Re: sick and fucking tired of this Y2k shit

[dana@dtn.com]

>

It was caused by
>the bad management of programmers and bad programmers pushed by ever
>growing deadlines from marketing and VP's of nothing and the usual
>government programming projects bought at the lowest bidder from
>contractors who don't give a shit and look forward to getting paid for
>fixing bugs,

Ehem.  Nice try, but it was caused by 2k computers, 10M harddrives (or no
harddrive), and the other assorted antique hardware that was once
high-tech.  I am sick of hearing how "Bad programmers" caused this "Bug".
It is not a bug, it is a feature that was practically required on older
hardware.  In fact I would bet that over the course of the last 30 odd
years the savings from using 2 digit years would easily pay for this
"crisis".  Here is an example for you:

Some Insurance Company Inc has a database of customer records.  This
database contains the date in 4 fields; Date of Birth, Start of Policy, End
of Policy, and Last transaction date.  By only using 2 digit dates you are
able save 64 bits per record.  Not much, but when the company has
100,000,000 customers/records this works out to 700M+.  Now in the late
80's I bought a 40M scsi harddrive and it cost me $900.  With this as a
base price storing those extra letters would have cost an extra $15,000 or
so (probably more).

Now I know my example is kinda weak, but the same was done throughout the
computer industry.  Maybe you started out on Windows 95 on a Pentium, but
there was ALOT of computing going on before MS even opened it's doors.  It
used to be that, particularly in DB systems, data items had a "Normal"
size, a rather small normal size.  I can't recall  what they were now, but
they were like 8 char for first name, 12 char last name, etc.  While these
seem silly now, they were once rather important.

You really need to keep in mind:

Paper tape
Punched cards
8" floppys
<100M harddrives
Nine and sixteen track tape
Floppy jukeboxs
etc.

The fact that code that was written 10-30 years ago is still in use is a
testimony to those who wrote it.  How many programs have you written that
will still be in use 30 years from now?  How many programs do you OWN that
you still think you will be using in 30 years?

Dan Anderson

P.S.  Feel free to make fun of anyone who has written code for modern
hardware and "forgot"  the first two digits of the year.  But these new
programs don't run control towers, utility districts, etc.  They let you
play solitare.