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  10567 
"Peter J. Acklam" wrote: "Thomas G. Marshall" wrote:
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.
I'm not against off-topic posts because of a charter, but because
it lowers the signal to noise ratio of a newsgroup. I want to
read about UNIX. If I wanted to read about hydrogen power vs
petrol, I would subscribe to the appropriate newsgroups.
Then why do you crosspost to four additional groups, including
c.l.c? The fact that the originator was too sloppy to set
followups to one group is no excuse. You are signalling your
willingness by partaking in the wide OT crossposting.
--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
"q@q.com" wrote: CBFalconer wrote:
.... snip ...
I didn't say it did. The point was that dispersal is no answer
to fission products, which depend on physics, not reactor
containment, moderators, etc.
Reprocessing "spent" fuel rods will eliminate that problem.
Nonsense. You have obviously never had any contact with that. It
is an euphemism for extracting plutonium, possibly including
weapons grade. The foulest fission products remain. Think
Humpty-Dumpty.
Anyway the real future in nuclear technology is fusion.
*Some* possible fusion reactions. Free neutrons flying about have
a tendency to be captured and create unwanted non-stable
isotopes. AFAICS the US has abandoned further research in this
direction, and in most nuclear scientific advances. The crowning
evidence is the fate of the super-collider.
--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
[Followups restricted to comp.programmin g, where this is at least
marginally on-topic.]
In article <oc************ *****@nwrdny03. gnilink.net>, "Thomas G. Marshall" <tg************ ****@replacetex twithnumber.hot mail.com> writes: Michael Wojcik <mw*****@newsgu y.com> coughed up the following:
A great deal of effort went into fixing real bugs in real code before
the rollover. It was a problem and it was handled. Those who claim
there was no problem are just as misinformed as those who hyped it
beforehand.
It was truly amazing that as little failed as it did. You can test each
of the following, fix it for y2k, and verify it independently:
nuclear sub software
NYSE software
FAA control tower software
McDonald's french fry calibration software
I wouldn't worry too much about McDonald's french-fry cookers.
I'm not a Y2K doomsayer. I'm agnostic on the question of whether
there would have been a real "crisis" had no remediation at all been
performed; I just don't know of enough actual Y2K problems to guess
whether there would have been significant infrastructure problems,
much less loss of life. (I did not personally see any Y2K bugs in
production code that seemed likely to cause loss of life. I have
heard of one, from a source that ought to be reliable; it would have
only affected a few people, though of course for them it would have
been more thant severe enough.)
My suspicion is that even without remediation, civilization would not
have crumbled. However, numerous entities would have suffered
disruption of their normal activities and financial damage, in some
cases severe.
What annoys me are all the people who claim that there was no problem
and nothing needed to be fixed. That is simply not true. I fixed a
Y2K bug in a piece of software that would have processed transactions
out of order if they were queued across rollover, for example.
--
Michael Wojcik mi************@ microfocus.com
We are subdued to what we work in. (E M Forster)
And somewhere around the time of 05/27/2004 10:03, the world stopped and
listened as Joona I Palaste contributed the following to humanity: Bob Day <xx*****@yyyyyy y.com> scribbled the following
on comp.lang.c:
"Generic Usenet Account" <us****@sta.sam sung.com> wrote in message
news:90****** *************** ****@posting.go ogle.com...
< snip >
Although the Y2K scare turned out to be vastly overblown,
< snip >
Idiot!! It wasn't "vastly overblown" at all. The fact is,
we did a damn good job fixing it.
Oh yeah? How about all those stories about everything from your coffee
maker to your car engine's sparkplugs stopping working on the exact
second the year 1999 changes into the year 2000? If that's not "vastly
overblown", what is? Dogs turning into cats and vice versa?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The computer in your car doesn't care what the date it. If it did, then
every time you disconnected the battery, you would have to set it. The
same thing goes to a whole slew of embedded controllers, which is what
most of the hype was about. The threat was business systems like
inventory, order processing, database, spreadsheet, operating systems, etc.
--
Daniel Rudy
Remove nospam, invalid, and 0123456789 to reply.
Daniel Rudy <dc****@invalid .pacbell.nospam .net.0123456789 > scribbled the following: And somewhere around the time of 05/27/2004 10:03, the world stopped and
listened as Joona I Palaste contributed the following to humanity: Bob Day <xx*****@yyyyyy y.com> scribbled the following
on comp.lang.c:"Generic Usenet Account" <us****@sta.sam sung.com> wrote in message
news:90***** *************** *****@posting.g oogle.com...
< snip >
Although the Y2K scare turned out to be vastly overblown,
< snip >Idiot!! It wasn't "vastly overblown" at all. The fact is,
we did a damn good job fixing it.
Oh yeah? How about all those stories about everything from your coffee
maker to your car engine's sparkplugs stopping working on the exact
second the year 1999 changes into the year 2000? If that's not "vastly
overblown", what is? Dogs turning into cats and vice versa?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The computer in your car doesn't care what the date it. If it did, then
every time you disconnected the battery, you would have to set it. The
same thing goes to a whole slew of embedded controllers, which is what
most of the hype was about. The threat was business systems like
inventory, order processing, database, spreadsheet, operating systems, etc.
Would you believe I already knew that? I wasn't saying *I* thought
coffee makers and sparkplugs would stop working. I was saying there
were stories about people thinking so.
--
/-- Joona Palaste (pa*****@cc.hel sinki.fi) ------------- Finland --------\
\-- http://www.helsinki.fi/~palaste --------------------- rules! --------/
"You could take his life and..."
- Mirja Tolsa
In article <40************ **@q.com>, q@q.com says...
Anyway the real future in nuclear technology is fusion.
Yes - as they say, it's always twenty-five years in the future!
- Gerry Quinn
In article <2h************ @uni-berlin.de>, Je***********@p hysik.fu-
berlin.de says... In comp.programmin g Gerry Quinn <ge****@deletet hisindigo.ie> wrote: 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.
Problem is that you can't properly dilute it down to a level similar
to the concentration in nature. Even if you could bring all the stiff
into a soluble form and a make a very fine powder out of it and then
drop it in the sea it would still take a long long time until it's
dispersed down to an acceptable level. While mixing comes free, thanks
to the second law of thermodynamics, it takes quite some time. But if
you have to speed it up you need lots of extra energy. If that would
be different please explain why e.g. in the Irish sea due to the
Sellafield/Windscale plant (or whatever they call the thing nowadays)
the concentrations are still that high.
"That" high? They are higher than elsewhere, it's true, and newspaper
reports have more than once screamed that the technetium content is far
greater than the natural levels - but it would be, wouldn't it, since
technetium is not found in significant quantities in nature. Note how frequently you see a casually implied estimate of the threat
from nuclear materials in terms of the mass of material multiplied by
the halflife.
And people complain about quite insignificant amounts of radionucleides
in seawater.
What's "insignific ant" is depends a lot on whom you ask. And it meant
something quite different in the fifties compared to what it means
now, even to the stout supporters of the use of nuclear power. It's
simply that nobody knows what levels are "insignific ant" since no-one
really understands all the mechanisms by which added amounts of radio-
active materials can influence living organisms. Some people (and not
from the crackpot fringe) even claim that small amounts are healthy -
having such a range of opinions shows quite nicely that nobody really
knows).
I also think this is plausible. Just as a few bugs are needed to keep
our immune systems active and indeed prevent them from turning on us, it
seems plausible that a bit of radiation will help keep our DNA repair
mechanisms in tip-top shape.
But anyway, the disagreement also shows that the effects of moderate
amounts of radiation are far from devastating, or we *would* know!
What would happen the world if we detonated 500 nuclear weapons in the
atmosphere with an average yield of about 1 megaton? Nothing much,
apparently, because we have done...
- Gerry Quinn
On Sun, 30 May 2004 07:38:33 +0000 (UTC), in comp.lang.c , jpd
<re**********@d o.not.spam.it> wrote:
(about the burning of hydrongen in air) You can pretty much emulate what happens when you fill a plastic bag
with, say, natural gas and hold a flame to it.
No you can't, and for goodness sake don't try this at home. Hydrogen
diffuses into the surrounding air VERY quickly, and burns almost
immediately. Did you never set fire to a test-tube of the stuff in school?
The plastic burns first,
then the gas, which slowly forms a nice ball of fire as it gets out of
the bag (or the bag burns away).
But natural gas has a higher density than air, and diffuses quite slowly.
--
Mark McIntyre
CLC FAQ <http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html>
CLC readme: <http://www.angelfire.c om/ms3/bchambless0/welcome_to_clc. html>
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On Sun, 30 May 2004 10:15:07 +0100, in comp.lang.c , Gerry Quinn
<ge****@DELETET HISindigo.ie> wrote: In article <t2************ *************** *****@4ax.com>,
ma**********@s pamcop.net says... >I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
>natural gas?
Think "Hindenberg "
If you pour a gallon of petrol on the floor, you can tap dance in it. If
you pour a gallon of natural gas on the floor, it dribbles out through the
drains in gaseous state. Trust me, I've done both. Heck I've even done it
with a gallon of iso-propanol (they're all handy coolants. The trick with
the last was to open the lab windows before I fell over dead drunk, and
then died of asphyxiation).
If you pour a gallon of H on the floor, you can kiss your ass goodbye as it
passes your head on its way to kingdom come. There /is/ a reason that the
LH test rig at RAL was about a mile from the rest of the lab, behind 20ft
thick earth banks, and inside a concrete bunker with one disposable wall.
Does liquid hydrogen ignite spontaneously in air? I wouldn't have
thought so.
You're right, but it does ignite awfully easily.
While I'm sure it evaporates faster than liquid nitrogen,
MUCH.
the cooling effect of a couple of inches of boiling hydrogen would
hardly be sufficient to stop you walking out. Not if you have shoes on
anyway!
If you've shoes, better hope there's no segs in them...
--
Mark McIntyre
CLC FAQ <http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html>
CLC readme: <http://www.angelfire.c om/ms3/bchambless0/welcome_to_clc. html>
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Gerry Quinn wrote: In article <t2************ *************** *****@4ax.com>,
ma**********@sp amcop.net says...
I'm sorry, but what are the reason Hydrogen is less safe than petrol or
natural gas?
Think "Hindenberg "
If you pour a gallon of petrol on the floor, you can tap dance in it. If
you pour a gallon of natural gas on the floor, it dribbles out through the
drains in gaseous state. Trust me, I've done both. Heck I've even done it
with a gallon of iso-propanol (they're all handy coolants. The trick with
the last was to open the lab windows before I fell over dead drunk, and
then died of asphyxiation).
If you pour a gallon of H on the floor, you can kiss your ass goodbye as it
passes your head on its way to kingdom come. There /is/ a reason that the
LH test rig at RAL was about a mile from the rest of the lab, behind 20ft
thick earth banks, and inside a concrete bunker with one disposable wall.
Does liquid hydrogen ignite spontaneously in air? I wouldn't have
thought so. While I'm sure it evaporates faster than liquid nitrogen,
the cooling effect of a couple of inches of boiling hydrogen would
hardly be sufficient to stop you walking out. Not if you have shoes on
anyway! Of course there might be an alarming amount of fog...
The Hindenberg, in any case, was full of gaseous hydrogen, probably
safer than liquid, but anyway different. AFAIK, more than half of the
passengers survived, largely because a hydrogen fireball produces a
relatively small proportion of radiant heat.
- Gerry Quinn This thread has been closed and replies have been disabled. Please start a new discussion. |
