Sunday Funnies Special Edition : Y2K Bug Apocalypse From http://www.ealoha.com - various sources... <<<>>> ***************************************************** * Sunday Funnies * Have you tried your smile today? ***************************************************** ***************************************************** * Happiness is a computer with a good sense of humor. ***************************************************** --- Apocalypse When? From the June 1998 issue of PC Computing, by John C. Dvorak. If we're to believe the news, the year 2000 problem will create havoc throughout the world. For those unfamiliar with the potential impact of Y2K, let me summarize. Many older computer programs, operating systems, and even embedded products have always used two digits to calculate the date--for example, 75,76,77 means 1975, 1976, and 1977. When the year 2000 arrives, suddenly we go from 99 to 00, or what is actually the computer equivalent of the year 1900. Overnight, any program code that makes a calculation based on the date will be dealing with minus 100 years instead of a one-day increment. The calculation will fail or give an erroneous result. This mistake may cause a tremendous financial hit for someone. Big corporations and government agencies like the Social Security Administration will send people the wrong checks--or no checks at all. Domino Effect The situation will not be easily corrected and many believe it will collapse the economy. This will be worsened by municipal systems that will cut off people's gas, light, and water since they haven't paid their bill for 100 years. On their way to correct this mistake, the public will find itself in massive gridlock because many of the controllers running the traffic signals will fail. Dams will overflow, drowning millions of people on their way to the corporate headquarters to demand their money. Those who manage to arrive will find the buildings dark since the backup generators won't work. The elevators will be stuck between floors because the controllers can't make heads or tails out of the 00 date, which means "off." All the new car computers that monitor engines with a real-time computer system have date stamping that will fail at midnight, making it impossible to start the car. TVs will work at home, but the computerized systems at the broadcasting centers will fail so nothing except channel 70 UHF in Gnaw Bone, Indiana, which uses antique gear, will be able to broadcast. Food riots will break out as flashlight-carrying maniacs ransack darkened stores with automatic doors that don't work. But the cops will not be able to stop the rioting because police and fire dispatch systems won't work. As computer scheduling fails, the food distribution system will fall apart. The homeless will flock to the farmlands looking for food only to be butchered as trespassers, their bodies left to rot. Carrion will abound. Disease will spread from the rotting corpses and be transferred to the cities by packs of wild dogs. Cougars, mountain lions, and rabid skunks will roam the city streets attacking whatever they can. People will shoot at the animals in the darkness and end up killing each other. Eve of Destruction Then things will get really bad. Nuclear fail-safe systems around the world will die, guidance controls will fail, and the missiles will fly, exploding in a random pattern all over the globe. Bombs hitting the North Pole will melt the ice caps, causing the flooding and destruction of all coastal cities. Sharks will swim the warm waters running through downtown San Francisco, feasting on the Armani-clad venture capitalists and lawyers. Dormant volcanos will be triggered. Earthquakes will bring down all the buildings in all the cities, crushing the public in glass shard. Nuclear holocaust will lead to martial law and vigilantism. Containment systems for biological and chemical systems will fail and horrible diseases spread rapidly everywhere. All babies will be mutants. All women bald. True zombies will walk the earth. This is more than economic collapse. It's the end of civilization as we know it. Then again, the upshot of Y2K could be nothing but a series of funny incidents laughingly reported on the nightly news. I'm banking on the latter thesis, although I do have a small supply of water just in case. The data gathered by Computer Intelligence and other research firms suggests that most large companies and the government are on top of the year 2000 problem. It's the small businesses that likely haven't considered Y2K--including end users like you and me. So what can we really expect? Probably a glut of skilled programmers on the market who'd been working on the problem for the past few years. They'll need a job. by John C. Dvorak (pccdvorak@zd.com)