As per Google's Usenet archives
[ http://groups.google.com/googlegroup...ounce_20.html], the
first discussion of the Y2K problem on the Usenet was on January 18
1985 [ http://groups.google.com/groups?thre...0%40reed.UUCP]. That
is a good 15 years before the problem manifested. Even then, it
turned out, we were scrambling for cover when the D-day was
approaching.
Although the Y2K scare turned out to be vastly overblown, we do have a
massive problem ahead of us ------ the Year 2038 problem. On Mon Jan
18 21:14:07 2038, the Unix seconds-since-epoch count will "roll-over".
After that, the time on the Unix systems will read as Fri Dec 13
14:45:52 1901.
IMHO, if we want to avoid the last minute panic that we witnessed
towards the end of the last millennium (while pursuing the Y2K
problem), we should begin the process of debating the viable solutions
to this problem NOW. It will take a long time for the consensus to be
built, and to come up with a solution that most (if not all) people
find acceptable. We also need considerable time to test out all
possible solutions in the real world, to decide if the solutions
really work as expected. We may also need to develop a suite of
recovery strategies should the problem manifest in some system on that
fateful Monday morning. All this takes time. So, as the late Todd
Beamer would have said: Let's roll.
Bhat
Nov 14 '05
248  10550 
In article <dk************ ********@bgtnsc 04-news.ops.worldn et.att.net> hu*****@NOSPAM. att.net writes: Dik T. Winter wrote: In article <ch************ *************** ******@slb-newsm1.svr.pol. co.uk> Christian Bau <ch***********@ cbau.freeserve. co.uk> writes: > There is one company that proudly produces a very VERY expensive
> non-Y2100 compatible watch. It is a mechanical watch, and displays year,
> month, day and weekday correctly until March 1st 2100. At that time,
> some part has to be replaced, but the replacement is already included in
> the price when you buy it today.
What will it do in 2800 (or 2700, i disremember), when the Greek Orthodox
church and the Gregorian calendar will disagree?
The two calendars disagree right now. As far as I know, there
are branches of the Orthodox Church which never recognized
Pope Gregory's adjustments.
But there are also branches that recognised the adjustments, but diverge
in the year I mentioned.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/
In article <10************ ***@ente.ipberl in.com> jpd <re**********@d o.not.spam.it> writes: On 2004-05-29, Mabden <ma****@sbcglob al.net> wrote: I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
Apart from the nasty tendency of those awfully small molecules to
slip through almost everything else (the main effort in creating
storage solutions for it is in storing it in a form where it's bound to
something else), it's mostly fear factor I guess.
Yup. In one recent news report on a fire in a hydrogen tank somewhere in
the Netherlands, the conclusion was that there was no safety hazard as no
toxic chemical stuff did emerge.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/
"Mabden" <ma****@sbcglob al.net> wrote: I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than
petrol or natural gas?
I'm sorry, but what has this got to do in *any* of these
newsgroups.
Peter
--
Peter J. Acklam - pj******@online .no - http://home.online.no/~pjacklam
Dik T. Winter wrote: In article <dk************ ********@bgtnsc 04-news.ops.worldn et.att.net> hu*****@NOSPAM. att.net writes: > Dik T. Winter wrote: > > In article <ch************ *************** ******@slb-newsm1.svr.pol. co.uk> Christian Bau <ch***********@ cbau.freeserve. co.uk> writes:
> > > There is one company that proudly produces a very VERY expensive
> > > non-Y2100 compatible watch. It is a mechanical watch, and displays year,
> > > month, day and weekday correctly until March 1st 2100. At that time,
> > > some part has to be replaced, but the replacement is already included in
> > > the price when you buy it today.
> >
> > What will it do in 2800 (or 2700, i disremember), when the Greek Orthodox
> > church and the Gregorian calendar will disagree?
>
> The two calendars disagree right now. As far as I know, there
> are branches of the Orthodox Church which never recognized
> Pope Gregory's adjustments.
But there are also branches that recognised the adjustments, but diverge
in the year I mentioned.
The probability approaches 0.99999999 ... ad infinitum
that both you and I will be dead by that time and
it will be up to our descendants to handle that problem :)
--
"It is impossible to make anything foolproof
because fools are so ingenious"
- A. Bloch
Gerry Quinn wrote: Je***********@p hysik.fu-berlin.de says... Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?
The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrated form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmentalis ts would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.
Chernobyl did an admirable job of dispersing radioactive waste
over a fairly wide area. Places such as Love Canal demonstrate
the efficacy of burying and forgetting wastes in general. 20 or
30 years after the banning of leaded gasoline, many highways
border vegetation show the benefits of lead dispersion.
I think we must belong to the genus Homo Non Sapiens.
--
Chuck F (cb********@yah oo.com) (cb********@wor ldnet.att.net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home .att.net> USE worldnet address!
Peter J. Acklam <pj******@onlin e.no> coughed up the following: "Mabden" <ma****@sbcglob al.net> wrote:
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than
petrol or natural gas?
I'm sorry, but what has this got to do in *any* of these
newsgroups.
Peter
--
Peter J. Acklam - pj******@online .no - http://home.online.no/~pjacklam
I no longer worry about OT posts in ng's. I've discovered that often a
subject is raised because of the /audience/ known to exist in the ng,
not its particular subject.
That is supposedly against the charter of the big 8. So be it.
--
While using is ok, actually /writing/ free software is a disingenuous
activity. You can afford to write software for free only because of
someone else somewhere actually paying for it. Just say no.
Gerry Quinn <ge****@DELETET HISindigo.ie> coughed up the following: In article <3D************ *****@nwrdny03. gnilink.net>,
tg************* ***@replacetext wi....hotm ail.com says... jpd <re**********@d o.not.spam.it> coughed up the following:
Anyway. Whatever we do, we'll pay for it sooner or later. If
sufficiently late we'll just be cursed by our ancestors. Which would
you prefer?
I'm thinking they're gonna hate us for one thing for another. If not
for environmental reasons then perhaps social. Heck, we might as
well give'm something to cry about. Let's go melt them polar caps
good.
"Those bastards in the twenty-first century could have prevented the
ice age, but they insisted on reducing CO2 emissions..."
In my life, the spirit of your point here has been echoed by me in a
very many circumstances and subject matters.
--
While using is ok, actually /writing/ free software is a disingenuous
activity. You can afford to write software for free only because of
someone else somewhere actually paying for it. Just say no.
>>>>> "AB" == Alan Balmer <al******@att.n et> writes:
AB> The only reason it didn't happen was because we fixed it.
I was actually tasked with fixing one of these "y2k Bugs".
I had to rewrite a CGI script for the Air Force. The old one only
cared about the last 2 digits of the year I had to modify the
script to accept all 4 digits. (Presumably the air force can't infer
that a birthday marked 82 means 1982 and not 2082 (or 1882) and
has to be explicitly told.) Of course this broke the badly
designed reporting format that the marketing company used and that
had to be redone too.
Quite a bit of work so it could be labeled Y2K compliant and make
DoD happy when the original script was quite sufficient.
--
Dale Henderson
"Imaginary universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly-
constructed 'real' one..." -- G. H. Hardy
The United States does NOT use reactor designs like the one
at Chernobyl. Also, Chernobyl did NOT have a containment
building.
Helsinki (AFP) May 24, 2002
Finland's parliament on Friday approved construction of a fifth nuclear
reactor, the first such plant to be authorized in Western Europe or
North America since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
CBFalconer wrote: Gerry Quinn wrote:
Je*********** @physik.fu-berlin.de says...
Then do an assay of the amount of natural radionucleides that are hidden
'under the rug'. I've heard there's stuff called uranium with a half-
life of 4000 million years, just hidden in rocks in unmarked locations
all over the planet. If you have a granite fireplace, there's even some
in your house, oozing radioactive radon gas into the air you breathe.
Well, if I am not completely mistaken, there's quite a bit of a
difference in the _concentration_ the stuff has been hidden 'under
the rug' by nature (plus stuff like plutonium doesn't seem to be very
common there) and the one the waste products are going to be stashed
away in. Or did they come upt with a way to distribute that stuff
evenly over a volume of a small mountain range and nobody told me?
The irony is that that (dispersion) is precisely the sort of thing that
people object to! The result is that radioactive waste is held in
concentrate d form and everyone is afraid of it. If it were diluted, the
environmental ists would protest that where there were once a thousand
tons of nuclear waste, there are now a million.
Chernobyl did an admirable job of dispersing radioactive waste
over a fairly wide area. Places such as Love Canal demonstrate
the efficacy of burying and forgetting wastes in general. 20 or
30 years after the banning of leaded gasoline, many highways
border vegetation show the benefits of lead dispersion.
I think we must belong to the genus Homo Non Sapiens.
On Fri, 28 May 2004 05:53:43 +0000, Keith Thompson wrote: "Stephen Sprunk" <st*****@sprunk .org> writes: "Gordon Burditt" <go***********@ burditt.org> wrote in message
news:c9******** @library2.airne ws.net... > My personal preference would be for a 256-bit number of picoseconds since
> the creation of the universe. It gives better precision than 1 second.
> It won't run out during the life of this universe. The only trouble is,
> we don't know accurately when that was.
You assume a "when" exists; relativity says that's impossible.
Relativity aside, there's nothing preventing time_t from being a
floating-point number whose zero is at a particular epoch. Epsilon of the
chosen type determines the precision of your clock.
With a floating-point type, the precision of your clock is also
determined by how far you are from the epoch. I'd rather have a
consistent precision over the entire representable range than be able
to measure picoseconds close to the epoch, but have the precision drop
by a factor of two every now and then.
Of course, more advanced beings would presumably have learned to cope with
that phenomenon, and have learned to focus on the more important concepts
in the Universe, such as universal mortality and alienation.
Singing:
"Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
If so, I can't imagine why.
We've all got time enough to die."
-- Chicago
Sorry. ;-)
--
yvoregnevna gjragl-guerr gjb-gubhfnaq guerr ng lnubb qbg pbz
To email me, rot13 and convert spelled-out numbers to numeric form.
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