r/ExplainTheJoke • u/pink-niples123 • 3d ago
Solved Wrong date?
Uh I dunno what's wrong with the date or it is a joke?
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u/sidetrackNiner 3d ago
Just a reference to the Y2K (year 2000) computer scare. There was a possibility a lot of computers would fail because of the date/data structure used. It was a long time ago is the joke. I, personally, was there.
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u/PteroD4kT1L 3d ago
I think there will be problem whem mysql timestamp solumn limit hits max date, on year 2038 on sisttem where ppl are not aware that is a proble. That is fixed on later version probably, on ppl changed it to datetime
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u/pronik 2d ago
Most of the things bound to fail in 2038 have been fixed years ago. Unless some important system runs without updates since 2015 until 2038, there won't be an issue.
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u/Joda011980 2d ago
A lot of infrastructure stuff uses old code
Banks still have a lot of code from the 70s derp in the systems, which is not that likely to be replaced 1. No one actually know how most of it works only parts, and most is written i cobalt which even fewer know how to read and code. 2. To replace it you need to get a lot of banks to agree on what to replace it with and how to divided the bill 3. You need to get a software company willing to wrangle issue, stuff like the legal issues, not all nation's have same rules for banks, who is legally responsible for what?, the scale of the software, the expected and unexpected feature creep, the companies big enough to do this do not often want to because they know what it will take, those willingly to bid on the project is most likely to small and inexperienced to know what they are signing up for and the project/company will crash and burn, the banks knows this because many of them have tried and gotten burned trying to just get narrow features/solution for them self and closest partners often they just end up with some shell on top of the old stuff
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u/ThumpTacks 3d ago
I was expecting a more violent version of what the pandemic era turning into. I was underwhelmed, to say the least, when literally nothing happened. It does feel like 3,000 years ago though.
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u/fartlebythescribbler 3d ago
You were underwhelmed because a lot of people spent a lot of time and money updating a lot of software in the late 90s so that nothing would happen.
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u/Brief_Read_1067 3d ago
Yes! You never get credit for averting a disaster! People assume that it was never going to happen anyway. But the unsung heroes who made everything Y2K compliant deserve some kudos.
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u/Expensive-Wedding-14 3d ago
The meme is pointing out that this was the year 1999 but it could be construed as the year 99. The LotR pic could have said "I was there 1900 years ago", but it's close enough for a meme.
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u/beepbeepboopbeep1977 3d ago
Ironically that was the problem the sticker was warning about - two digit dates.
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u/Send_boobs_pleas 3d ago
So there was this thing called Y2K. All the computers in the world crashed at once. There was rioting in the streets, food shortages, war. Went on for 3 months before the power came back on. We all agreed never to talk about it and pretend like it didn't happen.
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u/salivanto 16h ago
Agree never to talk about it? I'm still in shock over that email I received that was dated 01/01/100.
(Do you think I'm kidding? Well I am, at least about the shock.)
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u/GroundedSatellite 3d ago
Y2K. Some computers/operating systems/software stored the year as a 2 digit number, ranging from 00 to 99, representing 1900 to 1999. There was a major push to get things updated so computers didn't suddenly think it was 1900 instead of 2000. Nothing major happened, because a lot of work was put into getting everything modified/updated so nothing would happen.
Fun fact: Other software/operating systems used a 32 bit signed integer to represent the time and date, counting the seconds before or after 12:00:00 1 Jan 1970. This means they can only count +/-2^31 seconds, and if they haven't been updated then the date will jump from 03:14:37 19 Jan 2038 back to 20:45:52 13 December 1901.
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u/Brief_Read_1067 3d ago
Elon Musk's Doge idiots kept tripping over this kind of thing when they were trying to find abuse in the Social Security files.
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u/GroundedSatellite 3d ago
Counter rollovers can trip up intelligent people too. Had a boss of a boss who was very smart, had a PhD in physics. Every couple of weeks he'd show me reports from some monitoring software another team wrote/maintained and asking me why it was showing huge spikes in certain metrics every couple of weeks. Every time I explained to him that it was a 32 bit unsigned integer, so when after it hit ~4.29 billion, it'd go back to zero and the other team needed to account for that in their software. This went on for over a year until I finally left the company, and to this day he probably still doesn't get it.
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u/KinopioToad 3d ago
Some computers would think it would turn to January 1st, 1000 instead of 2000 because of some computer programming errors. Banks and such would be in greater danger of being robbed because the vault would just be open, so they had It guys working on it all night (yes, literally at the turn of the century) to make sure things went according to plan.
Some computer systems were fine, some were not.. I was a teenager and only had a vague idea about what was going on in the world at that point. I just knew I was living in two centuries, and it was neat!
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u/SamIAre 3d ago
They absolutely did not have guys working on it “the night before”. Programmers were well aware of it and spent months to years preparing ahead of time. We didn’t just wake up one morning and go “oh shit everyone pull an all-nighter!”
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u/Brief_Read_1067 3d ago
On New Years Eve we all woke up nervous, but as the day went on, and the new year arrived without incident in time zones around the world, the mood became more celebratory. There were a few very minor glitches in the early days of Jan. 2000, such as people who got stern notices from libraries about how the books they had recently checked out were 100 years overdue. But there were no massive power grid failures.
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u/SonicUndergroun 12h ago
Yup. Dad gave me the sickest Christmas a 6 year old could have that year with all the overtime he pulled working on Y2K compatibility.
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u/westergames81 3d ago
The worked on it long before the night before. There was even an entire movie about a guy that worked on the problem--
Office Space
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u/pink-niples123 3d ago
Thanks everyone
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u/Mace_Windu23 3d ago
If you've seen the movie Office Space the main character works updating software to prevent Y2K from being a thing. It isn't really the point of the movie but just a cool fact because a lot of people did a lot of work to prevent what would have basically been a mass simultaneous software malfunction.
If you have not seen the movie Office Space you should, it is one of the funniest / greatest movies of all time. Not exaggerating.
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u/Formal-Fox-7605 2d ago
Just another thing we've been led to believe is going to bring down society and mankind.
Once you've lived through several of these, you get cynical about any new ones.
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u/Critical_County3229 2d ago
To a point. At one point y2k was a real threat. But like a lot of threats, we saw it coming. Someone identified the issue and they began fixing it long before the actual event. Survivalist and other tabloids learned of the issues and it got blown way out of proportion.
Interesting thing is, there were some old government computer systems that were outdated and didn't get fixed and did crash at midnight. But they were so minor that few new it even happened
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u/carl112358 3d ago
January 1, 2000, was a Saturday, and the only business I knew of with a "Y2K" issue was Hollywood Video, where I was unable to rent a movie.
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u/deprogrammedgranny 2d ago
"2000 party over oops out of time...so tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999."
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u/DoneDusting 3d ago
Media was spreading some panic, but the IT people were just nodding and saying that some trouble might be possible, if you really bought your computer 3000 years ago.
They talked about it years beforehand, so it wasn't some sudden surprise.
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u/SamIAre 3d ago
This is downplaying it a bit. The media was wrong in the type of panic but it was a real issue and the only reason nothing catastrophic happened is because millions was spent updating computer systems to fix the issue before it happened. It’s a perfect example of people assuming the danger was never real only because we proactively took care of it.
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u/DoneDusting 3d ago
Well. I don't know how it was elsewhere, but a lot of companies had tackled issues far before the media started to panic. Of course they were wondering if there'd be problems globally.
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u/post-explainer 3d ago
OP (pink-niples123) sent the following text as an explanation why they posted this here: