Y2K Heretic

Many predictions have been made about Y2K. Many of them have been made be laughably ignorant people -- at least that's the view of the Y2K Heretic. Below, the Y2K Heretic examines some of the more egregious pronouncements floating around:

April 9, 1999 is a major Y2K milestone

This foolishness arises from the fact that April 9 is the 99^th day of 1999 - it certainly is. The doom-and-gloomers continue with the notion that this will be recorded in computers as 9999, and programs will identify 9999 as end-of-file and have big problems on this date.
     Stuff and Nonsense.
     Mainframe computers use dates composed of the year and the relative day of the year, eg. January 2, 1999 is recorded as 99002, April 13, 1999 is recorded as 99104, etc. This method of storing dates is often, through erroneously, referred to as a Julian Date. This date methodology makes things like sorting and determining number days between two dates relatively easy, at the expense of having to de-code it (convert it to the more familiar m/d/y format) for human readability.
     What the gloom and doomers fail to recognize is that dates in this format are stored in five digits. What that means is that April 9 ^th will look like 99099, not 9999. There is no programming significance to "99099."

This prediction is based on abysmal ignorance. The Y2K Heretic suggests you consider this when wondering about other things the same person says.

September 9, 1999 is a major Y2K milestone

This foolishness arises from the fact that September 9 yields a date of 9/9/99 or 9999. Somehow, computer programs are supposed to interpret this as being end-of-file. Well, some programs do interpret a field of all 9's as being end-of-file, but September 9, 1999 will not yield a field of all 9's.
      Like April 9^th above, this prediction is based on abysmal ignorance. The computer will store the date as 090999. The machines need the zeroes in order to prevent ambiguity. For instance, if the zeroes aren't present, what is 12399? If you say it's oviously January 23^rd, I'll answer that nope, it's December 3^rd. The zeroes are needed to be sure which date it is. 090999 is nobody's patteren for end-of-file, or anything else of significance.

The Y2K Heretic suggests you consider the underlying ignorance expressed in this predicition when wondering about other things the same person says.


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   Page updated 05/22/99