Channel 10's top 3 story tonight was "Y2K may still bite" (they said it but it
might have been 'byte'). They may never let go, Y3K IS lerking.
Did hear of a genuine Y2K stuff up in America, a friend does tech support for a
medical billing agency....
>Unfortunately the company (SMS) pulled a total boneheaded Y2K maneuver.
>Some of their customers own their own
>hardware and some lease time on the SMS mainframe in Pennsylvania.
>
>The customers with their own hardware had no problems but apparently their
>was some Y2K fix which was to activate at each installation at 12:00 AM.
>Unfortunately someone at SMS (who probably won't have a job tomorrow) failed
>to take into account the fact that this fix would occur in Penn. 3 hours
>before the West Coast. The details aren't clear but for every customer in a
>time zone different from Penn. lost all of their data entered before the
>systems were synchronized. One of the customers is San Francisco General
>Hospital. Of course the late evening news on New Year's Eve reported no
>problems anywhere except for the billing software at SF General.
>
>As you can imagine the press was bitterly disappointed at the lack of Y2K
>calamity so the fear is that they'll really latch on to this one.
Ken Yap wrote:
> >No!
> >Even my ancient Cyrix 686 166+ happily clicked over to 1/1/2000. The only
> >problem I have heard of is a company in the US whose system crashed when
> >they tested it a couple of days before the new year. Maybe everyone took
> >sufficient measures ahead of time.
>
> A Cyrix is hardly ancient. And it's not the processor that matters but
> the RTC. Linux, like Unices, doesn't have a Y2K problem in the kernel,
> but a Y2038 problem, which will be fixed as time_t is becoming a 64
> bit integer (it already is in glibc). So leaving your computer on is
> no test. Turning it on again after NY is, because the system time gets
> loaded from the RTC. I think the Linux hardware clock utilities know
> how to deal with RTCs that wrap around to 1980.
>
> I'd like now to see those doom and gloom Y2K bug alarmists go crawl
> under a rock in shame. :-)
> --
> SLUG - Sydney Linux Users Group Mailing List - http://www.slug.org.au
> To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
> unsubscribe in the text
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux Users Group Mailing List - http://www.slug.org.au
To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
unsubscribe in the text
