9/9/99 BIG TROUBLE ???

[skywalker[TSG]]

hmm ive heard of Y2K and now this i did not know that the date 9/9/1999 would be dangerous but ive heard that it will be is this true ??

[drdeath]

i dont know all the details, but i can tell you what ive heard....
i guess in like, really old programs and stuff, programmers used the 9/9/99 as an "ending date" or something. so, when the program gets to that date, the program will end or stop working. i think thats the jist of it... someone correct me if im wrong....

[Petros]

I heard that the code 9999 is like a delete key or something... don't know if it's true, just what a little bird told me /forum/smile.gif

[elite]

A long time ago (in a far away land?) disk space was expensive and in short supply. Every
single byte counted, and programmers were always looking for shortcuts.

Imagine, now, a customer record. There's this field for "Date Paid" and it really doesn't
hold anything valid until the customer makes their payment. Right? Now we could just
leave random bytes in the field, but shoot, wouldn't it be better if we could actually use it
for something useful? So, instead of setting up a Yes/No field for whether the payment
had come in, we could just set the "Date Paid" field so something to indicate they hadn't
paid their bill yet. When they did pay the bill, we could insert the correct date. Gee, that
saves us a whole byte of disk space...

Yep, you guessed it. The special info we inserted into that Date Paid field was a date SO
FAR into the future we just knew we would never see it - 9/9/99.

Does it really matter? Well, say my electric bill is due on Sept 10th. Say I pay it on Sept
9th. On Sept 11th (or perhaps after a grace period of X days), there's going to be this
little snippet of code somewhere that effectively says:

If DateDue > Today and DatePaid = "9/9/99" then
ShutOff The Deadbeat's Electricity!
End If

Depending on the grace periods involved, this little problem could surface any time in the
next several months. Of course, the moral is simple - don't pay anything on 9/9/99 !!!



The whole post is at: http://www.aota.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000528.html

[This message has been edited by elite (edited 09-06-99).]

[U-96]

If we had used the Jewish or Chinese calendar then we wouldn't have this problem.
Alternatly, the Arabs have another 500-600 years to get it fixed. /forum/smile.gif

U-96

[nilknarf]

Everyone seems to thing that the y2k bug won't hit until 1-1-00! Aren't they going to be suprised!

The bug actually started 1-1-99! And many dates in '99 are special codes in many programs, 9-9-99 just happens to be one of the more significant one's.

Good luck! If we're still here Friday, with no bills overdue, then we'll know if the 9-9-99 bug was fixed. But, that's not the only one left before the end of the year!

9-11-99
10-1-99
10-11-99
11-1-99
11-11-99
12-31-99

I'm sure I missed a few! I don't think y2k itself is going to cause major problems. I'm more concerned with people's reaction to the new year. A friend of mine put it quite nicely, "What's everyone so worried about, it's just a new year."

I'm sure ther will be problems for a week or two, but, life must go on!

[welsh wizard]

what about 2/29/2000! heard this is going to be just as much problem as a lot of the fixes have forgotten this date.

[800XL]

Beware of Y10k! Or, the even more insidious, Y1G...

We really should go to a calendar based on stellar precesion, a nice even 25,000 year cycle. (Well, almost even.)

[U-96]

No one get on a ship tomorrow!

Coastguard alert over '9-9-99' bug
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_439000/439884.stm

The aptly-named U-96

[Nathan G]

To: Elf Magic 8Ball
How does you civilzation keep time?
Has your people sufferered similar problems in keeping time reference? Are operators dumber than the machine they are running there (like here)?
Looking for a fix for us earthlings...
Could you loan us a time machine for emergency repairs? LOL

[Underclocked]

Just think about what Y1K did to mankind!
Several hundred years of the Dark Ages. /forum/wink.gif

[nilknarf]

Captain's Log Stardate 2-29-2000@#$^&@$%&U!%&

In the year 1K, this calendar didn't exist!

If I remember correctly, leap year works like this:

Every 4th year, except cenntenial years (ie. 1800, 1900), unless it's divisible by 400 (ie. 1600, 2000, 2400).

I think there's more to it, but this is relevant to most computer programs.

Most older computers do not take in to account the last part and think 2000 is not a leap year when it actually is, I think.

This is a matter that is very confusing when it comes to leap year. Even us experts get lost trying to remember it. The whole thing got started to put our calendar back on track. The person that created the system knew that the calendar would need correction eventually, so he came up with the leap year idea. This is one of the most accurate solar calendars ever created. The trick is remebering how it works. The leap year was needed because the day is slightly less than 24 hours. The year ends up being off by about 6 hours. In order for the calendar to match the location of the Earth around the Sun, we have to adjust the calendar every 4th year, every 100 years, every 400 years, and every 1000 years. The result, most people don't know what time it is according to the Earth's orbit around the Sun, and most don't actually care! It's just one more thing to confuse us with!

After all this, you should know that there are a handful of ancient calendars that are more accurate than ours and have never needed adjusting!

[KillerBug]

Hehehe...just think they year 3000, with the kind of laws getting harsher and hardsher now for the last 70 years, and so few fredoms left in the US, "The land of the free", in 3000, we will all want to get on planes, have the navagation systems die, and fall to our deaths. Oh, one other thing... 1000 is divisable by 4.

[This message has been edited by KillerBug (edited 09-08-99).]