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radikalgrafitio :ancom:

people were talking about the millennium bug recently, well it turns out a lot of the fixes just delayed the problem to 2020

"Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called “windowing”, which would treat all dates from 00 to 20, as from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80 per cent of computers fixed in 1999 used the quicker, cheaper option."

"Those systems that used the quick fix have now reached the end of that window, and have rolled back to 1920. Utility company bills have reportedly been produced with the erroneous date 1920, while tens of thousands of parking meters in New York City have declined credit card transactions because of the date glitch."

newscientist.com/article/22292

www.newscientist.comA lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers nowThe millennium bug is back with a vengeance, after programmers in the 1990s simply pushed the problem back by 20 years
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220boosts·132favorites
alcinnz

@radikalgrafitio I find it so weird that they were/are encoding dates in decimal. Y2038 makes more sense to me.

clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
@alcinnz @radikalgrafitio Binary coded decimal was very widespread in the 70s and 80s, everything from mainframes to 6502s had hardware support for it. It makes debugging the hex data easier and saves a few lines of code on conversion for display. 😀
ghostdancer

@radikalgrafitio I guess I just have suffered that suddenly the 1st day of the year the program we have at work stopped printing and previewing. If We change the date of the computer to 2019 it works , but not in 2020. The programmer just fixed it now . It's an old program so I guess that maybe the reason.

scolobb
@radikalgrafitio 😄 and 😩 at the same time.

Getting the date and the time right in software is very hard.
ed(1) conference

@radikalgrafitio I''m curious what places actually did this. As one who made Y2K fixes, to a soul, none of us ever wanted to have to deal with the mess ever again in our lifetimes. Nobody in any of my circles slapped a 20yr extension on it and shrugged. Sure, there was some windowing to guess the century but every bit of code I saw windowed around the current year, so it would work regardless of the year.
If a company/coder hardcoded 20yrs, let 'em suffer.

clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
@ed1conf @radikalgrafitio The people who hardcoded the 2020 cutoff in the 90s were those who calculated they would be retired by now. 😀
You want @mwl@io.mwl.io

@radikalgrafitio

I was there!

"Fixing this properly will take a hardware investment of X/code refactoring/some other expenditure"

"We're not going that. Do a hack job, nobody cares about correctness."

But I completely forgot about those meetings until now. Thank you for posting this. I can now tell 20-year-younger me that he was right! :flan_laugh:​

Port-humping pupper
@mwlucas @radikalgrafitio Now's the year to fly airplanes so you can fall out of the sky in a tragic airplane accident!
K.D. Lounge

@radikalgrafitio With Trumpageddon quickly approaching WWIII, this is thankfully the least of our problems.

⚪ Psy Chuan

@radikalgrafitio lmao i remember so many tech nerds on reddit getting angry because no one recognised the way they averted y2k. Guess everyone knows now!!

vx. redgrave, maid of mind

@radikalgrafitio I bet they will just kick it back again, so we'll have the same shit happen in 2040

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