[birdsman]

You guys are making fun of this story, but we should be concerned. This could be the most devastating thing to happen since the Y2K bug hit.

[Semi Civil Servant]

I guess we think alike. :)

[expatpat]

LOL!

[Qwinn]

"This could be the most devastating thing to happen since the Y2K bug hit."

Hey, now, be fair :) The reason Y2K was no big deal -was- because of all the hysteria about it. The problem got fixed (and all the hiring that was done to get it fixed was actually a big part of the late '90's economic boom).

But as a computer programmer, I can tell you, if the problem had been dismissed, if legions of programmers out there hadn't been hired to do what they did to solve the problem, 1/1/2000 -would- have been very nasty.

Know when the next big computer problem will hit? It's sometime in 2031. The date/time system in the C programming language (which both Unix and Windows are written in) measures time as the number of seconds since some arbitrary date they picked way back (I think since 1950 or something like that). Obviously, the number of seconds since 1950 is one smegging huge number. It runs out/rolls over in 2031. That'll be fun. But this time, I suspect the problem is gonna get ignored - and then we'll see how crazy the Y2K people were ;)

Qwinn