Fun fact: Y2K is still an issue in some old systems. Some, instead of going through and properly fixing the whole system, just bolted on logic to assume if the 2 digit year is less than say 30, assume it's 20xx and if it's 30 or more, assume it's 19xx. This saved the time of having to update the storage layer, but it means that they're in for a surprise in the future. Then there's the 2038 problem.
Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of blindly assuming those two missing digits are 19, make the assumption that if they're less than 50, it's 20, and if it's greater than 50, it's 19. 2050 (or whatever cutoff they're using) will suck (again) if that was their solution.
If that's the solution, it seems like you can just make a code change every 50/100 years or so to increment the assumed century, and then this fix can work indefinitely for fairly low maintenance cost
It will work for incoming data, but it will also trash all your existing records.
You might not care about records that are 100+ years old, but you might.
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that's the solution, it seems like you can just make a code change every 50/100 years or so to increment the assumed century, and then this fix can work indefinitely for fairly low maintenance cost
It will work for incoming data, but it will also trash all your existing records. You might not care about records that are 100+ years old, but you might.
I don't think that's an issue because I would presume you write your existing records with an absolute timestamp (unix time) rather than a relative one? Am I missing something?
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#24I wonder how many "specialists" this eliminated?
"Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government." So, since an employee works around 2000 hours/year, this is something on the order of 10 employees.
I'm curious, are you being snarky? Are you taking issue that a manager is at the switch and sweating some details, or are you just noting that this article was written about a trivial amount of government waste?
I can't tell if you're being snarky or not because you wrote so little. My finger was hovering over the downvote button, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will work for incoming data, but it will also trash all your existing records. You might not care about records that are 100+ years old, but you might.
I don't think that's an issue because I would presume you write your existing records with an absolute timestamp (unix time) rather than a relative one? Am I missing something?
A lot of these systems were built such that date stamps were simple 6 character text fields within a larger ascii-based file format on computers build in the 60s and 70s or earlier.
Space (both RAM and storage) is a premium on these systems and therefore much thought is given to what you place within any given row. As a result, no one stored unix timestamps as that would have required 10 characters more per timestamp per row, which would have had other ramifications on other parts of the code and/or memory. It would have required all stored records to be re-written somehow, which depending on the available online storage may have been an impossible task in and of itself. Not to mention how one would handle the recovery of any existing backups.
Due to these complexities, most organizations settled for code that shifted the meaning of the 2 digit year by some predetermined offset.
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#26I wish they had a few examples of the Y2K paperwork that was being submitted. I have trouble seeing how anyone could fill out that paperwork without at least a little sarcasm creeping in. "The year is 2017, the Y2K bug has still not manifested itself. However our agency remains vigilante and prepared for the day when it does."
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government." So, since an employee works around 2000 hours/year, this is something on the order of 10 employees.
I'm curious, are you being snarky? Are you taking issue that a manager is at the switch and sweating some details, or are you just noting that this article was written about a trivial amount of government waste? I can't tell if you're being snarky or not because you wrote so little. My finger was hovering over the downvote button, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.
It's a straight answer to the question. If there's any snark in this chain, it's the quotes on "specialists" in the top-level comment.
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#28I wonder how many "specialists" this eliminated?
"Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government." So, since an employee works around 2000 hours/year, this is something on the order of 10 employees.
The article contains a nice little switch of context in that paragraph;
> Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government.
They're not talking about the Y2k paperwork requirement when they give their estimate of hours saved, but the totality of the paperwork requirements.
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#29>Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government. >“Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate,” he said. “It’s been so long since somebody asked them to look backwards.” This is why it's generally a b…
Nobody was filing paperwork about Y2k, as is made clear by the next paragraph:
> The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
So sure, it's good to get outdated rules off the book, but don't pretend like people were still writing reports about Y2k.
Re: Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
#30I'm not sure how the Y2K rules are the primary focus of this article when the much more consequential impacts will be rescinding Obama's CIO memo that gave department CIOs full responsibility for implementing projects:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/08/08/changin...
Or eliminating the Core Federal Services Council which was setup to identify and improve the Federal services with the highest volumes:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/omb...