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*                                                            * 
*                         CYBERSPACE                         * 
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         * 
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   * 
*                                                            * 
* Copyright 2000 Karl Mamer                                  * 
* Free for online distribution                               * 
* All Rights Reserved                                        * 
* Direct comments and questions to:                          * 
*                                         * 
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Y2K not Y2Chaos!

In October 1998, I advised readers of Cyberspace to spend Y2K 
in their basements guarding their possessions. Not that I 
thought anything big was going to happen. This is the way I've 
spent every New Years of my adult life. Alone. Looking at my 
things. Why should you be so special?

At the last minute, I decided to go all out for New Year's Eve. 
I spent it on a friend's couch. I ate sushi with software 
developers and we watched CNN's coverage of Y2K celebrations 
around the globe. 

We all wore matching khaki pants. Most wore grey vneck 
sweaters. The alpha geeks wore T-shirts from companies that 
don't exist anymore like Infocom or T-shirts advertising 
products that never existed like Microsoft OS/2. Some never 
undid faded University of Waterloo jackets so I don't know, or 
care, what they were wearing underneath.

While waiting for Y2K EST so we could all go "happy New Year" 
and go home, we talked of MST3K, DS9, T2, and B5. By an 
unstated convention, no one spoke of Ep. 1. It's all been said. 

As the night wore on past 8 pm and drinks flowed and ice cream 
was mixed liberally with mugs full of Coke and some joker 
spiked the Coke punch with Pepsi, developers spoke of matters 
more serious to the heart. They talked of how hard it is to 
wait 3 years for a $1 million worth of stock options to vest, 
and, oh yeah, the beautiful women we'd never, ever meet.

But there was one thing we were waiting for more than being 
able to jump in our Volkswagen Golfs and go home. We were 
waiting for chaos. 

So many countries had spent so little on such a big thing, it 
was assured the Y2K bug was going to give us something to sneer 
at.

And then it happened. Nothing.

Every time the ball dropped in such places as Auckland, Seoul, 
and Moscow, there was a sense of let down as events failed to 
unfold. How could this be? Nuclear power plants didn't explode! 
Terrorist didn't lay waste to Seattle and parts of Redmond! 
Cars with more computers under the hood than NASA owns didn't 
become self-aware and rise up against their creators!

My microchip-tagged cat never once stood on two legs and talked 
like a human.

I had a friend who had practiced, for three full years, 
screaming "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" at the 
stroke of this very midnight. He tried to OD on a mouthful of 
wasabi. Brandishing an air pistol, I got a chef at Nami to 
resuscitate him with some ill-prepared fugu.

In the critical hours that followed the disturbingly smooth 
transition to the Year 2000, Y2K consultants/doomsayers went to 
ground and destroyed their dental records. Who could forget 
Benito Mussolini's fate at the hands of enraged Italians? 

The Ebay auction site slowed to a crawl as consultants 
hopelessly tried  to unload Y2K-related domain names. Desperate 
attempts were made to remove even a hint a person ever once 
made a single dollar suggesting (only suggesting) companies 
spend one hundred million dollars making sure every bit of 
hardware from the computer room to the lunchroom fully 
understood Y2K meant 2000 and not 1900 or 19100.

The long-ignored pundits who said the date flip would be no 
biggy suddenly appeared on the op ed pages of very important 
newspapers saying "I told you so" in 850 words. A few suggested 
mass arrests of the Y2K doomsayers would soon follow.  It would 
be a victor's justice.

About the only thing actually selling on Ebay was carry-on 
luggage (in Air Canada's new regulation size) being sold off by 
the Y2K Doom consultants to the Y2K I Told You So crowd. It's 
clear there's soon to be big money giving seminars to 
executives on how to avoid expensive hype-fueled boondoggles in 
the near future.

It's anybody's guess how the next generation of VPs look at our 
experience with Y2K and apply it to the warnings of the Y2K+38 
consultants. 

Huh?

Simply put, time-related functions in C/C++ runtime libraries 
use a 32-bit long int variable type to define the current date 
as the number of seconds that have elapsed since Jan. 1, 1970 
(the notional start of the PC era and more specifically the day 
Peter Norton first donned a dress shirt). Naturally, a long int 
overflows past 2,147,483,647. When computer clocks strike 
03:14:07 Jan 18, 2038 (exactly 2,147,483,647 seconds since Jan. 
1, 1970 and by coincidence, a Monday) computers will reset 
clocks to 1970.

Momma, don't raise your boys (and girls) to be consultants.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

               ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs)                   ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson)