geo

[The Natural Philosopher]

Very educated guess Mary.

Like I *know* you aren't a man.

[Weatherlawyer]

the cupressus where they rosst near me. I think it's an hawk.

I flack the cats with a catapault and marbles. Not that I want to hit one just scare the f*ck out of the bascats.

[Andy Hall]

Herpes stopped happening as soon as AIDS appeared as well.

[Mary Fisher]

Oh no it didn't! I had a cold sore the other week.

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

Nor do ours, there aren't enough cats to patrol all the feeding stations and the hens chase them off anyway.

Most cats are wimps, compared with hens. Perhaps they've been listening to the news and are frit of avian influenza.

Mary

[Capitol]

Time to stop kissing strange people then ?

Regards Capitol

[DJC]

Not even that. Even if the software was written in the 60s it would have been revised several times in the course of hardware changes. Not to mention all the minor (and major) revisions over the years. There never was a need for treating the 'millenium bug' any differently from all the other regular patches and enhancements that all software requires throughout its lifetime.

[Bob Eager]

Herpes simplex (cold sore) and herpes zoster (shingles) are 'alive' and well.

[Bob Eager]

Except that all the problems manifested themselves on the same day. OK if you have enough resources. And there *were* problems.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not in anything we dealt with...

For sure, we wen;t in the business of maintaining ROG scripts dating back before the ark.

But those were very few and far between.

This scare extended to every single computer. It was garbage 'the whole Internet MAY cone down around your ears' 'Airliners MAY crash'. CRAP.

[Andy Hall]

I was being facetious. As far as the media is concerned, it disappeared.

[Andy Dingley]

Hawks hunt ground-dwelling animals. If it's taking prey on the wing, it's a falcon (or relative).

[Bob Eager]

Ah. See what you mean. Yes!

[Bob Eager]

There are many documented problems, if you take a look at the highly respected comp.risks archives. And the reason there weren't more is because people did take it seriously.

Oh, I agree about that. Having to certify every last component was very silly.

But there's nothing new about date problems. Kernighan and Ritchie never foresaw the UNIX date problem referred to. And I remember dealing with an operating system that held the date in a 12 bit field - based on

1970. Worse, it held the day as (year-1970)*1000 plus day in year, and broke in April 1974!

[The Natural Philosopher]

And was probably FIXED in April 1974.

Cripes even when we were coding in BASIC it was IF YEAR < 70 THEN YEAR=YEAR+2000 ELSE YEAR=YEAR+1900