History's 10 biggest disappointments: from Y2K to Jar-Jar, don't believe the hype

Actually, moving electrons make electricity. Turbines merely get them to move.

You conveniently forget the people who were promoting that EVERYTHING would come to a stop because of Y2K. I strongly remember that people were saying that automobiles would not start on the morning of January 1st, 2000. It was at that point that I knew that Y2K was a hoax. NOBODY came out to my car and updated the computers on it, but it started right up that morning — as did everything else.

I also remember the people (Y2K’ers) who took over our gunclub the year before that and spent the treasury to build an armored building where they could make a “last stand” after Y2K. I remember one of them saying he bought several 100 shot double-snail magazines for his AR-15 because he couldn’t take time to reload 30 round magazines when the human waves tried to overrun his position to get his MRE’s after Y2K. That reinforced it.

There is no doubt that updating old programs in obsolete codes were needed, but that should have been done anyway. I did it myself on many of the Fortran and Basic programs that I and others wrote at my engineering firm. However, TEOTWAWKI or SHTF did not happen and would not have happened if we did not do it.

Calling fellow Conservatives “Stupid’ will not win or retain any hearts and minds in our forum.

I do A/R for over 48,000 accounts. I could do it by hand if I wanted to. It would take more time and I would need an assistant, but I am that efficient.

You are exercising a bit of ‘Expert Fallacy’ and behaving like a know-it-all when there clearly exists valid points of view by many parties.

My comment was benign and meant as a joke. You offhandedly replied in a tone that I find belligerent.

Work on that, especially if you want to bring future Conservatives into the fold.

So then why did tens of thousands of well run, prosperous companies around the world devote millions of man hours, hundreds of millions of dollars to solve a non-existent problem. As to expert fallacy let me give you a very simple idea of the problem.

Assume you are the county clerk. You have a General Ledger for year 99 and it is in balance (hopefully) as of 12/31/1999. You run the budgetary computation in January, 2000, to arrive at a pro forma budget for the new year. So you post to year 00. But then you want to compare it to the previous year. There is no previous year. The stupid computer does not know that the year is 2000, it only knows 00 and there is no positive integer before that.

Look at the property records. You run the tax computation for the year 00. But the computer can find no existing property owners from the previous year, ie., no property taxes.

Suppose it is now the and of January, year 00, and you need to prepare the deliquency list for your 48,000 accounts. Whoops, there is no previous year so everybody is current.

And I have not even touched on how to process 500,000 checks a day in a bank where the program needs to subtract the amount of the checks from the previous balance.

Y2K was a very real problem and I am amazed that intelligent, rational people (except for the Dim Trolls) on this forum fall for such a stupid idea that it was a hoax.

Maybe they do not understand what the problem was. It was a very simple thing. Computers were expensive in the beginning, magnetic storage was very expensive, and programmers, being the efficient ones of the world, sought ways to economize on storage. They allows two digits for the year. That was fine in the 80's and 90's. But 2000 would be recorded as 00 which was out of sequence. Simple fix. Change from two digits to four digits. Massive undertaking. Millions of programs throughout ALL pc's and mainframes. EVERY computer in the world.

Would that make planes fall from the sky? It could have because of another programming trick. There is constant revision to programs and the hardware they control. To synchronize the status of the program in a complex machine (such as an airplane or automobile) Many of the hardware components are dated in firmware (chips). The controlling software will have a date in the program which says we can use the hardware. If the current controlling software says the hardware should (or should not) be used unless a certain date is presented by the hardware and if all of a sudden the computer date changes from 99 to 00, then much of the hardware would not be used, in fact all the dated hardware prior to 2000. Because 00 is less than 96, 97, 98... Big problem.

So be glad we did fix it.

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