Re:All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours
by larrywright on Friday June 12, 2009 @11:00PM
(#655734)
It always irritates me when people say "Y2K was such a non-event". It was a non-event because a whole lot of people fixed and tested a whole lot of code. If they hadn't, the world would have been a pretty miserable place on 1/1/2000.
Re:All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours
by eru on Saturday June 13, 2009 @06:07AM
(#656017)
Perhaps not really miserable, but a lot of things in administration (etc) would not have continued to work.
(My grandfather was also one of those fixers.)
Re:All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours
by larrywright on Saturday June 13, 2009 @12:10PM
(#656233)
Depends... the code that runs an insurance company is one thing. The embedded computers would likely have been the biggest problem - things that dispense medicine, control the power grid, etc.
Re:All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours
by eru on Saturday June 13, 2009 @01:30PM
(#656301)
Few embedded systems depend on the date, do they?
Re:All Hell May Break Loose On Twitter In 2 Hours
by larrywright on Tuesday June 16, 2009 @05:53PM
(#660971)
I don't have first hand experience, but from what I understood, yes. Particularly in monitoring devices: "Shut this off if you haven't received a signal in x minutes". That sort of thing.
> It’s possibly a coincidence, but Twitter has just welcomed two new members to its API team today. Is Twitter manning up for the battle?
Right, because as a company, what you really want to do if a big hammer is about to fall on you is immediately hire a couple of new programmers who aren't familiar with your internals at all.
> It’s now past 2 PM and no reports of massive failures yet. Perhaps this really is just like Y2K.
Yep, because there's no such thing as a bunch of programmers who spent a lot of hours fixing code _before_ it broke. (I was one of them.)