waht was y2k virus

[rapier57]

I have to pipe in on this. I any of you remember, much of the hysteria surrounding Y2K was generated from the efforts of Gary North. This is the guy who has actively worked to generate panic, FUD and generally work up the gullible population in his attempts to bring down the secular government of the US.

http://www.serve.com/thibodep/cr/y2k.htm

Calling himself and his followers "contrarians," his current efforts are seen here:

http://www.garynorth.com/

[bballad]

Katja: Nope computers do't do datesdirfently now. In most cases we jsut put in a date window. IF you are before this two digit date the century is 20 otherwise its 19...so yes in a few years we go through all of the changes again (job security).

Und3ertak3r: While planes where never going to fall out of the sky. JIT assembly lines had problems, enviromental contorlls had problems. JIT delivery app had problems. Some of the AMI BIos versions had problems (yes the PC would just stp working untill you flashed the BIOS.) There where serious issues that coud have effected the econamy seriously...we just fixed them in time.

[mohaughn]

Originally posted here by Katja

Nowadays, dates are stored differently. Often as a number of days since 1900 or since 1970. Thus the only limit now is the size of the number datatype (often 2 or 4 bytes) which won't cause many problems anymore for the next 50 years or so. (And then there will be a new Y2K like problem.) Storing dates as just a number of days used to be considered a slow method because it required the computer to do some serious calculations to translate it to day-month-year format. Nowadays computers are fast enough so this isn't a problem anymore.

Basica[/B]

As far as computers storing dates differently. This is also true. Unix has been storing dates the same since the late 1960's and 1970's. And unix uses the number of seconds that have passed since the year 1970 written as a signed 32 bit number. The current day,time, and year is calculated based on the number of seconds. So faster computers did not make this possible. It just doesn't take that much math to figure the date, it's not that intensive. Any system using the current 32bit date format of counting seconds since 1970 will run out of space in their 32 bit counter in 2038. It's known as the unix timebomb..

The problem with Y2K was poor planning, it had nothing to do with the speed of computers. Most of the developers didn't think those systems would still be running by the time 2000 rolled around.

[LEFTYGUNZ]

I SOLVED MY OWN Y2K PROBLEM