I didn't know America maintains a register of men they could potentially conscript should the need arise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System
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14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#22"The glitch, it turns out, originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation during a transfer of nearly 400,000 records to the Selective Service. A clerk working with the state’s database failed to select the century, producing records for males born between 1993 and 1997 — and for those born a century earlier, PennDOT spokeswoman Jan McKnight said Thursday. ... The Selective Service didn’t initially cat…
That is what we call a y2k bug
Century field? In all likelihood, this is actually a repair to a y2k bug.
Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#23Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#24The glitch, it turns out, originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation during a transfer of nearly 400,000 records to the Selective Service No drivers license, no problems.
More like No ID, no problems.
Except no ID is its own problem.
Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#25A clerk working with the state’s database failed to select the century, producing records for males born between 1993 and 1997 Wait so.. The US is drafting?
Right. It's essentially a ceremonial piece of paperwork, dating from a more militarized time (USSR etc) when un-computerized governments didn't have many other ways to keep track of its citizens. Nowadays, no human being really cares if you register anymore, because there's no draft, and if there ever needed to be, they could require registration again and track down the delinquents using computers. So it'll probably…
They really do care if you register. If you don't register by 26 and decide to go to college later, you'll lose a significant amount of financial aid offered to independent students. There's no way to register after 26, so you're stuck.
Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#26"The glitch, it turns out, originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation during a transfer of nearly 400,000 records to the Selective Service. A clerk working with the state’s database failed to select the century, producing records for males born between 1993 and 1997 — and for those born a century earlier, PennDOT spokeswoman Jan McKnight said Thursday. ... The Selective Service didn’t initially cat…
The fix isn't particularly ridiculous. Updating an exisiting databases value from an 8 bit to 32 bit integer would have required quite possibly rebuilding the entire database and any software that was bound to getting an 8 bit integer as a return value (For example messages split by length rather than coupled with a label). Which might have been made harder because the hardware costs involved (say for the extra 20 hardrives to store the 20GB of data) would have been much higher than now. Much easier just to create another table that includes century and a foreign key pointing back to the database entry. Not great but it does the job and you can patch over what look like minor visual or selection errors as they pop up rather than dealing with every custom form that relies on the database throwing exceptions that stop workflow altogether.
As embarrassing as this headline is you can at least say the people who were supposed to get the communications did.
Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#27A clerk working with the state’s database failed to select the century, producing records for males born between 1993 and 1997 Wait so.. The US is drafting?
The notice was for the recipients to register, which all American men must do when they turn 18.
"must" is pretty loose, if you don't fill the slip out nothing happens
Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#28Gov tech is always fun. I just remember when I had to do it I tried to register sometime late at night (2am-ish?) and was surprised to see that their system had crazy amounts of planned downtime per week. It took a few days before I remembered to do it when it was accepting registrations.
Found wayback link: It is not operational when system maintenance is scheduled from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. U.S. Central Time Tuesday through Saturday and from 6 p.m. Wednesday to 2 a.m. Thursday.
(https://web.archive.org/web/20011101001831/http://www4.sss.g...)
Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#29"The glitch, it turns out, originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation during a transfer of nearly 400,000 records to the Selective Service. A clerk working with the state’s database failed to select the century, producing records for males born between 1993 and 1997 — and for those born a century earlier, PennDOT spokeswoman Jan McKnight said Thursday. ... The Selective Service didn’t initially cat…
The fix isn't particularly ridiculous. Updating an exisiting databases value from an 8 bit to 32 bit integer would have required quite possibly rebuilding the entire database and any software that was bound to getting an 8 bit integer as a return value (For example messages split by length rather than coupled with a label). Which might have been made harder because the hardware costs involved (say for the extra 20 ha…
Most Y2K issues were not about 8 bits vs. 32 bits, but about storing years as two-character strings. Otherwise we might have seen problems in years like 2028 or 2156.
This story is proof that one cannot "patch over minor [...] errors as they pop up" as you say.
Re: 14,000 draft notices sent to men born in 1800s
#30"The glitch, it turns out, originated with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation during a transfer of nearly 400,000 records to the Selective Service. A clerk working with the state’s database failed to select the century, producing records for males born between 1993 and 1997 — and for those born a century earlier, PennDOT spokeswoman Jan McKnight said Thursday. ... The Selective Service didn’t initially cat…
Well see, they wrote all this bank software, and, uh, to save space, they used two digits for the date instead of four. So, like, 98 instead of 1998? Uh, so I go through these thousands of lines of code and, uh... it doesn't really matter. I uh, I don't like my job, and, uh, I don't think I'm gonna go anymore.
^ office space quote.