this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
104 points (89.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36172 readers
528 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] solidgrue 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At the time I ran a large campus network where we spent all of December laying in contingency plans and doing tabletop drills just in case some Y2K bug hit and took us out.

I hosted a party that New Year's Eve, but stayed sober(-ish) so I could assess and deal with any fallout. Midnight approaches, we do the countdown. Clock hits zero and I smooch a couple of the ladies attending. I disappear to my home office upstairs to assess....

2 devices down, same location. 1 more device down, next door. Everything else us up and fine. Odd.

The devices all went down about 20 minutes prior to midnight. Not Y2K. Not critical sites, it can wait til next business day.

I close up shop about 0015 hours 2000-01-01 and go back downstairs to rejoin my party, aiming to catch up with the other drunks. Shenanigans ensue.

Reason For Outage: there was a frat house next door to the two buildings that went down, and they had a house fire that burned the tree out front, which scorched our aerial fiber runs into the next two buildings down. Ridiculous coincides are ridiculous.

So yeah. Y2K was a non-event.

[–] themeatbridge 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Y2K was a non-event.

It's worth mentioning that it was a non-event thanks to the tireless efforts of millions of programmers reviewing billions of lines of code. The problem was real, and the threat of total financial meltdown was real, and we prevented it because we all agreed that there was a problem that needed fixing.

It's also worth keeping in mind that the problem had been fixed for months, if not years, before the media turned it into a frenzy. Most of the work had been done, and it was only the slim chance that something critical had been overlooked. The panic and fearmongering was massively overblown. It's like being in a plane that lands, and then they announce the engine had fallen off in mid flight. Yes, it could have been bad, and the plane might still present a risk to everyone onboard, but the worst of the danger has passed.

[–] solidgrue 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's worth mentioning that it was a non-event thanks to the tireless efforts of millions of programmers reviewing billions of lines of code.

Oh, I don't mean to downplay the magnitude of the challenge! That it was a non-event is a minor miracle easily a decade in the making thanks entirely to the efforts of people way smarter than me. While I didn't sit in on code reviews myself, there were a couple of Old Programmers who came back from retirement to review some of our own COBOL code, and older. They were happy ro share. It was a formative event for me as a young buck.

The UNIX epoch rollover in 2038 is going to be more of the same. Many systems haven't yet been converted over to 64-bit time, and there are a LOT of embedded systems out there. Hopefully attrition will take them, but we all know the IT lore of that one old NT server sealed up in the wall, and still serving files somehow.....

[–] themeatbridge 1 points 1 year ago

Remeber in the 90s when 2038 seemed like the very distant future?