Re: Year 2000 Solutions Conference

In <4bet0v$ak1@grid.direct.ca> emvy@platon.com (Maarten Veerman) writes: >In article <uspdi-2112951633250001@uspdi.clark.net>, uspdi@clark.net says... >GIVE IT A FUCKING REST, ASSHOLE! >> The Year 2000 date problem is coming up fast, and you need a solution. >>To stay ahead of the problem you need to attend the Had a little too much coffee, Maarten? Sounds like you could use a vacation. It is a very real problem in the real world, where sometimes old design decisions stop making sense. I'm well aquainted with an accounting system created 25 years ago, when disk space was real expenseive. Since every single record had at least one date, saving 2 bytes per date was significant. Also, we had memeory restrictions on those 11/70's, and we would tune code to make the data and program space as small as possible. So the redundant "19" was ditched. After all who ever heard of a system having a life cycle that long? The designers expected it to last 7 - 12 years. Well, now it looks like that system was so well designed that it will be operating well into the next century. And when the original designers get together and marvel at how long it's lived, they say, "that was real well designed. In fact, if we had to do it all over again, there's only one thing we'd do differently - USE 4 DIGIT YEARS". So all the children braying about how stupid anyone who designed a system with 2 year dates is just showing their inexperience. A system with only one flaw like that that has lived for 20 years is truly amazing. Now, fixing that one flaw is going to be a major undertaking. So I'm veryi interested in what others have to say about solutions that DON'T involve converting 20 years of historical data by hand and combing through thousands of programs by hand. So if you're tired of hearing about it, use your 'n' key, and ignore it. Some of us have REAL work to do. -- r l reid ro@panix.com : Nisht geshtoygn, http://www.panix.com/~ro : nisht gefloygn.