Remember the Y2K debacle?

PAllen

I would say yes. That is the way I experienced it in the industry - the hype did help motivate efforts to prevent it.

nsaspook

Yes, this is a sad example of what happened when the bug wasn't fixed properly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/se...rtinwainwright

jedishrfu

Another related crisis was the GPS rollover in 1999 due to the way satellite keep track of time in weeks and secs in a week.

The fear was that GPS would fail and planes would crash...

Here some details on how programmers would get tricked by the complexity:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2869

Containment

I hear that in 2015 Hollywood finally completely runs out of ideas so possibly that will be the next end of the world scam.

turbo

Might be true...

Pythagorean

On Y2K, I was visiting my mother in the Lower 48, but I had gone to a friends nearby in the state. The friend was staying in a kind of half house (never asked why, when we were younger his mom and dad were always drunk, so he had a rough childhood). But it was this program where couples could take in troubled youth. This was a Christian couple and I remember playing/singing a song on the guitar for them (Nights in White Satin). They were strangely emotional about it (apparently it was one of their shared songs).

When we went out to light fireworks for the turn of the century, they stayed inside with the lights low. When we came back, they seemed forlorn, and not near as interactive as they had been. My friend kind of guided me back outside and I asked "What was up with them" (I hadn't even thought about Y2K). He replied (in a disparaging tone) that they were depressed because God hadn't come down on a chariot and taken them away and ended the sinful world.

ImaLooser

Don't you hate it when that happens? And people think this prophecy thing is so easy. Why can't I have an apocalypse once, just once? Is that really too much to ask?

ImaLooser

Self-defeating? How about self-aborting prophecy?

BobG

Only the planes with the autoland feature. But plane's navigation systems certainly could have gotten completely lost, forcing pilots to revert to the standard triangulating their position from radio signals from known locations. But, people with old enough GPS receivers certainly did have to replace them or run into problems.

That leap second is a lot worse problem. Inserting an extra second, manually, whenever the IERS determines it's necessary (i.e. - no regular pattern), is a nightmare problem for programs that actually need that date/time to be correct - especially if the program is being installed into a device that will sit in some remote location with no human interaction for years.

jim mcnamara

Yes. In the sense that code/metadata used 2-digit years. We worked extensively on the problem, also.

We had 30 utility companies to support - 80% of rural New Mexico, parts of Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, etc.

I was not claiming Y2K was some sort of weirdo prophesy, but rather how people got wrapped around the axle on it. That lady who bought a generator was a programmer.
And should have known better.

The "prophesy" part of it was that all of our data infrastructure would cease to function.
Life as we know it would fall apart. Electric generation would stop, gas would no longer flow from wellheads. Literally. The list of this kind of baloney was long and completely wrong.

Everybody in the software industry was on it. We started in 1998. We found two bugs, in payroll. Nothing in scada or any other control system that could affect resource regulation. The assertions of problems were off by orders of magnitude. So are the current assertions of disaster.

It seems to be an affliction, especially in the US,

However it is not yet 11:11am MST. (per Evo) :)

jim mcnamara

Looks like the disaster-mongers are still winning hearts and minds:

http://www.khou.com/news/Apocalypse-...184282561.html

I guess this town is immune - SIRINCE, Turkey, is said to be where Mary, mother of Jesus, ascended to heaven.