Star Wars producer George Lucas

Bob-Dubery · 2011-01-21T13:38:41+00:00

is going around telling anybody who will listen that the world is going to come to an end in 2012. So he won't be needing all that money....

RobK

singemonkey wrote
And they'd probably be throwing the mother of all new years parties too.

Don't know whether I'd want to attend one of their parties, I mean with the human sacrifice thing being quite popular with the Mayans ?

deefstes

At least we can all sleep easy in the knowledge that the world won't end tomorrow - I mean it's already tomorrow in Japan.

Bob-Dubery

raithza wrote 15 years ago, everyone thought that software engineers in the 60's predicted that the world was going to end in 2000 because their calender systems couldnt handle that date....

I feel the need to put in a word here. Y'all can call me defensive if you like. I was heavily involved in the Y2k remediation program for a big, listed company.

A lot of people say that there was, in fact, never a problem because there weren't any failures (well there were, but nothing serious). There was a Y2k problem, or perhaps problems plural. On the system that I remediated there was nothing that would have caused it to stop on the stroke of midnight, there was, however, a problem to do with years being represented as 2 digits (97, 98, 99 and then 00) that would have caused the system to get it's knickers into a severe twist when the first billing run of the new year happened.

There was a Y2k problem. It's nature was simplified by the press (perhaps understandable) and things were over-sensationalised. Which may have been a good thing because it meant nobody could ignore it. So all over the world there were remediation programs to ensure that important systems (and this includes things like "smart" equipment in operating theatres, "smart" A/C systems and so on) would make the transition smoothly. Nobody sensible foretold the end of the world, but there were very real possibilities that companies would not be able to do business.

The IT community took the issue seriously, investigated and fixed the problems found.

Not a COBOL issue actually. COBOL was quite able to handle Y2k. However if poor design decisions had been made, irrespective of the platform/language, or programmers had sort to conserve memory resources that were comparatively expensive in the 70s or 80s by storing or representing the year portion of a date with 2 digits (a common portrayal of the bug) then there was the potential for a problem. In the system which I tested and fixed the operating system, database and programming languages were all themselves free of Y2k problems, but somebody had written some stupid code. More a human problem than a technology problem.

Bob-Dubery

singemonkey wrote
X-rated Bob wrote
singemonkey wrote My calendar only goes up to December 31st!
Calendars have been stopping at December 31st for some years now.

Yet the sun still rises in the East, summer follows spring...
But wow. Imagine the the first time people used the calendar. Dec 31st creeping up. They must have been terrified. What would happen when the annual cycle ended? The calendar seems to suggest that it's creators knew Dec 31 was the end of time. ☹

Fools!

Those early calendars were inaccurate anyway because the guys who devised them didn't understand leap years properly. By the time the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 there was an accumulated error of about 10 days.

The mess persisted for a long time - well over a century. Some countries went onto the Gregorian system the moment Pope Gregory said "make it so". But that meant chopping 10 days out of October. Some protestant countries resisted for many years because if the catholics were saying it was a good idea then there had to be a downside for protestants.

Anyway... for a long time anybody saying "the word is going to end tomorrow" was probably wrong by at least a day if he'd tried to work things out mathematically. Of course if he'd done something really scientific like reading tea leaves or killing a cat and looking at it's entrails....

Tonedef

100%, bob. Zero-day integer wrap problems are in any event a much more serious and insidious issue but very very little attention is given them by the media, probably because starting epoch dates are variant across different systems and there are no coincidental events like the turning of the century to get people into a state of mass hysteria. People tend to have an enormous affinity for boundary-type events.

Bob-Dubery

Tonedef wrote 100%, bob. Zero-day integer wrap problems are in any event a much more serious and insidious issue but very very little attention is given them by the media, probably because starting epoch dates are variant across different systems and there are no coincidental events like the turning of the century to get people into a state of mass hysteria. People tend to have an enormous affinity for boundary-type events.

Agreed. Nobody sensible in IT actually said the end of the world would come or anything like that. In this case I think there was a productive consequence of the hysteria - namely that it put the issue in the spotlight and nobody could say (or pretend) that they didn't think it was coming.

The guys I did the Y2k remediation for took legal advice on this. They even speculated about falling back on insurance in the case of a Y2k-related claim against them. Their lawyers said "No. Insurance will not pay out. Insurance is for accidents, for things that you cannot foresee. You KNOW that 1st Jan 2000 is coming and you KNOW that there is a possibility of system malfunctions. Your systems may be fine or may not be, but insurers will want to see proof that you took the matter seriously and took reasonable pre-emptive measures."

There must have been many conversations like that. Because of the hype - misplaced and exaggerated as it was - businesses HAD to look at their systems, test them, have audit trails of the testing etc etc

Interestingly I only found one bug that was actually to do with 2-digit representation of years but I found and fixed several others - a consequence of a rigorous test program.

I am pleased to say that said company went quite a long way past "reasonable", took the matter very seriously and put a lot of plans and procedures in place. This wasn't so much because we weren't sure of our own testing but because we didn't know what anybody else's Y2k programs had achieved and what the knock-on from a single failure could be. What if the robots went crazy? What if a cell phone network went down?

The planning went right down to having a quorum of the board available at all times and making sure that they had Vodacom and MTN cell phones. But what if both networks and Telkom went down? Well they got ham radios in place as a last line of defence.

And ironically everything else worked just fine whilst the radios, if we'd had to fall back on them, wouldn't have done the job. 31st December 1999 saw very high sunspot activity, and ham radios in Jo'burg were battling to talk to other radios 5ks away.

Tonedef

Lol. Thats somehow fitting. I wonder if anybody went the 1200baud baseband modem and moerse cabtyre reel on the back of a Hilux route. ?

Keira-WitherKay

well george lucas may be predicting the end of the world.... but i guess the world will survive it always does...... it's the human race, dare i say civilisation as we know it that is at risk.... from some catastrophe .....

but if one believes the accounts of noah's ark and the great flood ...no one believed him either while he spent what musta been months or years building a boat ...... ? or they woulda also built them......

after being top of the food chain for millions of years i'm sure the dinasours thought they were quite set as top predators for eternity ... now they extinct .....

and just like in the disaster movies...... do you think the powers that be will actually announce there's a meteor the size of texas heading our way ....even if they know it............. not till the last minute....... and rightly so...... cos hey if somethings gonna wipe out the human race or most of us , where can you hide... the dinasours couldn't ........i'd rather not know.......... anyway it may be a microscopic virus and not a meteor and no one will see it coming

anyway "who wants to live forever "

Jack-Flash-Jr

"He was not serious when he talked about the end of the world in 2012 but he is an adamant believer that the world is flat, that Stonehenge was built by aliens, and that the sun revolves around the Earth." She added, "These are among the many subjects he commonly discusses at length with Elvis, who he's going to digitally insert into 'Indy 5' along with a roster of famous dead actors."
Georgey's office.

Bob-Dubery

I note that this week The History Channel are running a show "Nostradamus and 2012".

Maybe I should recant.

domhatch

singemonkey wrote Anybody who thinks the world's going to end in 2012 because of some weird interpretation of an ancient calendar needs to seriously re-evaluate their basis for determining truth.

Truth, schmooth (no disrespect). Pure logic wins this one, hands down. The calendar in question runs on a 5 000-year cycle. At the end of the current 5 000-year cycle, the world will supposedly come to an end. Which is all well and good, but what happened at the end of the couple of hundred thousand preceding 5 000-year cycles? Not a whole heck of a lot.

I will, however, just to be safe, be spending the festive season next year in the Drakensberg. ?
dh

singemonkey

X-rated Bob wrote I note that this week The History Channel are running a show "Nostradamus and 2012".

If there was a motoring channel equivalent of the History Channel it would only have shows about Ferraris and fictional cars from movies.

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