[QUOTE=LaurV;378424](gotcha :P)[/QUOTE]

You did indeed! :smile:

But I believe my point still stands. In the day, every bit counted.

Even today, many of the deep programmers around here, and elsewhere, still count every bit and every cycle as precious, while more pedestrian programmers (myself included) simply throw more hardware at the problem so we don't have to worry about such things....

[QUOTE=chalsall;378513]In the day, every bit counted.[/QUOTE]
I think another problem was that people simply thought in two-digit years, including some who ought to know better - like programmers!

I was involved in reviewing company programs for Y2K compatibility at the end of the 1990s. The worst example I found was a then-recent program, written in maybe 1995 (no problem with storage space by then), which performed a function call to the UNIX operating system to get the date and time. The programmer had only acquainted himself with the code which brought up the final two digits of the year (there was an alternative code which would have given him the full year, but he apparently didn't know that one). He was required, quite properly, to output the date with a full four-digit year. His solution was to output "19" followed by the 2-digit year passed by the operating system.:cry:

[QUOTE=Brian-E;378519]I think another problem was that people simply thought in two-digit years, including some who ought to know better - like programmers![/QUOTE]

Ah, possibly...

[QUOTE=Brian-E;378519]I was involved in reviewing company programs for Y2K compatibility at the end of the 1990s. The worst example I found was a then-recent program, written in maybe 1995 (no problem with storage space by then), which performed a function call to the UNIX operating system to get the date and time. The programmer had only acquainted himself with the code which brought up the final two digits of the year (there was an alternative code which would have given him the full year, but he apparently didn't know that one). He was required, quite properly, to output the date with a full four-digit year. His solution was to output "19" followed by the 2-digit year passed by the operating system.:cry:[/QUOTE]

Dumb be him.

You're probably referring to tm_year in the tm structure as a result of the function call to ctime()?

[QUOTE=chalsall;378521]Ah, possibly...



Dumb be him.

You're probably referring to tm_year in the tm structure as a result of the function call to ctime()?[/QUOTE]I remember monitoring sundry websites as the start of the last year of the second millennium swept round the world. A clock in New Zealand displayed the year as 19100. It had been programmed in Perl and used string concatenation (the '.' operator) instead of arithmetic addition.

Incidentally I was (a) on-call for MSFT to deal with any critical problems and (b) had been bed-ridden with influenza until the previous day.

[url]http://jezebel.com/woman-shoots-lover-for-unsatisfying-sex-1607774272[/url]

[URL="http://news.yahoo.com/air-algerie-plane-disappears-radar-093919462.html"]Air Algerie plane disappears from radar[/URL]

[QUOTE]ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — The official Algerian news agency says an Air Algerie flight from Burkina Faso to Algiers has disappeared from the radar.

APS said air navigation services lost track of the plane 50 minutes after takeoff early Thursday, last sited at 0155 GMT.[/QUOTE]

US Border Patrol Pull Guns & Detain Boy Scout Troop For Photography.
 

[url]http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/23/1316003/-US-Border-Patrol-Pull-Guns-Detain-Boy-Scout-Troop-For-Photography?[/url]

Gotta watch out for them Boy Scouts!

Indeed, the War on Photography has been going for at least 6 years now:
[URL]https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/06/the_war_on_phot.html[/URL]

cyclist collides with steam roller
 

Here's something you don't see very often: [url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-28514222[/url]

Not really WTF, It's about what I expect
 

[url]http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/31/1318109/-Michele-Bachmann-Obama-keeping-migrant-kids-so-U-S-can-perform-medical-experiments-on-them[/url]

[QUOTE]Rep. Michele Bachmann has a new theory about the unaccompanied minors fleeing violence in Central America who have come in large numbers to the southern U.S. border: they are future victims of a liberal plot to use unwilling children for medical experiments.[/QUOTE]

Note the Three Stooges lineup. Louis Gohmert to the one side says that the refugee children are lying about violence in their homelands.

Genuine W.T.F.
 

[url]http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/01/1318397/-Homophobic-Paranoia-In-Utah[/url]

[QUOTE]Homophones, as any English grammarian can tell you, are words that sound the same but have different meanings and often different spellings — such as be and bee, through and threw, which and witch, their and there. This concept is taught early on to foreign students learning English because it can be confusing to someone whose native language does not have that feature.
But when the social-media specialist for a private Provo-based English language learning center wrote a blog explaining homophones, he was let go for creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda.[/QUOTE]