
Could Open-Source Code Make Our Y2K Fears Finally Come True? - rb808
https://hbr.org/2017/07/could-open-source-code-make-our-y2k-fears-finally-come-true
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greenyoda
The author describes the Y2K problem at the very beginning of the article:

 _" Almost 20 years have passed since the corporate world woke up to long-term
problems in computer code, which became known as Y2K. Over the previous
decades, software developers had used the date 01-01-00 (January 1, 2000) as a
convenient hack to make it easier to debug software. The problem was that it
wasn’t taken out."_

Clearly, he has no understanding of what the Y2K problem was really about -
using two digits to store four-digit years to save space, thus making it
impossible to distinguish, for instance, between 1900 and 2000. I'm very
suspicious of an author's qualification to talk meaningfully about software if
they make such an egregious error at the very beginning of the article. (The
first paragraph of Wikipedia's article on Y2K would have yielded the correct
answer.) I'd also assume that the article wasn't fact-checked.

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rb808
Actually I think this is mostly scare story for managers. But it does
highlight an issue that we rely on a lot of hard work from volunteers all over
the world that largely go unrecognized.

