U.S. is "Just About OK for Y2K"

whostudios wrote to us with the current CNN headline news, stating that the White House has deemed that US will be OK for Y2k. Besides having silly rhyming involved in it, it's an interesting report. What do you folks think about all of the whole Y2k fears?

My thoughts?

The following are not what I'm afraid will come with Y2K. I'm not afraid that...

the power grid will come down. This has been rather thoroughly tested. What may (probably will) happen is that there will be local blackouts. Some could be serious, but I doubt that many people will be killed as a direct result of lack of heat.

the banks will lose everyone's money. Banks have had to look past December 31st, 1999 for a while. My credit card doesn't expire until September 2000, for instance. Again, there _will_ be localized problems, but I doubt that anyone will permanently lose a significant portion of their income.

nukes will accidently go off. This is actually the one I'm least sure about, as I think there is a tiny possiblity that Russian (possibly other country's) nukes will be launched due to some bad data. This is pretty small, though, and (on a rather foreboding note) I think that the US should be able to shoot down any stray nukes before they cause significant damage.

What am I afraid of? People. There are people right now that have enough guns, ammo, and other so-called "survival" equipment to outfit a third-world country. Many of these are not the most stable people to begin with. I'm afraid that when Y2K occurs and nothing significant happens, a few of them will decide to use their guns and ammo in what will already be a rather tense situation. The possiblity of riots due to the lack of Y2K problems should not be ignored. If you have friends that fit in this group, invite them to a party and make sure they pass out or something ;).

~=Keelor

The world is going to end!

Some things that will happen during Y2K:

1) Earthquakes. Lots of them.
2) Hurricanes. Lots of them.
3) Floods. Lots of them.
4) The Apocolypse's horsemen will ride the earth.
5) The Messiah will come, but it will turn out he has no power, and will perish with the rest of us.
6) The Antichrist will come.
7) The Supreme court will announce Microsoft innocent, and the apocolypse will come.
8) Every computer, everywhere (except those running Linux or some other flavor of UNIX) will crash.
9) After being announced not guilty, and after all the computers crash, Microsoft will reveal that in order to fix the problem, you must buy Windows2K which will arrive in about a year.
10) WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!

If anything else is going to happen, please notify me so I can stock up more food and buy more guns.

I tend to agree

Massive power grid failure seems unlikely; ditto for banks falling apart altogether as well as for the nukes.

There may be some problems in third world nations where they may have gotten some old System 34/36 systems shipped in, that will burn up on Jan 1st, but if they're just barely automated, stepping back to non-computerized methods isn't liable to be that much of a problem.

I am a bit less worried about the "people" problem.

• There have been fewer religious "millennial paranoia" movements than I expected (and I was anticipating there to be some. [hex.net]). Yes, there are crackpots. But they've been remarkably quiet.
• The serious crackpots are going to all load up with guns, and head to a deserted spot in Montana.

  Ed Yourdon says so :-). [yourdon.com]

  Supposing thousands of crazed lunatics head, heavily armed, to Montana next month. What's likely to happen? They're liable to accidentally shoot each other. This might make next year's Darwin Awards [darwinawards.com] as one of the dumbest things of 1999.

• I agree with Yourdon's assessment that New York City is liable to be a bad place to be on New Year's Eve; if you put vast numbers of partiers wanting to hold "the blowout of the millennium" in one spot, problems are a given.

A lot of opinions with little facts

The impression I most often get whenever I hear about the Y2K bugs that'll bring the end of the world is that whoever is talking has no idea what they're talking about (or, even worse, they have no idea what their sources are talking about).

Still, as a CS grad, I have a pretty good idea how it must feel trying to convince someone, and oneself, that a complete (to be defined) system will behave exactly as it should in less then 2 months. I mean, if I spend hours debugging code I write because it's behavior is erratic, I'm not sure I'd like to prove (to be defined) that someone else's code will not display a behavior I can't predict (this is probably a NP problem :-)) ...

Generally, I think the world will keep on spinning and most people will encounter, over the next few months (if not years), a few instances of the problem (be it a VCR not working or a credit card refused). But in no way will humanity crash. Worst case, there'll be a few extreme cases with serious consequences (say a plane crashing or my town lacking electricity in the middle of winter for two weeks, which some will remember living through a few years back) on which all the medias will be glued for 1~2 weeks before everybody agrees it was a sad and predictable thing; and then forgets about it.

I strongly doubt that statistically speaking the Y2K will have a major impact on the number of deaths in 2000 or cost more to any government then recent natural disasters (be it flood, hurricanes, earthquakes).

Remember that this year we've had a few hurricanes in north america and in Asia, major earthquakes in Turkey, Greece and Taiwan, incredible floods in south america and Asia, ... Good luck convincing me that the Y2K bug can cause more damage (financially, emotionnaly, etc. ) then any of these.

However, no matter my rambling, we'll only know for sure in a few months (say a year or two at max for all major repercussions to show up).

P.S. #1: This is of course only my opinion. There are probably some readers who actually made a living out of fixing such problems. I'd be very interested in reading their opinions.

P.S. #2: Of course, I won't be able to live with myself if Slashdot doesn't load up at midnight... :-)

Y2K -is- a problem - for Gnu Software and others.

I think that the GNU Y2K readiness list [gnu.org] is a bit disturbing. CVS-1.8 and 1.9 are not ready, and no newer version is listed as having been tested. Groff is not ready... ouch...


I also fully expect that there will be major and expensive breakdowns of computer systems. There is far too much stupid code out there being relied on. I had the same reflex as nearly every programmer... 'Ahh, it won't matter except for silly things like sorting your checkbook by date.' I still don't really know -why- it matters, but when people have done readiness-testing (setting the date to Dec. 31, 1999 and watching it rollover) computer equipment has done things like stop a power plant from working. Why? Probably some linkage between database functions and power functions. Or a failure in a cron-like system. Who knows.


As programmers we think it's 'obvious' that it isn't 'really' a problem. But it is a problem. It's just like when it's 'obvious' that it can't be -your- code that introduced the bug... until you step through it with a debugger and realize that it is. You can argue until you're blue in the face about why it shouldn't be a problem, but the empirical evidence disagrees.


Well, Lawyers, Liars and Perl [perl.com] gives a better explanation of why there are Y2K issues even in modern code better than I can do.

--Parity

See that big fire? Yeah thats where I live.

The people problem won't be armed survivalists, heck they're probably gonna have a great time getting drunk, shooting guns in the air, and using the 'lets do it on midnight' pick up line, in safety in the woods.

They're just people. Now take the same behavior and put that in the big city and you got a GREAT excuse to riot. Your enemy isn't some tang drinking freak but your local high school/college kids, drunken asses, trash of all ethnicity, and your usual spineles suburbanites who will join in anything dangerous if everyone else is. Think Woodstock 2000.

"We're gonna party like its 19-99!"

"I'm gonna be trying to turn my car right side up like its Jan 1, 2000'"