Review:Year 2000 In A Nutshell 61
It says volumes about our times that when most Americans talk about the year 2000 they think not of the many symbolic or mystic implications of the Millenium, but of the mundane but potentially significant programming glitch that threatens many computer systems.
"Because programmers in earlier decades economized on space by cleverly dropping two digits," writes Langdon Winner in the Tech Knowledge Revue, "we are now obsessed with the problem and the costly challenge of minimizing its possible damage."
It's typical of the mass media's narrow-minded approach to technology to focus so obsessively on the worst possible consequences of Y2K computer problems that some people are planning to stockpile food, water and cash in case our collective lights go out. And it's typical of cyber-gurus geeks, programmers and Web developers to forget that there are political, social and cultural issues surrounding the approaching Millenium that go far beyond technics.
Winner, a political scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and one of the country's most thoughtful technology scholars, argues that the approach of the new century offers an occasion to ponder the condition of humanity and the planet that sustains us.
"How many of the world's nearly six billion people live well or in circumstances that are even marginally agreeable?," he wonders. "How many still suffer poverty, war, disease, illiteracy, and the other scourges of the species? Will the policies of global civilization merely magnify well-known ecological, economic and social ills? Or will the next century finding ingenious remedies?"
Nobody knows, and nobody's even talking about it much. The media's technology coverage has increasingly focused on Internet stock prices, Silicon Valley businesses, the gee-whiz computer gadgets of tomorrow, and the handful of panicked people digging bunkers in preparation for the supposed havoc to be wrought by the Y2K bug.
Small wonder some people are scared out of their wits. Few people outside the computer industry know how seriously to take the Y2K bug. Are predictions of possible chaos alarmist and exaggerated? Should reasonable people take steps to protect themselves and their families? Should we, as a culture, be taking the Y2K issue more seriously? Will we be able to withdraw our cash from banks next January? Turn on our faucets and furnaces? Will our E-Z passes still let us through the toll booth?
Journalists don't seem to have a clue. While every Internet stock blip is covered like the outbreak of World War III, Stories on Y2K range from the hysterical to the ignorant.
But there is at least one intelligent, useful and highly credible guide, "Year 2000 In A Nutshell", by Norman Shakespeare." ($19.95 www.oreilly.com). O'Reilly is perhaps the best publisher of technical and computing books in the United States. Its "Running Linux" and "Linux In A Nutshell" were so coherent and intelligently presented, I almost ordered "Year 2000" hoping it would make some sense of the approaching traumas.
It did.
"Year 2000" has O'Reilly's trademark clarity and organization. It contains one of the best overviews of the Year 2000 problem I've seen anywhere, along with a master plan for conversion projects, ways to identify Y2K problems and fix them, and reference information on the date and time functions in the computer languages most likely to be affected: COBOL (a business language), PL/1, Visual Basic C, and MVS LE.
For those who don't grasp the origins of this mess: decades ago, when programming code was tight, it was common practice to use two-digit storage (e.g. 69 for the year 1969) for date code within software. The earliest computer programmers had so little memory to work with that any trick for saving two bits was worthwhile. The chances that a year entered into records would need to begin with anything other than "19," seemed to unlikely that dropping the century digits was adopted as a memory-saving method.
As computers became more powerful, this abbreviated dating convention continued to be the standard, mostly out of habit.
In l950, asks Shakespeare, "who was even worried about how computers would handle data in 2050?"
But when the clock rolls over at midnight on the last day of December, l999, many of these older computers won't recognize "00" as the correct date. How odd in the Digital Age that poorly designed computer programs won't be able to handle the transition to the next century. The (Y2K) dilemma might render applications and hardware ineffective unless the original code is altered, an expensive, time-consuming but urgently necessary task. This is not merely an American, but a global problem. As politicians and Wall Street analysts like to remind us daily, we live in a global economy whose infrastructure literally is computer networks.
Small Year 2000 errors are already occurring, says "Year 2000." A computer program recently determined that a prisoner's release date, 1/10/15, had passed and he was almost released after serving only a few days. New York Stock Exchange executives want to close on the 31st of December in l999, because NYSE managers fear that all prior dealings could somehow be accidentally invalidated due to Year-2000 computer errors. Malfunctioning programs could cause businesses to lose track of critical systems that affect both production and cash flow.
For organizations and institutions in the healthy and public safety areas, Y2K problems could be life-threatening. Lawyers and firms are already cranking up in preparation for all sorts of litigation, as companies and governments try and pin blame and responsibility on someone. And it will be tough for companies to argue that they weren't warned or didn't have time to prepare.
There is widespread disagreement about just how urgent and dangerous the Y2K problems will prove to be. Some warn of the collapse of power and utility systems, along with banking and other financial operations. I know sober and knowledgeable computer programmers and engineers who say they won't fly on the last day of December in case air traffic control systems fail, and who plan to set aside cash in case banks shut down.
Plenty of other knowledgeable computer experts ridicule these alarms and insist that the disruptions will be numerous but minor. Meanwhile, engineers and programmers are making a fortune helping government agencies and corporations scramble to get their programs in order.
For most Americans, it's all as disturbing as it is bewildering.
Clearly, some of these fears are real. Many computer programs still aren't ready to handle the transition from l999 to 2000. Not only are most computers and applications suspect, but electromechanical equipment, networking and process-control hardware and operating systems could also be affected. Unless all such systems are checked and converted, there could be global repercussions.
While most banks, utilities and government agencies are working to update their programs and applications, nobody really knows how companies or countries -- especially outside of the United States and Europe - haven't, or how their problems might affect a world of networked computing systems.
"Year 2000" is sober and clear-headed. The book doesn't warn of apocalyptic disasters so much as smaller problems: the point-of-sale terminal at the counter of your favorite diner won't print a receipt; the gas pump won't work because the date set by the company's back-office computer is invalid; the parking gate at work won't function because its logic has been reset; elevator buttons all flash simultaneously since routine service appears a century overdue. And operating systems on computers fail to work because of network failures sparked by invalid dates. When you call your Help Desk, the phone may not accept your code because it automatically expires extensions that haven't been used for a year or more.
This book suggests that Y2K problems will be greater than most Americans think, yet fall well short of media-invoked notions of Armageddon. And Shakespeare reminds us that in our litigious culture, the biggest costs might be legal bills.
"The actual cost of achieving Year-2000 compliance will go far beyond analysis and conversion costs," says Shakespeare. "Production delays, reduced market share due to poor PR and media reports, and the loss of profitability or important data will all affect companies. Once the dust has settled and everyone is compliant, another ugly chapter will unfold: the search for culprits within companies, and the search for corporate accountability by shareholders and victims of accidents or other losses."
According to "Year 2000", the U.S. government is budgeting $30 billion for conversion, and Fortune 500 corporations have earmarked between $20 million and $200 million. That's excluding, in most cases, the cost of litigation, which without some form of government intervention, could exceed that of conversion. Government figures suggest that only 30 per cent of small to medium size companies (those with between five and 100 staffers) will be even close to compliance by the big day.
Small wonder Americans are increasingly coming to associate the Millenium with still more computer troubles instead of more symbolic and ultimately, much more significant, issues.
This, Winner suggests, has a hidden and poignant irony. Our culture has become so slavishly dependent on digital technology that it is increasingly unwilling to face any technological issue other than Y2K.
"Among the issues that cry out for attention as a new era dawns is the widening gap of inequality that characterizes the world's population, " he writes. "Our much heralded global economy has been good at producing a handful of millionaires and billionaires, but a third of the earth's people live in grinding poverty.
"While we're at it," Winner suggests, "why not tackle some of the 'bugs' that threaten the environment that we hand to our children? How about fixing the technologies that spew millions of tons of CO2 into the air each day, exacerbating global warming? How about replacing the systems that pour toxic chemicals into the air, water and land, slowly poisoning human populations and other species?"
Winner is right, but he needn't hold his breath if he thinks journalism will suddenly start covering technology in this more detached and thoughtful way. Like other scholars of technology, he guesses that if enough time, money and effort are invested this year, most of our computers will actually remember that a new Millenium has arrived.
It's the humans that might forget.
You can buy this book at Computer Literacy and help Slashdot out.
Y2k and public policy. (Score:1)
The central difference between the two appears to be the clear-cut "day of reckoning" that we have with y2k. If only we could convince textile-industry pollution to wreak havok on, say, Sept. 4, 2003, topsoil depletion due to inferior farming techniques to dismantle the world's economies on March 9, 2011, etc., each spaced sufficiently far apart that the public would not tire of crises. We could ride the wave of litigation to a better tomorrow, beneficial public policy might actually be made for a change, and Cambell's soup sales would boom every three years or so. (And if you buy that, I got a bridge to the 21st century I'd like to sell you...).
Programmers: America's Favorite Scapegoats! (Score:1)
In the second place, programmers can't control what the media covers. Programmers didn't refuse to cover the topic as a serious concern until 1997, and programmers aren't refusing to cover other topics today. In many ways, Y2K is a problem caused by journalists.
Finally, programmers can't control the fact that people are attracted to relatively simple problems with clear solutions. Even you, Jon Katz, made an oreo with crunchy social issues on the outside and a nice soft filling of technical stuff.
The simple fact is that the technical glitches are easily seen and fixed. Social issues, such as modern slavery in Africa, are hard to confirm and nearly impossible to fix.
Trivial example: a local elementary school has been raising money to buy slaves and set them free... and been critized (with justification, IMHO) for actually encouraging enslavement because there is now an international market for them! If slavery is a problem when each slave is worth $5, what happens when the going rate is $50? $200? More? (This is the same reason many people think decriminalization of drugs is worth considering. Drugs are bad. Corruption of the police and courts are worst.)
If you don't buy slaves and set them free, what do you do? Send in the Marines and undoubtably kill some of them accidently? Organize an international boycott/blockcade and get all warm&fuzzy while the real problem goes unchallenged? Let ask the Iraqi people their opinion...
I hate to be pestimistic, but humanity has been struggling with these social issues for at least 5000 years. I seriously doubt that we'll fix it, globally, in my lifetime. That doesn't mean we don't try, but there's a lot of wisdom in the Eastern philosophy which says that the best action is often inaction. The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) should serve as a recent cautionary tale.
He's got a point, you know .. (Score:1)
And instead it's got people's knickers in a twist.
I'd like to see how techies could conspire to reorganise things from the ground up. Sort of along the lines of Bruce Sterling's Manifesto of January 3, 2000 [spectacle.org].
No Subject Given (Score:2)
What an overstatement.
First of all, this says nothing about our times. Look back in history and you see that, in EVERY time, in EVERY era, human beings have been convinced that armageddon is just around the corner. If it's not the ending of computing as we know it, it's nuclear annihilation, the rapture, or volcanos and earthquakes wrought by wrathful gods. If we have nothing else to be concerned about, we have the ever-present gigantic meteor from outer space, which I'm sure will return to its number-one status of probable source of global peril on January 2, 2000. (Don't worry, Katz, ecological dysfunction will be number two.)
Secondly, it is humans' concern with symbolism and/or mysticism that brings about this sort of hand-wringing in the first place.
Lastly, if one is to be concerned with problems that one does not understand and cannot possibly do anything about, it is a tad bit more rational to be primarily concerned with the ones that might lead to one's OWN peril.
Tax! (Score:1)
Cobol (Score:1)
By the way, 2038 is only a problem if your Unix is still 32-bit. I believe Linux (and other Unices as well) on 64 bit platforms has already solved that problem. If you are still using a 32 bit system in 39 years, you deserve what you get.
As usual .... (Score:1)
Why on earth should any rational human pay any attention at all to a reviewer whose research is so unbelievably wretched that he takes the idiot Winner seriously?
Craig
As usual .... (Score:1)
Basically he's just another postmodern academic spouting touchy-feely kindergarten Marxism.
Craig
Well said. (Score:1)
To the two anonymous idiots who posted above: if you want some references, write me.
Craig
Now let me get this straight .... (Score:1)
Who, precisely?
> It is capitalism as a system that is the problem...
Odd, most of the rest of the world has concluded that capitalism is the solution, a proposition which is supported by the history of (at least) the last thousand years. What new facts have you unearthed?
Craig
Now let me get this straight .... (Score:1)
No, I'm saying that the history of the last thousand years shows that every conceivable alternative to capitalism produces results that are disastrous by any rational criterion. Socialism is simply a return to the medieval idea that an elite needs to decide for the common people what to do with their lives, since they're too stupid to decide for themselves; all it adds is the window-dressing of voting.
> Capitalism is a recent thing, popularized by such great thinkers as Adam Smith ...
Nope, capitalism is simply what happens when people are free to make their own economic arrangements. It's been around for a very long time. So has socialism; note that the government of ancient Rome provided free bread to its citizens. Write me for references.
> ... pits people against each other and discourages cooperation.
How many people had to work together cooperatively to make your car, or your computer, or your ballpoint pen? Capitalism encourages cooperation to a greater extent than any known economic system; that's why the 19th century -- having for the most part gotten rid of mercantilism and the feudal system -- was by comparison anyway so peaceful compared to the twentieth century. (Notice what the remnants of feudalism and mercantilism did to Ireland in 1848-49, for example, and observe that the system under socialism as proposed by "agrarian reformers" would be little different.)
> Read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle ...
Upton Sinclair was an idiologically-motivated liar. References upon request.
Craig
The Union of Concerned Scientists ... (Score:1)
Consider just these two facts --
- Over the last thirty years there has been no global atmospheric temperature rise; in fact, the best evidence says there's been a very slight cooling (within the range of expected normal variation).
- There has been a warming in this century, but nearly all of it occurred before the second world war, while most of the CO2 increase in the atmosphere happened after the war.
In fact, most of the worlds climatologists do not believe any serious global warming is occurring now. References on request.> You won't happen to represent the oil industry, would you?
No, I represent the five or so billion people whose health and well-being are endangered by mendacious fascists with megaphones.
Craig
Regarding half-wits (Score:1)
Done. In fact, I've lived and worked near both, and (modulo the sheer size of the plant) a nuke is a much better neighbor than an oil-fired plant. Much cleaner, for one thing.
> Three Mile Island ... Cherynoble (sp) ...
Chernobyl was a wonderful example of socialist engineering; even the original design engineers warned that the graphite-based sheilding design was grossly inadequate and accident-prone, but of course the government had more pressing concerns at the time than the mere safety of its citizens.
TMI, on the other hand, showed that in spite of completely wrong decisions by operations personnel at every point during the incident, the plant design avoided any danger to the surrounding area.
(Basically, what happened was that a valve stuck open. During the next six hours the plant repeatedly tried to shut itself down but the operators, misunderstanding the cause of the problem, kept overriding the automatic systems.)
Observe that radiation never rose above normal background levels anywhere outside the plant's boundary, notwithstanding continuous mismanagement.
Craig
Cobol (Score:1)
I agree that y2k is overhyped.
However it did make sense to use 2 diget dates in cobol programs. Cobol didn't provide an easy way to store dates ie base intiger type. You could however do lots of neat things with money. Cobol is still the number one language (lines of code) because buiness needs map well to cobol making cobol an efficant language to program in.
Remember cobol was deisgned in the early 60s, and was one of the first non machine languages used. They didn't have the binifit of modern knowlege of how to design a langue, and it shows. However cobol turns out to be good enough that it isn't worth the bother of changing, minor issues like y2k are delt with.
don't forget that many of these programs were written on punch cards which have been destroyed by floods or mice, leaving only the compiled version. (stored on mag tape, most importantly lacking the comments)
PCs and unix have problems with y2k, but compared to the old cobol code (especcially the lost source code) that is a minor problem.
Don't forget too that the correct date isn't important to many things. Where I work we have told customers that the boxes we stoped sell in 1985 won't work, upgrade to our latest box. They respond by setting the date to 1972 or something. Not a big deal for a router, or a small buiness cash register. Come to think of it several small buinesses in town are using a mechanicl cash register that cannot work byond 1970, but they set the date to 1950 and keep going.
Why is preparedness irrational? (Score:1)
Anyway, I don't think that Y2K is overhyped. I think it is underhyped. The thing most of us who are preparing are afraid of is panicky irrational underprepared neighbors, not starvation.
Frightened people have a great capacity to be grand-mahl shitheads, especially in large groups.
If the government or the media could convince people to plunk down $50-$100 on minimal food storage, anything else that might happen would be bearable.
RE: Why is preparedness irrational? (Score:1)
The concern is not that the farmers' computers will break. The concern is that 90% of the crops grown in this country are from high-yeild hybridized seeds. This has the side effect of making them sterile. You can't reserve 5%-10% for replanting, you must buy them from the likes of Monsanto and ADM.
The concern is that these companies may (emphasis on may) not be able to produce and distribute more seed.
I don't think it's worth building a compound and stocking AK-47's, but I don't think it's irrational to invest $100-$200 on basic supplies. The Mormons have been doing it for 170 years.
I know where there'll be food. (Score:1)
The bank came out to my parents to check on their "Y2K compliance". My dad looked at them and said, "I'll write a different date on this piece of paper." Basically, there wasn't anything related to raising the turkey's that was directly dependant on anything affected by Y2K bugs.
minor stuff (Score:1)
2) Millennial
3) starts 01/01/2001, midnight,
366 days removed from 01/01/2000
Y2K in a Viridian way! (Score:1)
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian.
And is pursued in more detail on the Viridian mailing list:
http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/
How do we get people to address the real problems? Marketing!
Check it out.
Tax! (Score:1)
People will have an incentive to buy new cars that use less fuel. Companies will have incentive to produce cars that use less fuel.
It's possible, with today's technology, to design car motors that use up to 10x less fuel. But since it's more expensive, and less powerful, people don't buy it.
My two bits (Score:1)
Star Date or...? (Score:1)
No Subject Given (Score:1)
Ah well, it'll be an interesting New Years to say the least.. I partied hard this year on the Strip, so next year we'll probably have a quiet party sipping glasses of wine and holding loaded shotguns.
C
Slow Pitch (Score:1)
I agree with you here.. I would like to see Katz put together an article that doesnt spend 1/3 of the text explaining what a XX versus XXXX century date is.
Yeah, he does write editorials, not technical pieces... so what's your view on the whole Y2K thing, Jon? Did Year 2000 in a Nutshell have any impact on your thinking towards the matter?
C
Slow Pitch (Score:1)
Yes, here at "dotslash" we're all so gosh darn brilliant we can't possibly deign to read anything that we may or may not alreday know. I was thinking of contributing an article on IPv6, but since everyone must know all about that I won't bother.
Geoff Hamilton
Cheaper Price at Shopping.com (Score:1)
Check it out at: http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~bgannon /booksearch/ [purdue.edu]
Let me know what you think, it will find the cheapest price on the net... if I'm missing some sites let me know.
Slow Pitch (Score:1)
Now, what are the details -- or the major points -- that we're missing? I feel like we're all examining the works of pointillists under a maginifying glass. Help us take a step back and figure out what the picture is.
Regarding half-lives (Score:1)
Look at it another way: at least it is decomposing! We use chlorine to clean our pools and protect our drinking water but chlorine gas (and chlorine bleach, for that matter) stays poisonous just about forever.
Three Mile Island was just about the worst accident imaginable and yet no civilians were ever endangered by it. I deny the "could devastate an entire eastern state" claim; what are your assumptions there? And while you're considering worst case scenarios, compare it to a big hydroelectric dam breaking...
Check out Th e Ultimate Resource [umd.edu] by Julian Simon. Especially the nuclear power [umd.edu] chapter.
Blame it on MicroSoft (Score:1)
DEMORONISER
Correct Moronic Microsoft HTML
This page describes, in Unix manual page style, a Perl program available for downloading from this site which corrects
numerous errors and incompatibilities in HTML generated by, or edited with, Microsoft applications. The demoroniser keeps
you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.
NAME
demoroniser - correct moronic and gratuitously incompatible HTML generated by Microsoft applications
SYNOPSIS
demoroniser [ -u ] [ -wcols ] [ infile ] [ outfile ]
DESCRIPTION
Many slick, high profile corporate Web sites I visit seemed to exhibit terrible grammar completely inconsistent with the
obvious investment in graphics and design. Apostrophes and quote marks were frequently omitted, and every couple of
paragraphs words were run together which should have been separated by a punctuation mark of some kind.
This remained a mystery to me until I wanted to convert a presentation I'd developed in 1996 using Microsoft PowerPoint into
a set of Web pages. A friend was kind enough to run the presentation through PowerPoint's "Save as HTML" feature (I have
abandoned all use of Microsoft products, so I did not have a current version of PowerPoint which includes this feature). When
I got the PowerPoint-generated HTML back and viewed it in my browser, I discovered that it contained precisely the same
grammatical errors I'd noted on so many Web sites, and which certainly were not present in my original presentation.
A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a
computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are
written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this
prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own "extension" to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in
Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0x82 through 0x95--this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and
Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters.
These characters include open and close single and double quotes, em and en dashes, an ellipsis and a variety of other things
you've been dying for, such as a capital Y umlaut and a florin symbol. Well, okay, you say, if Microsoft want to have their own
little incompatible character set, why not? Because it doesn't stop there--in their inimitable fashion (who would want
to?)--they aggressively pollute the Web pages of unknowing and innocent victims worldwide with these characters, with the
result that the owners of these pages look like semi-literate morons when their pages are viewed on non-Microsoft platforms
(or on Microsoft platforms, for that matter, if the user has selected as the browser's font one of the many TrueType fonts
which do not include the incompatible Microsoft characters).
You see, "state of the art" Microsoft Office applications sport a nifty feature called "smart quotes." (Rule of thumb--every
time Microsoft use the word "smart," be on the lookout for something dumb). This feature is on by default in both Word and
PowerPoint, and can be disabled only by finding the little box buried among the dozens of bewildering option panels these
products contain. If enabled, and you type the string,
"Halt," he cried, "this is the police!"
"smart quotes" transforms the ASCII quote characters automatically into the incompatible Microsoft opening and closing
quotes. ASCII single and double quotes are similarly transformed (even though ASCII already contains apostrophe and single
open quote characters), and double hyphens are replaced by the incompatible em dash symbol. What other horrors occur, I
know not. If the user notices this happening at all, their reaction might be "Thank you Billy-boy--that looks ever so much
nicer," not knowing they've been set up to look like a moron to folks all over the world.
You see, when you export a document as text for hand-editing into HTML, or avail yourself of the "Save as HTML" features
in newer versions of Office applications, these incompatible, Microsoft-specific characters remain in place. When viewed by
a user on a non-Microsoft platform, they will not be displayed properly--most browsers seem to just drop them, as opposed to
including a symbol indicating an undisplayable character. Hence, the apparently ungrammatical text, which the author of the
page, editing on a Microsoft platform, will never be aware of.
Having no desire to hand-edit the HTML for a long presentation to correct a raft of Microsoft-induced incompatibilities, I
wrote a Perl program, the demoroniser, to transform Microsoft's "junk HTML" into at least a starting point for something I'd
consider presentable on my site. In addition to replacing the incompatible characters with HTML-compliant equivalents
wherever possible (a few rarely-encountered characters which can't be translated result in warning messages if
encountered), the following sloppy or downright wrong HTML is corrected.
The missing semicolon at the end of numeric character escapes (=) is supplied.
Numeric renderings of special characters ( &) are replaced with readable equivalents.
Unquoted tags containing non-alphanumeric characters are quoted.
PowerPoint's mis-nesting of and tags is corrected.
PowerPoint's boneheaded use of
- and
tags to accomplish paragraph breaks is corrected and the proper
tags are removed.tags inserted.
Missing tags in text-only slides are inserted.
Nugatory
Unmatched
tags in headings are removed.
Idiot "paragraph-long lines" are broken into something suitable for editing with a normal text editor.
OPTIONS
-u Print how-to-call information and a summary of options.
-wcols Wrap output lines at column cols. By default, lines are wrapped at column 72. A cols specification of 0 disables line
wrapping. demoroniser attempts to wrap lines so as to preserve their meaning. Lines are broken at white space
whenever possible. If this cannot be done, a line longer than the cols specification will remain in the output HTML.
BUGS
demoroniser is a Perl script. In order to use it, you must have Perl installed on your system. demoroniser was developed
using Perl 4.0, patch level 36.
FILES
If no outfile is specified, output is written to standard output. If no infile is specified, input is read from standard input.
SEE ALSO
perl(1)
Download demoroniser.zip
AUTHOR
John Walker
http://www.fourmilab.ch/
This software is in the public domain. Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, without any conditions or restrictions. This
software is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
by John Walker
January 16th, 1998
who cares about year 2000 .... (Score:1)
De-commodification of standards (Score:1)
Look like it's time to switch to Linux for good John. You've been made to look like an idiot by Microsoft "smart quotes" - a prime example of de-commodification of standards. Microsoft smart quotes are those specially formatted `` , '' and ' (as single chars) symbols. Applications running on windows tend to through them in regardless of what charset they are supposed to be using. They're characters with decimal codes somewhere in the 128-159 range.
They don't work on anything except Windows. That's why we have to read through all those ?'s in your text.
From someone on the Ottawa-Carleton LUG [oclug.on.ca] mailing list:
The insidious bit is that applications get them without asking (or wanting) them. - Richard Perrin
Creating correct HTML (Score:1)
The questions marks are from Netscape in Linux incorrectly formatting the HTML code.
Uhhh. No. Read De-commodification [slashdot.org] below. The problem in that's it's not proper HTML. (Or even a proper text charset).
- Richard Perrin
De-commodification of standards (Score:1)
Actually the problem IS with the OS, specifically with the API that the OS provides to the applications. This API (for writing text) in this case doesn't conform to the proper codage standard.
Linux in this case is merely a reference to his current project of getting it running. I agree that if he were working on a Mac (or in BeOS, MS-DOS, UNIX, or hell, even on a PDP-11 connected to a DecWriter paper terminal) he wouldn't have this problem.
He does have a problem when writing HTML using any application that uses the standard Windows API. Check out RandySC's post [slashdot.org] for a detailed description of the problem and a good program to fix it.
As for the decent apps on Linux, who can beat vi, sed, awk and emacs for all your integrated office suite needs? ;-) Oh yeah, throw in Netscape for easy writing of busted HTML.
Seriously, I've never found myself wanting in the apps department, I just wish they'd develop Total Annihilation and others for Linux.
- Richard Perrin
what happened to religion? (Score:1)
we've replaced religion with technology.
NETSEX (Score:1)
My computer. My Way. Linux.
--
Howard Roark, Architect
Y2k is overhyped. (Score:1)
if (year_current(yy) - year_previous(xx) 0) over_heat_reactor_core(TRUE);
Poverty vs CO2 (Score:1)
That said, poverty does not exist because there isn't enough stuff being produced. Poverty exists because the resources are being consumed in a monsterously inequitable manner. The wealthiest 5% or so of all nations out-consume the planet's ability in nearly all nations, and most everyone in the wealthiest nations (esp. here in the Good Ol' U S of A) overconsumes.
Yes, in the high-tech nations things have gotten cleaner. Talk to the Ogoni [ucsd.edu] people of Nigeria and ask them if things have gotten cleaner in the past two decades. Europe's population may be crashing just in time to make room for floods of 3rd world refugees. Look at India's birthrate, for example.
For the most comprehensive look at the numbers I've found, check out the State of the World" [worldwatch.org] series from the Worldwatch Institute. [worldwatch.org]
Year 2000 (Score:1)
Governments now have a reason to raise taxes to pay for all the new hardware and software. Banks will justify raising fees to pay for the upgrades.
Insurance companies will raise their costs. And on and on..... It will be a buyers boon in the markets, especially after all the fools buying heavily inflated stocks, aka Yahoo at 250+???, panic. As always their will be winners and loosers, what makes the difference is who understands the game, and who doesn't.
Oh, one more thing. Expect to see governments taking advantage of the ignorance that abounds. Expect to see the executive branch grab even more power with the use of states of emergency. I doubt we will see marshall law, if the executive branch is cleaver enough, they will grab the power in ways that few americans pay attention too. The biggest danger is not Y2k, its our collective ignorance.
COBOL (Score:1)
Katz Is the Shit (Score:1)
Let's be clear: a small percentage of the world's population is profiting at the expense of the majority. Until technology becomes a tool for aleviating that problem (which it could be, but isn't), we should be subjecting its industry to ruthless criticism. It is capitalism as a system that is the problem, and we need to use our combined knowledge and energy to make the next millenium one that belongs to the entire human race, rather than to a few select masters.
ryan
No, f**k you! (Score:1)
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