[mountainlion]

Y2K was a fear of programs that already were in working order.

[BikerJoe]

The account creation and registration problems are masking the problems that will happen later.

Fer Godsakes, they can't architect a system as a set of subsystems, each separately developed and tested, with well-defined interfaces?

[Qbert]

I hope Obama has enough left in his stash to pay for these mistakes...

[Safrguns]

>>> Y2K was a fear of programs that already were in working order.

You a programmer???

I am... and I was directly involved with updating software for Y2K. Using a 2 digit field to store what needed to be a 4 digit number by Y2K would have resulted in catastrophic logic errors that would have brought down systems indefinitely. Fixing this problem is relatively easy... but also very tedious and extensive because you have to trace the use of these date fields through all code.

The problem was real... the problem was fixed.

Businesses with actual skin in the game understood the problem, and got it fixed right on time.

[RJS1950]

No, Y2k was blown out of proportion. The largest part of the Y2K effort was to fix date formats and other date computations that would no longer work correctly at the change of the millenium. Problems like default century fields of 19 and software logic that would see 01 as 1901 instead of 2001.

It was a large and necessary effort that some scammers, MSM propagandists and others blew out of reality with the planes falling from the sky, power grids going down, etc.

A large part of the software base would not have correctly worked and needed to be fixed. Everything had to at least be evaluated.

[ken in texas]

Y2K was a fear of programs that already were in working order.

Granted, there was some unwarranted hysteria but there were also a lot of systems that would have stopped working correctly. There were a lot of programmers working in the trenches to get systems modified.