Date: Fri, 06 Feb 1998 08:35:42 -0500 From: "Brian J. McGovern" <mcgovern@spoon.beta.com> To: robl@phoebe.accinet.net Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Year 2000 compliance statement? Message-ID: <199802061335.IAA17390@spoon.beta.com>
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Actually Robert, what it shows is the confusion and paranoia that surrounds the issue. The media has hyped this problem well above and beyond the level needed for "normal concerns". Therefore, most people who understand the problem chuckle every time they hear it. After 2000-3000 requests, it just becomes another annoying "newbie" question to them, and the frustration rises another notch. Remember that you're mostly dealing with people that have a firm belief that if you use a computer, you should have SOME idea of what is happening. They probably also believe that if you drive a car, you should know how an Internal Combustion Engine works, at least in principle. I, also, am of that camp ;) To be honest, I can't remember an OS (and i'm sure someone is about to correct me) that WASNT Year 2K compliant. OSs claiming they're "Year 2000 compliant" is a marketing gimmick so you dump all your old stuff, and buy the new, improved version.... which, if you ever read a marking guide, "New" translates in to "Costs a lot more", and "Improved" translates in to "We changed the interface as to be unrecognizable to our older users. All the bugs and problems with the prior release are still there, however". The problem is in the software. If I take a vintage 1982 Cobol business application and run it on a Circa 1998 Pentium II 233 with any operating system off the shelf, it'll still break, because INSIDE THE PROGRAM, dates are stored in two digits. Its merely a left-over from when they didn't have 128MB of Ram and 9.7GB of disk space to play with. The people who need to worry are those who run older business applications that show a tendancy to store years as two-digit date codes (ie, if you have a program that naturally shows the last date you got paid, for instance, as 01/01/98). Most of these are in large business arenas (such as financial institutions, governments, etc) that have been too dependant or too cheap to replace aging applications with modern ones. In these cases, their wakeup calls are two years away. Otherwise, if you run a fairly modern office, there shouldn't be ANY problems unless you run this type of legacy software. Now, I'm hoping this doesn't come across as a "tough sh*t" replay. It isn't meant to be. Its merely an explanation of the problem, and why getting a Y2K "statement" from the FreeBSD core would be considered laughable at their end of the pipe. If you'd like, feel free to take this email to your boss as not only a statement that FreeBSD, the OS itself, will survive the Year 2000 roll-over, but also as an explanation of the problem, so that they understand it, and can thereby manage it far more effectively. -Brian
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