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February 8, 2007
Is DST the Real Y2K?
While Y2K was a bust, there are a lot of people more credibly nervous about the unanticipated consequences of the change in daylight savings time coming up on March 11th. With DST moved forward four weeks in the U.S., courtesy of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, all sorts of technology-related things are seemingly set to go awry, most of them having to do with computers soon to be confused for a few weeks about whether it is really now, or an hour from now, or something else altogether.You can find more here from Microsoft, which will be at the epicenter of much of the DST blowup.
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Y2K spending stopped on 01/01/00 and when tech companies saw the numbers for the quarter that began that day the NASDAQ crashed. Yes, of course there were other reasons as well.
On March 11 some things will be an hour late, I hope it's not my pizza delivery.
31 December 2039, now there's a date to mark on your calendar.
Sorry, I got it wrong, actual date:
Tuesday, January 19 03:14:07 2038
I don't see this as a big deal - I may be missing something. The patches are delivered or on the way, we know what has to be patched.
I'm always willing to be surprised.
If nothing happened on y2k how was the money wasted? You simply can't tell from that data point. If we spent all that money and lots of things happened then, yes, the money was wasted. It's strange how poorly some people think.
8849's point that the money spent on Y2K preparations wasn't wasted because nothing bad happened is comparable to the story of the guy on the train throwing bits of paper out the window "To keep the alligators away." When a fellow passenger assured him that there were no alligators within 3000 miles, he replied "I know. I'm keeping them away."
Much of the money "wasted" on y2k was actually spent on IT upgrades that could have waited a few years but for y2k so it was a shot in the arm for tech as much as a disaster preventative.
The spending just quit on 01/01/00 precipitating panic in the IT sector where they naively thought that all the upgrading was "normal."
Where did I make the point that money spent on Y2K preparations wasn't wasted, zbignew? Or are you just trying to help out my point that some people have poor thinking facilities? Priceless.
It's impossible to know what percentage of the money was well-spent and what percent was wasted. But there is no question that there was a real problem that could only be resolved through investment. Are the "Y2K deniers" really claiming that there was no problem to begin with? That magically the two-digit date fields would continue working properly through some kind of magic?
Does nobody remember how, after all the time and money wasted on Y2K consultants, nothing happened? Then, instead of looking embarrassed at all the money they extorted out of companies with their fallacious tales of doom and gloom, some of them "Oh, February 2000 is a leap year! That's when the real problems will start!" Back then it was nothing more than a shameless attempt to keep the party rolling. Today we should know better.