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  10556 
"Mabden" <ma****@sbcglob al.net> writes: "John Smith" <JS****@mail.co m> wrote in message
news:40******** ******@mail.com ... Mabden wrote:
OK, Topic Nazi!
Godwin's Law invoked. Thread terminated.
Ah, at last someone gets it!
It hard to be a Troll in the City these days!
It's not about whether we get it or not. We just don't care.
You are a deliberate, self-admitted troll. It's not cute, it's not
funny, it's just irritating. You've had your fun; please go away now.
We're trying to have serious discussions here.
Incidentally, you're violating sbcglobal.net's terms of service.
--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keit h) ks***@mib.org <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center <*> <http://users.sdsc.edu/~kst>
We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.
"Robert W. McAdams" wrote:
.... snip ...
Technologies already exist for isolating nuclear wastes from the
biosphere for that period of time. (In fact, the best of these
technologies utilizes a layered approach, in which a number of
isolation techniques are used together, each of which, by itself,
is capable of isolating the waste from the biosphere for
substantially more than 10,000 years.)
All of which is experimentally verified, of course. I am
gratified to know that my public spirited ancestors of 8000 BC
prepared those test beds for you. </sarcasm>
--
"I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office
in foreign policy matters with war on my mind." - Bush.
"Churchill and Bush can both be considered wartime leaders, just
as Secretariat and Mr Ed were both horses." - James Rhodes.
"Thomas G. Marshall" wrote: Lew Pitcher <Le*********@td .com> coughed up the following: Nonymous wrote:
>>> I assume that $20 is after inflation, which means it'll be on
>>> par (in constant dollars) with what we pay for petrol or
>>> ethanol today. Hardly a problem, though I'd expect us all to
>>> be running on hydrogen by then; ethanol is a transition fuel.
>>
>> And where does the power to extract that hydrogen come from?
>
> Nuclear power plants.
Now you are really trying to pull my chain. Better known as a
silly way to boil water.
'boil water'? How does one get hydrogen from vaporized water?
1) A nuclear power plant uses atomic decay to heat water to steam.
2) The steam goes into a steam turbine to generate electricity.
3) The electricity is used to electrolize water into hydrogen and
oxygen
4) The oxygen is discarded, leaving hydrogen to power those
hydrogen engines.
The pure O and O2 are fed into an O2 combustion engine to generate
even more....
The word you are looking for is 'less'. The laws of
thermodynamics and of conservation of energy rear their heads,
thus making perpetual motion machines somewhat impracticable.
--
"I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office
in foreign policy matters with war on my mind." - Bush.
"Churchill and Bush can both be considered wartime leaders, just
as Secretariat and Mr Ed were both horses." - James Rhodes.
On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 05:31:33 -0600, August Derleth <se*@sig.now> wrote: On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 11:18:37 +0000, Richard Bos wrote:
Leor Zolman <le**@bdsoft.co m> wrote:
On Thu, 27 May 2004 11:41:50 -0700, Alan Balmer <al******@att.n et> wrote:
>I suppose the world would have appreciated it more if we'd let
>everything go to hell and then became heroes by fixing it afterward.
I suspect just the opposite. In the ensuing uproar over renegade,
unprincipled, greedy software developers, government would just enact the
Federal Software Quality Commission to oversee and regulate the software
industry into submission.
Ah, yes. And all the world is the USA, of course. Snigger.
Ok, then: Regulate the US economy into submission.
I think our economy already /is/ in submission; they'll have to regulate us
into something else, then.
-leor
Better? ;-)
--
Leor Zolman --- BD Software --- www.bdsoft.com
On-Site Training in C/C++, Java, Perl and Unix
C++ users: download BD Software's free STL Error Message Decryptor at: www.bdsoft.com/tools/stlfilt.html
"Keith Thompson" <ks***@mib.or g> wrote in message
news:ln******** ****@nuthaus.mi b.org... We're trying to have serious discussions here.
Actually, it's Off Topic. You are violating the newsgroup rules.
Please don't post OT replies.
--
Mabden
On 2004-06-01, Robert W. McAdams <rw*@fambright. com> wrote: Je***********@p hysik.fu-berlin.de wrote in message
news:<2h******* *****@uni-berlin.de>...
[snip] Actually , the issue is not CONCENTRATION, but RADIOACTIVITY. Nuclear
waste is, initially, much more radioactive than the uranium ore that
was mined to produce the nuclear fuel that, in turn, produced the
waste. But the most radioactive isotopes contained in the waste also
have short half-lives. The result is that if you can isolate the
waste from the biosphere for 1,000-10,000 years (depending on the type
of waste), at the end of that time it is less radioactive than the
uranium ore that was mined to produce it. (This is in sharp contrast
to, e.g., the toxic chemical wastes produced by coal combustion, which
never decay.)
Technologies already exist for isolating nuclear wastes from the
biosphere for that period of time. (In fact, the best of these
technologies utilizes a layered approach, in which a number of
isolation techniques are used together, each of which, by itself, is
capable of isolating the waste from the biosphere for substantially
more than 10,000 years.)
Which is all peachy, but ehrm. I still see two[1] problems: First; It,
to me, has too much of a /because we can/ attitude if we're to use
nuclear fuels for, how long? a few months? a couple of years, tops? then
have to sit on it for 1000-10000 years to make sure the debris of our
sitcom watching doesn't kill anyone. Even if you can use the stuff for
10 years then have to nanny everyone else to stay away for just 1000
years, there's still this 1:100 discrepancy.
Second, if you want to fool yourself you can forget about the cost of
sitting on something that you'd rather not touch (or have anyone else
touch) for a couple of aeons. However, nature will still present the
bill. The curses of our children are just extra.
Like the ads from all sorts of shady loansharks that one should really
indebt oneself just for buying a widescreen colour tv. Where, if you do,
you `buy money' but not to invest to make more money, no, just to spend
it and sit on your lazy ass and watch. That, in the end, doesn't buy
you anything. Except maybe the debts that still have to be paid off but
you still don't have the means for generating the money needed. I don't
watch tv, nevermind widescreen tv. Lucky me.
IFF we're going to use nuclear fuels, we'd better do something darn
useful with it, instead of getting comparatively small returns from
rather big waste-guarding commitments we can't fulfull in our own
lifetime.
[1] Many, in fact. I'll point out just two here.
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
And somewhere around the time of 05/30/2004 10:45, the world stopped and
listened as Joona I Palaste contributed the following to humanity: 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. google.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.
On re-reading your post, I see that now.
--
Daniel Rudy
Email address has been encoded to reduce spam.
Remove all numbers, then remove invalid, email, no, and spam to reply. us****@sta.sams ung.com (Generic Usenet Account) wrote in
news:90******** *************** **@posting.goog le.com: 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.
This problem was fixed in VMS....which used[es] 8-byte dates with mSec
resolution.
Flavius Vespasianus <nl@nl.com> writes:
[...] This problem was fixed in VMS....which used[es] 8-byte dates with mSec
resolution.
Do the VMS C compilers use this representation for time_t, or do they
use a Unix-like representation (seconds since 1970, either 32 or 64
bits)?
I haven't used VMS in several years, but my vague recollection is that
it uses a Unix-like time_t.
--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keit h) ks***@mib.org <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst>
San Diego Supercomputer Center <*> <http://users.sdsc.edu/~kst>
We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.
Keith Thompson (ks***@mib.org) wrote:
: Flavius Vespasianus <nl@nl.com> writes:
: [...]
: > This problem was fixed in VMS....which used[es] 8-byte dates with mSec
: > resolution.
:
: Do the VMS C compilers use this representation for time_t, or do they
: use a Unix-like representation (seconds since 1970, either 32 or 64
: bits)?
:
: I haven't used VMS in several years, but my vague recollection is that
: it uses a Unix-like time_t.
:
From the OpenVMS FAQ... http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/openvms_faq.html
HP OpenVMS systems - Ask the Wizard
"10.22.1 Other common C issues
The localtime() function and various other functions
maintain the number of years since 1900 in the "struct
tm" structure member tm_year. This field will contain a
value of 100 in the year 2000, 101 for 2001, etc., and
the yearly incrementation of this field is expected to
continue.
The C epoch typically uses a longword (known as time_
t) to contain the number of seconds since midnight
on 1-Jan-1970. At the current rate of consumption of
seconds, this longword is expected to overflow (when
interpreted as a signed longword) circa 03:14:07 on
19-Jan-2038 (GMT), as this time is circa 0x7FFFFFFF
seconds since the C base date. (The most common
solution is to ensure that time_t is an unsigned.)
If C does not correctly handle the display of the
local system time, then check the UTC configuration
on OpenVMS-the most common symptom of this is a skew of
one hour (or whatever the local daylight savings time
change might be). This skew can be caused by incorrect
handling of the "is_dst" setting in the application
program, or by an incorrect OpenVMS UTC configuration
on the local system. (See section Section 4.4.)..."
VMS itself doesn't have a date problem until 31-DEC-9999 23:59:59.99 http://makeashorterlink.com/?E14832678
The original link wrapped to 2 lines: http://ftp.support.compaq.com.au/pub...admes/windows/
snsvaxeco03022. README
"PLY_WAT-VMS SNSVAXECO03022 PLY System Watchdog V2.2 VAX ECO Summary
Year 2000 concerns are now dismissed to 31-DEC-9999 23:59:59.99..."
--Jerry Leslie
Note: le****@jrlvax.h ouston.rr.com is invalid for email This thread has been closed and replies have been disabled. Please start a new discussion. |
