Linked by David Adams on Thu 1st Mar 2012 22:53 UTC, submitted by judgen
The outage on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform that caused the government's G-Cloud service to go offline was the result of a calculation error caused by the extra day in February due to the leap year.
Writing on the Azure blog the firm's corporate vice president for service and cloud, Bill Laing, said while the firm had still to fully determine the cause of the issue, the extra date in the month appeared the most likely cause.
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RE: If true, is this a vindication of Y2K?
by Bill Shooter of Bul on Fri 2nd Mar 2012 05:29
in reply to "If true, is this a vindication of Y2K?"
Member since:2006-07-14
Depends on how you define Y2K.
If Y2K was about how a single flaw in a single system somewhere would kill all civilization. Then no, this is not that.
If Y2K was about how some developers fail to think a few years into the future with localized bad results, then yes. This is that.
RE[2]: If true, is this a vindication of Y2K?
by bannor99 on Fri 2nd Mar 2012 05:59
in reply to "RE: If true, is this a vindication of Y2K?"
Member since:2005-09-15
Depends on how you define Y2K.
If Y2K was about how a single flaw in a single system somewhere would kill all civilization. Then no, this is not that.
If Y2K was about how some developers fail to think a few years into the future with localized bad results, then yes. This is that.
If Y2K was about how a single flaw in a single system somewhere would kill all civilization. Then no, this is not that.
If Y2K was about how some developers fail to think a few years into the future with localized bad results, then yes. This is that.
It went way beyond "some developers" although most of the blame can be laid at the feet of the decision-makers.
Bob Bemer started petitioning everyone from programmers to politicians starting in the early 60s about the problems with 2-digit dates - they didn't listen and he wasted several decades trying to convince them.
RE[2]: If true, is this a vindication of Y2K?
by Alfman on Fri 2nd Mar 2012 06:23
in reply to "RE: If true, is this a vindication of Y2K?"
Member since:2011-01-28
Everyone assumed that "Y2K" trouble was only about the year 2000, but most computers actually had different date boundaries.
The year 2000 was only a problem for those who stored dates in ascii/ebsdic form. Mainframes seem to be unusual in their use of BCD and nine's complement within their vsam files, which is why they were especially susceptible to the two digit overflow.
Binary time representations such as those in *nix have different limits, but they're also approaching.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
RE[2]: If true, is this a vindication of Y2K?
by zima on Fri 2nd Mar 2012 08:51
in reply to "RE: If true, is this a vindication of Y2K?"
Member since:2005-07-06
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Member since:
2005-09-15
If the world's (arguably) premiere software company, with all the lessons learned and experience gained during decades of development could have had a disastrous outage caused by an extra day,
then all those who bitch that all the money and effort spent on the Y2K fixes were a waste and that we were hoodwinked by a bunch of grouchy, grimy COBOL programmers looking for a last big payout can just shut the FUCK up.