Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Kosh on March 17, 2010, 07:43:27 pm
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Found this (http://web.archive.org/web/20010211165926/kunstler.com/mags_y2k.html) "classic" online a while back, so on the 10th anneversary of the self pwnage that was the y2k hysteria, I thought it would be good to look back on such nonsense as this.
Writing this in April of � I believe that we are in for a serious event. Systems will fail, crash, seize up, cease to function. Not all systems, maybe only a fraction, but enough, and enough interdependent systems to affect many other systems. Y2K is real. Y2K is going to rock our world.
People will consequently suffer. I don抔 know how much. Some people may lose their lives - but more likely at the hands of a disabled medical establishment than because of civil disorder, loss of power, starvation, bad water, or other projected horrors (though these, too, are possible). Some will suffer the loss of fortunes, some of any income whatsoever, and many of something in between. Quite a few will find themselves suddenly without an occupation, and few ideas about how to make themselves useful to other people (without occupations themselves). Many will suffer a loss of comfort and modern convenience, and if that goes on any longer than a week, it may escalate into serious problems of public sanitation and infectious disease.
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the closet thing we've had to y2k is the ps3's not working on march 1st this year, because they though it was feb.29th
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haha y2k... I remember being upset about that, what a waste of time since nothing really happened.
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i was 11 when all that crap started up. i remember my dad (worked for IBM) being on "emergency call" and having to stay rediculously late/go back in to work at all hours of the night. i asked what Y2K was, and he explained that to save space only the last 2 digits of the year were used for dates. to which my child-perspective response was, "So?" :rolleyes:
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well the reason why nothing happened is because the entire computer industry spent like three years grinding there collective asses off trying to fix it before it caused a real problem.
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Exactly. People come out with crap about how Y2K wasn't a problem, ignoring the fact that people spent years making sure it wouldn't be a problem.
the closet thing we've had to y2k is the ps3's not working on march 1st this year, because they though it was feb.29th
Which is a great example of what Y2K would have been like if people hadn't fixed the issues it caused.
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I wonder if we still have that "Y2K Compliance" 3.5" floppy floating around here somewhere. I should hold onto that. :D
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Exactly. People come out with crap about how Y2K wasn't a problem, ignoring the fact that people spent years making sure it wouldn't be a problem.
the closet thing we've had to y2k is the ps3's not working on march 1st this year, because they though it was feb.29th
Which is a great example of what Y2K would have been like if people hadn't fixed the issues it caused.
And it was only a problem because people designed a lot of software without regards for the approach of the 21st century. It was patched over in almost every regard. The biggest problems with computers and time, recently, has been Microsoft screwing up the new DST updates, and having scheduled appointments bumped forwards/backwards an hour.
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Well there was that banking floating point problem this year due to 10 = 16. Guess those programmers figured they wouldn't have to worry about it since the would would be dead by now.
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And it was only a problem because people designed a lot of software without regards for the approach of the 21st century.
To be fair, a lot of the time, the coders didn't think people would still be using their code in 20-30 years time so it's hardly surprising they didn't consider that.
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And it was only a problem because people designed a lot of software without regards for the approach of the 21st century.
To be fair, a lot of the time, the coders didn't think people would still be using their code in 20-30 years time so it's hardly surprising they didn't consider that.
Agreed. They also didn't think they'd be using the same methods decades down the line.
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never underestimate cost-cutting cheap-outs :nervous:
our nuclear reactors still run on code from the 60s :eek2:
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that old code is probably much more efficient than the modern bloatware that todays industry puts out. i was trying to download the most recent windows sdk and was pretty concerned that it was one point four gigs. how can anyone hope to make semi-decent code with such megalithic sdks to work with?
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Also just like NASA a lot of that stuff has to be tested for years before being approved for use due to the conditions and reliability needed.
BTW does anyone know when that next big clock issue is supposed to happen? Something about unix time needing an extra digit? Or did that happen already and it was just another panic for nothing?
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The big one is the Unix Epoch. But that's not for another 28 years or so.
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yeah, that one is gonna be a *****.
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i bet it will happen exactly one day after linux pewns windows :D
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Exactly. People come out with crap about how Y2K wasn't a problem, ignoring the fact that people spent years making sure it wouldn't be a problem.
the closet thing we've had to y2k is the ps3's not working on march 1st this year, because they though it was feb.29th
Which is a great example of what Y2K would have been like if people hadn't fixed the issues it caused.
To be fair:
The lack of Y2K-related problems in countries such as Italy, which undertook a far more limited remediation effort than the United States. In an October 22, 1999, report, a US Senate Committee expressed concern about safe travel outside of the United States. The report stated that overseas public transit systems were considered vulnerable because many did not have an aggressive response plan in place for any problems. Internationally, the report singled out Italy, China and Russia as poorly prepared. The Australian government evacuated all but three embassy staff from Russia.[35] None of these countries experienced any Y2K problems regarded as worth reporting.[36]
# The lack of Y2K-related problems in schools, many of which undertook little or no remediation effort. By September 1, 1999 only 28 percent of US schools had achieved compliance for mission critical systems, and a government report predicted that "Y2K failures could very well plague the computers used by schools to manage payrolls, student records, online curricula, and building safety systems".[33]
# The lack of Y2K-related problems in an estimated 1.5 million small businesses that undertook no remediation effort. On 3 January 2000 (the first weekday of the year) the Small Business Administration received an estimated 40 calls from businesses with computer problems, similar to the average. None of the problems were critical.[34]
So there were countries that did almost nothing to prepare and very little happened. Would it have caused the electricity to go out, social collapse, the end of the world? I'm not so sure. The vast majority of predicts, hype, and hysteria was 100% bulloks.
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Most of those countries didn't have computer systems quite as old as America did though.
As I stated before the biggest problem was with code written decades before 2000.
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never underestimate cost-cutting cheap-outs :nervous:
our nuclear reactors still run on code from the 60s :eek2:
Say, doesn't our light bulb use "code" from the 1880s?
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Most of those countries didn't have computer systems quite as old as America did though.
As I stated before the biggest problem was with code written decades before 2000.
Entirely agreed. The REAL issue in Y2K was/would have been major software vendors that folded, collapsed, liquidated, &c. prior to releasing a viable patch or workaround for popular or critical equipment. Had Microsoft folded, for whatever reason, between 1998 and 1999 and never corrected the clocks, THEN a major problem could have been in consumer and corporate versions of Windows, NT, and DOS.
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So...
what exactly is Y2K? Is it like how computers can't handle the dates between the 90s and 2000's or what? :wtf:
How is that a problem?
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...are you serious?
...is he serious?
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Is it more of a fact that I'm seriously uninformed, or the fact that Y2K wasn't a big deal to begin with?
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The problem, in a nutshell, was that in order to save memory space, software engineers in the 80s and earlier decided to store years using only two digits. They were going on the assumption that the systems they built wouldn't be in use long enough for this to be a problem, but as it turns out, that was wrong. As a result, there was a minor panic when people started to think about what would happen if the year stamp went from 99 to 00; it could potentially lead to strange errors in accounting systems and mission-critical control hardware for nuclear power stations. Not to mention possible issues in embedded controllers like the ones found in elevators. One popular scenario was control hardware throwing systems into emergency shutdown because the hardware thought it hadn't been serviced in a hundred years. Or an accounting system paying 100 years worth of interest automatically. Or automatically paying a hundred years worth of taxes.
As explained, due to several thousand people working their asses off to make sure this wouldn't happen (and of course, some people doing their job properly in the first place), none of this happened.
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oh, okay. Knowing this just makes the 2012 apocalypse seem that much more fake.
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Is it more of a fact that I'm seriously uninformed, or the fact that Y2K wasn't a big deal to begin with?
It's more that I have no conceivable idea how you'd never managed to hear about it in the first place. :p I mean, unless you're under the age of 13 or so, it's something I'd expect most Internet denizens to be intimately familiar with. Talk/hype about it was literally everywhere when 2000 rolled around.
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I only became aware of the world when I was like 10 (which would be in 2005). Before that I had no idea about any memes, internet phenomena, and the like whatsoever.
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...Christ, I feel old right now. :p
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I felt old after my first girl trouble. Imagine how I feel now.
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...you've already had "girl trouble"?
Dammit, man, stop doing this to me! :lol:
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Depends on what qualifies as "girl trouble". Cared too much for a girl that got creeped out too easily by it. Sad thing is after three years I'm too stubborn to recover properly from it.
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Most of those countries didn't have computer systems quite as old as America did though.
As I stated before the biggest problem was with code written decades before 2000.
That's a good point, but then again what about the 70% of american schools that also did nothing?
If nothing was done, the way I see it it would have caused some headaches with billing, payroll, that sort of thing that would have taken a couple of weeks to sort out, but it wouldn't have caused a lot of the other stuff that people were predicating (social collapse/unrest, planes falling out of the sky, world war 3, computers becoming completely useless, traffic lights to stop working, whatever the guy in the article suggested, etc), which in the end still makes it look a lot less formidable than the hype suggested.
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Depends on what qualifies as "girl trouble". Cared too much for a girl that got creeped out too easily by it. Sad thing is after three years I'm too stubborn to recover properly from it.
The first time usually takes about four.
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It's more that I have no conceivable idea how you'd never managed to hear about it in the first place. :p I mean, unless you're under the age of 13 or so, it's something I'd expect most Internet denizens to be intimately familiar with. Talk/hype about it was literally everywhere when 2000 rolled around.
Well, just to let you know, I started learning how to use the Internet in 2001 so :p .
But yeah, like haloboy here, I had no idea why it was such a huge problem back then. I've heard about it, but I didn't know what it was, understand the implications it held and, as a result, failed to appreciate the magnitude of it altogether. Even after your post, I still fail to appreciate its magnitude.
I felt old after my first girl trouble. Imagine how I feel now.
I felt old after I started having backache from walking for far too long a distance. My superior and one of my friends have both called me "uncle" at least once. Like Hell I'm an uncle, I'm only 19.
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I felt old after I started having backache from walking for far too long a distance. My superior and one of my friends have both called me "uncle" at least once. Like Hell I'm an uncle, I'm only 19.
i was an uncle at 17 :D
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I was an aunt at 8.
Depends on what qualifies as "girl trouble". Cared too much for a girl that got creeped out too easily by it. Sad thing is after three years I'm too stubborn to recover properly from it.
Your new name is Lil Aardwolf.
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Y2k was a big fear that i thought people didn't think all the way through. What's going to happen when you're computer hits the big 00 year? Well, another year and day of normal operation happens. Will your computer take a **** when you try to modify a file made in 99 during the year 00? No, the file you modified just gets a new last accessed and last modified stamp of 00 instead of 99. The one thing i'd find funny is if xp had come out earlier and supported 2 digit years. That way when the clock would strike 00 then xp would say "you're a pirate, the date is wrong!, plz check out WGA!"
The only thing that really got ****ed up a little bit in the minor sense when the clocks struck 2000 was the atomic clock. Perhaps there was some more **** ups with technology, but ultimately, computers don't have sentience to be able to get confused like people were treating them would when the date goes from 99 to 00. The only time i see programs getting confused because of a date change is if that program was designed to do so, like xp (it screams bloody murder if you change the date to something in the past because of that WGA crap since ms doesn't trust their customers and treats them like they will do wrong on their part).
Probably some more stuff in y2k got ****ed, but ultimately, i didn't get very excited about it. I had a 1980's mac that had two digit year dating. I changed it to 00 manually one day, nothing happened except the computer thinking that it was the year 00.
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Y2k was a big fear that i thought people didn't think all the way through.
You mean, just like you did there?
Plz to read wikipedia before posting something stupid, kthnx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem
EDIT: You basically said "I don't see why it was a problem, my home computer survived it just fine". You see, it wasn't about home PCs. It was about old-style mainframes and embedded systems. You know, systems that do important stuff.
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consider avionics. its something that absolutely has to work. otherwise you get planes falling out of the sky. in addition to atc systems, some of which are really antiquated.
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consider avionics. its something that absolutely has to work. otherwise you get planes falling out of the sky. in addition to atc systems, some of which are really antiquated.
But are any of the onboard avionics of a plane dependant on the year being read correctly?
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But are any of the onboard avionics of a plane dependant on the year being read correctly?
Possibly. At the time I doubt GPS was thoroughly integrated though. The air traffic control system, however, was known to be a significant Y2K risk.
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I'm still surprised that this was something to be afraid of, seeing as how easily it seems to have been fixed before it happened.
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Thousands of coders going through tons of legacy code verifying that nothing unexpected will happen is easy?
Sidenote: If nothing else, this sparked major code reviews for a few important systems, and infrastructure audits that resulted in systems that were ultimately even more stable. So even if the fear behind it may have been unfounded, the effort to fix the issue did produce a few good results.
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updated software is always worth the effort.
i just wish they weren't used as an excuse to release a product early.
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But are any of the onboard avionics of a plane dependant on the year being read correctly?
Possibly. At the time I doubt GPS was thoroughly integrated though. The air traffic control system, however, was known to be a significant Y2K risk.
So if air traffic control thought the year was 1900 then the planes would have fallen out of the sky?
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no, but plane arrival dates and the like would be completely off.
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Off by 100 years maybe. :p
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And how do you think any system using time to calculate distance is going to be affected if the time is suddenly very very wrong?
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And how do you think any system using time to calculate distance is going to be affected if the time is suddenly very very wrong?
Not much if it was all affected by exactly the same amount. If every system thought the year was 1900 then it wouldn't matter. Either that or you subtract 100 years worth of hours. :p
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So you're assuming that software that has been maintained for decades will always have been programmed by coders who used the same method for representing the date and that therefore every clock will be off by the same amount?
Yeah, I think we're done here.
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Not much if it was all affected by exactly the same amount. If every system thought the year was 1900 then it wouldn't matter. Either that or you subtract 100 years worth of hours. :p
Take a couple of navigation classes.
Or alternately, imagine what apparently going backwards in time does to your apparent speed of advance.
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:snipe:IMA****UP :snipe:
I was thinking it through, but your small mindedness had to come in here and not think about the big picture i was alluding to. If my **** lick mac from long ago could survive it, then that makes you wonder what other 2 year digit date supporting machines would be able to do (like survive).
The y2k problem with people worrying about it back then is a little funny. So a computer goes to year 00. That's about it. There were some minor problems with y2k, but that was it. It's not like a clock reaching 00 on an airplane is going to make it fall out of the sky (well, not unless the clock is the fuel cut off switch...rofl). When instead there were some intermittent problems. The few that weren't intermittent, didn't take much time at all to fix, and also were nothing major like planes falling out the skies or all the nukes in the world launching. For god's sake, the US atomic clock thought the year was 19100.
People were all getting stressed out, and the preparation helped, but really just by having people aware and ready for when the clock hit 00/2000. The main thing the y2k wikipedia entry points out is yet again, people that were aware and ready on standby, and some intermittent problems. Certainly planes falling out of the sky? All of the US's nukes launching at once? Yeah right. Concerning y2k, the only reason such destruction would happen when the clock hits 00 is if the vast majority of the worlds programmers were in the same end of the world cult.
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Read the thread plzkthnx.
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*sound of S-99 not getting it*
You ... really aren't getting it, are you? You are taking your own personal experience with your home computer (which at the time probably didn't do anything critical for your home or business), and apply it to a wide variety of systems, from mainframes running accounting systems designed in the 60s to embedded systems designed for very, very constrained hardware specs, all of which were deemed so critical for operation that people were actually afraid of upgrading them. Systems where noone knew how they were going to react on January 1st, 2000. Systems where you couldn't just run a quick test to see what would happen then.
In other words, you're still saying "I don't see what the big deal was, nothing happened", when I'm saying "No wonder nothing happened, there was a giant effort to make absolutely sure of that".
Now tell me again who is not thinking of the big picture?
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So you're assuming that software that has been maintained for decades will always have been programmed by coders who used the same method for representing the date and that therefore every clock will be off by the same amount?
Yeah, I think we're done here.
Ok, I have a question. Let's just say that we all know flying from point A to point B should take, lets say, 7 hours. Now, if the plane left the airport at 9:00 pm December 1999, and if the computer system thought the next year was going to be 1900 (as per the Y2K bug), what would it say the ETA was?
I understand that you need to know the time, as in hours, minutes, seconds, days, and months accurately, but I don't understand why needing to have the year be spot on is mission critical.
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because a year == 365 days a day == 24 hours an hour == 60 minutes, you cant have one unit inaccurate without all the others being effected because they are basically the same unit.
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time is very important in any system that does physics calculations, and atc systems are required to triangulate aircraft positions with various radar hardware and compute speed, altitude and and course vector. all of which needs to be rendered on an atc scope. what they didnt want is blips flickering all across the scopes or appearing in the wrong location. and considering the age of the systems and what you stand to loose if they fail, id say it was well worth the effort to go through and fix all the timing bugs. "planes falling out of the sky" was really just a worst case scenario, and even without atc the planes would continue to function (in theory :lol: ), and if atc becomes unreliable they could have reverted everyone to vfr flight while they rebooted the systems and landed planes as necessary. plus you got everyone on alert so the likelihood of something bad happening was slim.
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because a year == 365 days a day == 24 hours an hour == 60 minutes, you cant have one unit inaccurate without all the others being effected because they are basically the same unit.
Ok, so in my above example it would read a huge negative number of hours, correct?
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Or it would crash the ATC systems. Or make them give poor readings which resulted in the pilots getting the wrong landing information.
I really can't see why anyone would have so much trouble accepting that an aeroplane or ATC system having bad data isn't a serious potential risk.
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Or it would crash the ATC systems. Or make them give poor readings which resulted in the pilots getting the wrong landing information.
I really can't see why anyone would have so much trouble accepting that an aeroplane or ATC system having bad data isn't a serious potential risk.
I just never figured they would have factored in the year to their nav systems, that's all.
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Or it would crash the ATC systems. Or make them give poor readings which resulted in the pilots getting the wrong landing information.
I really can't see why anyone would have so much trouble accepting that an aeroplane or ATC system having bad data isn't a serious potential risk.
I just never figured they would have factored in the year to their nav systems, that's all.
date/time is usualy stored as a number which is converted to date time by an algerithem, a good example is to type a date into excel, then select the cell propertys and change it to show number so an innacurecy in that number will throw it out for example
23/03/1999 16:00 in excel is stored as 36242.6666666667
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Now tell me again who is not thinking of the big picture?
Nothing anymore since now you're agreeing with me. The whole thing with my old computer was for testing a hypothesis that there's a possibility that perhaps y2k isn't so catastrophic.
Having sexy time with mainframes running accounting systems designed in the 60s to embedded systems designed for very, very constrained hardware specs, all of which were deemed so critical for operation that people were actually afraid of upgrading them. Systems where noone knew how they were going to react on January 1st, 2000. Systems where you couldn't just run a quick test to see what would happen then.
In other words, me love you long time, when you're saying "No wonder nothing happened, there was a giant effort to make absolutely sure of that".
This is where you agree with me that about what i said about y2k tech phobia. People going ape **** over a problem that had some unknowns (people reading too far into the problem such as the world ending on 00). Is it that bad to test on similar systems that wouldn't pose a risk if they were separate for testing to see what could happen on the big 00? My only problem was that i did one crappy test for ****s and giggles, when also seeing what the win3.1.1 and the win95 i also had would have provided more insight (but damnit, i was 14, and i didn't think of this then).