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This is special???

SkepticalScience

Thinker
S
Joined
Jul 2, 2003
Messages
225
So, a few people at work were talking about how they were suprised no news-worthy event took place because of the "special significance" of this date:

"On Wednesday of this week, April 5th, at two minutes and three
seconds after 1:00 In the morning, the time and date will be
01:02:03 04/05/06. That won't ever happen again. Don't be suprised
if something newworthy occurs"

I'd like a witty reply to this nonsense.

Seems, like there should be a whole bunch of these "significant dates".

The best I could think of was: 02:03:04 05/06/07

That happens next year, and is just as significant, no?
 
Tell them the newsworthy events are waiting for 06:06:06 06/06/06.
 
SkepticalScience said:
So, a few people at work were talking about how they were suprised no news-worthy event took place because of the "special significance" of this date:

"On Wednesday of this week, April 5th, at two minutes and three
seconds after 1:00 In the morning, the time and date will be
01:02:03 04/05/06. That won't ever happen again. Don't be suprised
if something newworthy occurs"

I'd like a witty reply to this nonsense.

Seems, like there should be a whole bunch of these "significant dates".

The best I could think of was: 02:03:04 05/06/07
Click to expand...

01:02:04 04/05/06

It's just a second later and just as unique. Of course, in German we give the day first, and then the month, so what you thought was 01:02:03 04/05/06 actually was 01:02:03 05/04/06.

You'll just have to wait another month for anything newsworthy to happen.

I shall ignore the sillyness of claiming that that date won't ever occur again. It will, in just 1000 years. Also, we have something caled timezones - so an hour earlier it had been that precise date somehwere else on the planet; and just an hour later it will be that precise time somewhere else yet again.

I will not even speculale why the cosmos should care about the Julian Calender, though...
 
SkepticalScience said:
So, a few people at work were talking about how they were suprised no news-worthy event took place because of the "special significance" of this date:

"On Wednesday of this week, April 5th, at two minutes and three
seconds after 1:00 In the morning, the time and date will be
01:02:03 04/05/06. That won't ever happen again. Don't be suprised
if something newworthy occurs"
Click to expand...

Someone mentioned this to me last night. Apparently they read it in the online edition of 'Wired'. I couldn't help wondering what was so unspecial about 01:02:03 on the 5th of April, 1906. Or 1806. Or what's ruling out 2106 and 2206.

Not to mention that it's actually 05/04/06 here, which is nowhere near as cosmically exciting.
 
SkepticalScience said:
So, a few people at work were talking about how they were suprised no news-worthy event took place because of the "special significance" of this date:

"On Wednesday of this week, April 5th, at two minutes and three
seconds after 1:00 In the morning, the time and date will be
01:02:03 04/05/06. That won't ever happen again."
Click to expand...
It'll happen again on the 4th of May. At least over here. ;)

Edit: I see two posters have beaten me to it this time! :mad:
 
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You could point out the arbitrary nature of time measurement, or how different formats could be used that would render the "special" nature of that particular date and time meaningless, in the UK, that particular date and time would be 01:02:03 05/04/06, and the number sequence they quote would happen on 4th May.

It's already happened millenia ago for the Jewish calendar (except that they don't tend to use numbers to represent the months), and will happen at yet another date for the Muslem calendar.

You could use Julian time, which would represent that particular time and date as 2453830.54309 JD.

Not looking so special now is it? :p

ETA Julian date converter
 
Dates, eh?

01/01/2000
05/05 2000

In the lead-up to Y2K, I worked in IT, shovelling coal into a firm's systems. A good friend's father (not in IT) looked at me across a kitchen table seriously one day and told me to pay attention, and take seriously the Y2K warnings. He was stockpiling food, water, and had bought a camper to go to the hills (he already owned several guns from decades past, so no news there). I tried to patiently advise him that people were working on the problem, and not to expect the end of the world.

The world didn't end.

He then kept his stockpiles for the 05/05/2000 planetary conjunction. He even bought a poster!

The world didn't end.

It's been a coupla years since I talked to my buddy about his dad, but apparently he subsequently went camping, let his stockpile start dwindling and talked less woo.

Go figure. :rolleyes:
 
Jimbo07 said:
I tried to patiently advise him that people were working on the problem, and not to expect the end of the world.
Click to expand...

What, there really WAS a problem?

I thought it was largely BS invented to sell expensive fixes. I hardly expect people smart enough to invent operating systems were myopic enough to not to see a turn of century coming.
 
It wasn't operating systems, it was applications. And yes... there were problems in some systems.
 
tkingdoll:

Most of them expected their code to be replaced before then :)

There were some problems, mostly with accounting type features. Figuring dates, and more specifically, the differences between dates. Initially, code for much software was developed to use a two digit date due to the high cost of memory. You can cut each stored date by 2 bytes, and this is a signifigant savings in a large database, especially when 10MB hard drives and 64K RAM are the norm. The problem was, a lot of this code (and the two digit year convention) were kept, even as software was updated. Almost all of the modern OSs could capably handle the year without trouble (Windows systems, for example, track the date by the number of seconds from a starting point. They'll "run out" in something like 2021 or 2012). The biggest worry came in from custom code and software applications. Many businesses still used older custom COBOL programs, for example, that were coded in for a two-digit year. Some embedded systems (dedicated chips and computers for things like fire alarms or small electronics) also used two-digit years for the memory (and therfore cost) savings.

I doubt it would have been the "doom and gloom" situation many predicted, but if it had hit unawares it could have had a signifigant impact, especially in the financial markets.
 
I had to deal with it. A database I imported used 2 digit years, and then switched to 4 digit years as the year 2000 came up. I found a few places where my code didn't handle that correctly, and had to modify it to handle either the 2 or 4 digit version (since the users might be using either database version). No biggie, but it was a problem that had to be looked into and solved.

And, by the way, some of this data was being used to compute magnetic variations that were being fed into aircraft for navigation purposes, so it was "kind of" important to get right.
 
I was also mildly involved in Y2K work in IT. I mostly worked on the Network connectons/equipment between the main data center and the remote building the test systems were being ran in.

As I recall, the problems were mostly COBAL and/or FORTRAN (fuzzy on the language, and a nagging feeling it's neither of these, but it's the best I can remember ATM. I have slept since then;-) apps that had been in use for many years, and had been set up with only 2 digits for the year field.

The company was an old insurance company and spent about 2 years as I recall working on the issue. The last 6 months or so was when the test site was set up and testing using live or current data was started.

I know that the language of most concern was one not used that much any more, and the programers that had experiance in it were getting top dollar to show their skills.
 
SkepticalScience said:
So, a few people at work were talking about how they were suprised no news-worthy event took place because of the "special significance" of this date:

"On Wednesday of this week, April 5th, at two minutes and three
seconds after 1:00 In the morning, the time and date will be
01:02:03 04/05/06. That won't ever happen again. Don't be suprised
if something newworthy occurs"

I'd like a witty reply to this nonsense.

Seems, like there should be a whole bunch of these "significant dates".

The best I could think of was: 02:03:04 05/06/07

That happens next year, and is just as significant, no?
Click to expand...
The newsworthy event is that this will only happen once. Isn't that enough?
 
sinclairmcevoy said:
The newsworthy event is that this will only happen once. Isn't that enough?
Click to expand...
Only once every century! Except it's twice, because of the UK/US format difference. And it doesn't mean anything because it's arbitrary.

Otherwise, yeah it's newsworthy itself. :rolleyes:
 
tkingdoll said:
What, there really WAS a problem?
Click to expand...

In addition to what Huntsman wrote, there was a bug, albeit a relatively minor one, in building automation systems that turned off the heating and air conditioning on certain days of the week. If the system calculated the day of the week from the date (and most didn't, they simply performed an increment at midnight ie. if yesterday was Monday then today is Tuesday), the building systems would be off when they should be on. And even in those the solution was to set the year back to 1972.

But, yeah, the claims made by the kooks would have required every single silicon chip in the world to contain an instruction that said "If year = 0 then blow-up()". The simple fact is the vast majority of computerized control systems (eg car ignition, airplane systems, etc) that they were claiming were going to fail catastrophically don't care what year it is and probably don't even have a place to store it or code that uses it. And if they did they would likely just not operate as expected, not explode.

The short answer is, "Yes, there was a problem. No, it wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be."

And just to point out how little people really understood it, I had people trying to tell me it wasn't going to happen until 2001 since that's when the millenium really started.
 
Huntsman said:
Mainframes...*shudder* *twitch*
Click to expand...

The shop I worked in required several solutions from serving a web page to accessing legacy data. The OS's I can rattle off the top of my head from when I left (5 yrs ago):

IBM system/390, OS/2, Windows NT, Windows 2000, MS/DOS (:eek: ), and I did an evaluation project which included Linux-based thin clients.

Good times! :jaw-dropp

Oh, and I heard every stupid prediction from "nuclear missiles will spontaneously launch" to "your toaster will fail and you'll choke on burned toast." :D
 
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I was consulting for a large company that wanted to make sure every product provider was Y2K complaint. At the time, I was providing IT training assistance and not writing any code. Their corporate headquarters still tried to get me to sign something saying that my services were Y2K compliant.

I kept telling them I did not provide products. This went back and forth until they sent me a letter in legalese thanking me for asserting (by my not providing products) that I was Y2K compliant. I wrote back that in the case I was not Y2K compliant, I would either be 100 years late to work, or they would get invitations to the funeral. I received no more correspondence.

CT

ETA - this is also the same company that kept threating me with release if I did not fill out the "optional" government declaration of Minority/Women Owned Business (MWOB). Thanks for the option.
 
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