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Monday, February 12, 2007
Year 2000 bug redux
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I just talked to a smart techie friend - a professional - who is worried about the mess the Congress has gotten us in.
He’s not talking about Iraq or even Nancy Pelosi’s airplane. Instead, he was talking about an act of Congress that changed the date that daylight savings time starts. My buddy said getting the computers in his workplace ready for that is tying up a lot of the resources in his computer department.
All this reminds me of the Y2K bug - Year 2000 - that was supposed to bring the world to a halt. The idea was that some computers kept track of dates using two digits with the assumption that the first two digits of the date would be 19.
I spent the first minutes of 2000 on the air at WSB-AM here in town, waiting for disaster to strike. Some of the most fearful had said that telephones would stop working, utilities would go out of service - it was basically going to be the end of life as we know it.
What happened? Not much of anything. That’s because the computer world spent a lot of time and money - just as my techie friend’s department is doing - getting ready.
Generally the problems that we know about don’t kill you, it’s the ones that we don’t know about that are fatal. I think that’s how it’ll be this time. But I’m linking to a Washington Post story that will let you learn more about the problem so you can get up to speed if this is new to you.
I’ll also add a link to from Microsoft for home users
I wouldn’t go out and stock up on ammunition, beer and toilet paper because of this, but it doesn’t hurt to - uh - keep up with the time.
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