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The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe
The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe

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SGU Prem #114 - Mar 19 2019

Uncut interview with Y2K expert Peter de Jaeger

 SGU Prem #114 - Mar 19 2019

Comments

Would have been nice to hear a bit more about Y2038 since this is more imminent than 2100

Richard Ireland

I can't find the reference right now I I remember reading reports of a car leasing company that went bust in 1995 as it couldn't process a 5 year lease. A more concrete example: imagine it's 1998 you a a credit card with an expiry date of 01/00 ... "00" is less than "98" so your card might get declined, apparently visa and mastercard had fines in place for merchants that failed this test.

Doug Paice

Great interview, and it's a topic I get frustrated about (re people saying it was all a hoax) One thing I'm surprised Peter didn't bring up was that problems were encountered before 1st Jan 2000: expiry dates. I'm a software developer and was working on a electrician licensing application in 1997-2000. I wrote a report on the key Y2K dates they had to contend with and pointed out that 3 of them had already passed, we'd been issuing licences with expiry dates beyond that for a couple of years already! We did do a bunch of testing and (ironically) only found one date related bug: 2000 was a leap year and if we issued a licence on Feb 29th the system would fail as it tried to set the expiry to 29th Feb in a non-leap year.

Doug Paice

Listened to the interview with Peter de Jaeger and enjoyed it immensly (brought back memories, since I am a software developer). This comment is about one of Peter's examples however. I vaguely recalled Korean Air Flight 801 so I looked it up (I might mention that I am a private pilot and have worked on air traffic control systems, so I tend to pay attention to these things). The suggestion that this was caused by a computer problem - even indirectly - does not fly (sorry). This crash was fundamentally pilot error of the worst kind - the PIC doing something stupid in spite of being warned by the flight engineer that it was wrong.

Jack Reeves

Where are the show notes located?

Tony Aguilar


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