Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Y2.01K

Crash the Y2K bug

Y2K was a big deal. A huge amount of money was spent updating older software which stored dates using only two digits. A common solution at the time was to treat dates of 00-09 as post-Y2K, and 10-99 as pre-Y2K. Effectively this only delayed the problem for ten years - our ten years ran out a few days ago. Some examples of failures experienced since Jan 1, 2010:

A huge amount of money and effort was expended in the 1990s to upgrade systems for Y2K. When Jan 1 rolled around and civilization did not end, there was much criticism that the whole thing had been hyped by vendors eager to sell new gear. Quite likely we overspent... but I believe the consequences of underspending would have been more expensive to clean up afterwards.

Fortunately, it appears that magic pixie dust is available to fix all Y2.01K problems, according to a press release from BogusTech. Obviously a spoof, its very funny and well worth reading.