Y2K Ready?

[DK]

Is Frontpage 98 Y2K ready????[nbsp][nbsp]Or not.[nbsp][nbsp]If not, what do I need to do?

[Stephen]

Justin,

You have a lot more faith in Microsoft than I do. Personally I think we won't see major foobar on Jan 1, 2000. What I think more likely is that small problems will compound and lead to bigger one's days or even weeks into the new millenium. How big, I don't know. It's not really the software that will be the cause of the main problems generated by Y2K. I think it will be the way people respond to them.

BTW I saw 'Saving Private Ryan' the other day and 'foobar' I discovered from it is a German expression (apparently not in the dictionary according to an on-screen journalist). Maybe I'm the last to know this. But here's my question: What precisely is foobar...?

[Charles Capps]

I assure you, most Microsoft software is Y2K ready - I accidentally ran my compy in 2003 for about a week...[nbsp][nbsp]*LOL*[nbsp][nbsp]Besides Norton Disk Doctor complaining about the dates when I ran a scan (it doesn't like dates that are in the future...), nothing bad happened at all.
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"Okay, so I'm not "SANE" so to speak, but uh... I'm the lovable kind of psycho"
http://solareclipse.net/

[Justin]

Like I said, I ran my PC for about a week in the year 2020, and Windows, IE, Outlook, etc all did just fine. It's just a friggin year - and any program made within the last few years uses a 4 digit year - so rolling from 1999 to 2000 is no different from rolling from 1983 to 1984.

Foobar, if I am not mistaken, is another way of saying FUBAR, which is an acronym that ends with Beyond All Recognition. I hope I don't have to explain the first two letters :)[nbsp][nbsp]I may be wrong about foobar being a synonym for the acronym, but it is certainly a phonogram (if I have that word right... :))

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Deb]

Flubbed up beyond all recognition ;)

My favorite is when something fixes itself .. PFM (Pure friggen magic)

ahhhh see I do have kids :þ

Deb

[Justin]

I personally think people put too much into the Y2K thing... the only time I see a problem is if a power company or phone company is not properly set up. Simple software programs, if they are not compliant, will not break. They may show the date incorrectly, but other than that, unless Windows decides not to work any more, there shouldn't be a problem (and I've already tested Win98 for a few days running at 2020 :))

For any official statements you would of course have to visit www.Microsoft.com (http://www.Microsoft.com) - but I don't see why there would be any probs...

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[fuddmain]

For more on foobar check out the New Hacker's Dictionary at www.jargon.org/jargon_21.html#SEC28 (http://www.jargon.org/jargon_21.html#SEC28).


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Brian
[nbsp]brian@fuddmain.com[nbsp]

[Justin]

The etymology of hackish `foo' is obscure. When used in connection with `bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`****ed Up Beyond All Repair'), later bowdlerized to foobar. (See also FUBAR.)
I was right :þ

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[fuddmain]

I think most of the time you see it in programming books it does not mean flubbed up beyond all recognition.[nbsp][nbsp]The case I make for that is Programming Perl.[nbsp][nbsp]Foobar is used often and I find it hard to believe that's what Larry Wall means given he seems to be quite religious.[nbsp][nbsp]And, the entry in The New Hacker's Dictionary gives one of the definitions as:

2. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files).


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Brian
[nbsp]brian@fuddmain.com[nbsp]

[Ron]

There are still a lot of programs with two-digit years out there, including most of mine. But that's okay. At least for a while.

Any time you enter a two-digit year, the computer has to make some assumptions. Most older programs automatically assume the missing digits are "19." Which, of course, is the whole crux of our problem. Microsoft's assumptions are different. If the two digits you enter for a year are in the range 30 to 99, all MS products I know of will assume the missing digits are 19. But if the range is from 00 to 29, they assume the missing digits are 20.

So we've got about 30 years before we need to start worrying all over again... :)

[Rich]

So we've got about 30 years before we need to start worrying all over again...

Yes, actually 37 years because all 32-bit operating systems will break after the year 2037.

If MS chose 30 years, I guess it is because they have decided to have the problem corrected a little bit earlier than 2037, which is probably very wise.

Rich

[Justin]

Rich - I think this only applies to Unix/Linux OS's, as the method of measuring time is the number of seconds since 1970. This number, stored as a 32 bit number, will overflow in 2038 (might be 2037 - I'm not sure). But I don't think Windows uses the same method of measuring time - the only number I am able to get from the API is the number of seconds since midnight, resetting daily, as well as the number of seconds of uptime (which is rumored to overflow after 47 days of uptime, BTW)...

I could easily be wrong, but I was pretty sure that this only applied to *nix systems... which of course by then all systems will likely be 64 bit anyway :)

Quote from our Y2K page: . If Apache sees such a date with a value less than 70 it assumes that the century is 20 rather than 19. I think most software uses this rule rather than the 30, or at least *nix software, since the epoch is 1970. Another of my favorite quotes: qmail calculates dates by subtracting signed 32-bit seconds-since-1970 representations. As a consequence, it has the usual Unix year-2038 problem, which most people expect will be fixed by switching to 64-bit unices. Since that process has already started, it's expected to be completed some time in the next 40 years I like that one - we'll get around to it in the next 40 years (kinda like what they said back in '81 I bet :))

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support