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Undertoad · 01-30-2018, 08:41 AM

"Why are you snapping your fingers?
"It prevents tiger attacks."
"But there are no tigers here!"
"It is working!"

Because it's impossible to prove a negative, I can't show that there weren't going to be problems without the panic. There might well have been. I'm saying they wouldn't have been apocalyptic.

Like your situation. MOST WIN 95/98 boxes were not patched for any Y2K problems these OSes had. Luckily, there was a workaround: reboot.

That's it. Reboot! OMG Apocalypse? No!! If you ran Win 95 and didn't have to reboot on a particular day that would be a good day for you!!!

But you have gone to the trouble of *imagining* an apocalyptic result (what if my system was doing something important!) and, that's exactly how this works. Voila apocalypse.

(J'ever talk to those legacy programmers? I knew some. They were doing global search and replace in COBOL code to prevent the checks from being printed with "19" instead of "20" in front of the year. The panic became more costly than the problem when it left the realm of the experts.)

01-30-2018, 08:41 AM	#35
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	"Why are you snapping your fingers? "It prevents tiger attacks." "But there are no tigers here!" "It is working!" Because it's impossible to prove a negative, I can't show that there weren't going to be problems without the panic. There might well have been. I'm saying they wouldn't have been apocalyptic. Like your situation. MOST WIN 95/98 boxes were not patched for any Y2K problems these OSes had. Luckily, there was a workaround: reboot. That's it. Reboot! OMG Apocalypse? No!! If you ran Win 95 and didn't have to reboot on a particular day that would be a good day for you!!! But you have gone to the trouble of imagining an apocalyptic result (what if my system was doing something important!) and, that's exactly how this works. Voila apocalypse. (J'ever talk to those legacy programmers? I knew some. They were doing global search and replace in COBOL code to prevent the checks from being printed with "19" instead of "20" in front of the year. The panic became more costly than the problem when it left the realm of the experts.)