>> A lot of it has to do with IT picking up again. Evidently the dot-com
>> bust has finally bottomed out. I looked for work in software for several
>> years before being hired just a few months ago.
>
> Well everyone made massive upgrades in the late 90s to get over Y2K, and
> now, those systems are slowly becoming obsolete again, so there's
> another wave of upgrades coming...

I don't know about IT, more like "the entire jobs market went to hell 
for a few years"...

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Le 12/07/2012 16:04, Invisible a écrit :
>>> A lot of it has to do with IT picking up again. Evidently the dot-com
>>> bust has finally bottomed out. I looked for work in software for several
>>> years before being hired just a few months ago.
>>
>> Well everyone made massive upgrades in the late 90s to get over Y2K, and
>> now, those systems are slowly becoming obsolete again, so there's
>> another wave of upgrades coming...
> 
> I don't know about IT, more like "the entire jobs market went to hell
> for a few years"...

In the very late 90s, due the urgency of Y2K, anyone would get hired (I
mean, even without a computer degree... we got chemistry degree on the
job, just to name a few)
Then Y2K failed to happen (as a catastroph) and the Web bubble enjoys a
growth: people stayed on the computer...
(and some European countries had a bonus deadline: Euro get introduced
as real for the 2002-1-1, so after the Y2K race, a lot of work for the
money-change)

2002 & al: bubble has exploded, but a lot of people get the computer
item in their CV. Less "fancy" works, lot of internal candidats (from
low to high level of qualification), no need to recruit actively outside.

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On 7/6/2012 7:59, Invisible wrote:
>>>>> (Now, if only my battery wasn't so low...)
>>>>
>>>> Can't you use the phone while it's charging?
>>>
>>> I'd need to have the charger in order to do that. It's 50 miles away.

>>
>> And what have we learned from this?
>
> Well, I suppose I could spend £40 on a second charger. :-P

Or get a phone that charges from USB.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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On 7/12/2012 7:25, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Then Y2K failed to happen (as a catastroph)

I've never been able to figure out whether this should be "Then Y2K failed 
to happen" or "Thus Y2K failed to happen".

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Oh no! We're out of code juice!"
   "Don't panic. There's beans and filters
    in the cabinet."

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>>> And what have we learned from this?
>>
>> Well, I suppose I could spend £40 on a second charger. :-P
>
> Or get a phone that charges from USB.

Oh, my phone *does* charge from USB. But guess what? The connector at 
the phone end is non-standard. What a surprise...

(The same goes for my MP3 player, BTW. It uses a /different/ 
non-standard charger. As does my mum's camera. I could go on.)

Required XKCD quote: http://xkcd.com/927/

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On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:11:39 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 7/12/2012 7:25, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>> Then Y2K failed to happen (as a catastroph)
> 
> I've never been able to figure out whether this should be "Then Y2K
> failed to happen" or "Thus Y2K failed to happen".

Clearly Y2K happened, since it's 2012.

The predicted Y2K computing technology disaster is what failed to 
happen.  Planes failed to fall from the sky, the power grid failed to 
fail, the phones kept working.

Society failed to fall into a dark age due to technology failures.

Jim

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Le 2012-07-20 17:38, Jim Henderson a écrit :
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:11:39 -0700, Darren New wrote:
>
>> On 7/12/2012 7:25, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>>> Then Y2K failed to happen (as a catastroph)
>>
>> I've never been able to figure out whether this should be "Then Y2K
>> failed to happen" or "Thus Y2K failed to happen".
>
> Clearly Y2K happened, since it's 2012.
>
> The predicted Y2K computing technology disaster is what failed to
> happen.  Planes failed to fall from the sky, the power grid failed to
> fail, the phones kept working.
>

Mostly because most companies took it seriously enough that they fixed 
the problems that could have happened.

some small businesses did have problems, for example:

My cousin's restaurant's staff realized at 1am on Jan 1st that Visa and 
Mastercard were rejecting all his sales since they were dated 1/1/1900. 
  He had 200 people who had paid $250 apiece, not counting drinks (and 
they were drinking Dom Perignon) for the Y2K bash.  He would have lost 
close to $100,000 that night if it wasn't for the fact that the adjacent 
hotel's manager (whose computers were Y2k-ready) offered to lend him a 
cash register on the fly.

I was working that night baby sitting devices that couldn't care less 
about the date, but had to be at work nonetheless, so I had rented a few 
DVDs to help pass the time.  I ended up working all night on an 
unrelated outage, and slept through most of Jan 1st. As a result, I 
returned my DVDs to the store late, but their computer said that I owed 
them -$18,500 in late fees because I had returned my DVD 99 years and 
364 days before renting them.  Until I closed my account at that video 
store 5 years later, I had a negative balance in their system.

Some larger businesses too had issues:

Planes did not fall from the skies, but some planes didn't leave the 
ground either as all the airlines that were part of Star Alliance and 
were using a LuftHansa-owned system from tracking aircraft maintenance 
had to get special waivers from their countries' respective aviation 
authority because of signed/unsigned integer goofs in the system saying 
that the aircrafts hadn't been inspected in 2147447122 days.

The Japanese nuclear plants were "out of control" for a few hours as 
some of their monitoring systems crashed and had to be rebooted.

NASA also temporarily lost control of a few satellites for the same reasons.

Not counting all the outages, planned and unplanned, during the previous 
year as systems were being upgraded to be Y2K-ready.

> Society failed to fall into a dark age due to technology failures.
>

I don't think anyone seriously expected society to fall into a dark age.



-- 
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/*   gmail.com     */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }

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On Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:14:04 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:

>> The predicted Y2K computing technology disaster is what failed to
>> happen.  Planes failed to fall from the sky, the power grid failed to
>> fail, the phones kept working.
>>
>>
> Mostly because most companies took it seriously enough that they fixed
> the problems that could have happened.
> 
> some small businesses did have problems, for example:

Sure, there were some relatively minor issues.

There were predictions (whether or not they were /serious/ predictions is 
certainly debatable) of massive outages and a return to the dark ages or 
the stone ages.

But I never took those very seriously myself.  But people who were less 
well-informed (and not working in the tech industry) certainly did think 
things would be much worse than they were.

My coauthor and I joked about getting into the long-haul trucking 
business if everything croaked.  Of course, we knew it was highly 
unlikely (and if it happened the way the doomsayers were, long-haul 
trucking would've have been a particularly good business because there 
are a lot of computers involved in that business - not just to keep the 
trucks running, either, but for the whole supply chain management side of 
things.)

Jim

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:14:04 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>

> Sure, there were some relatively minor issues.
>
The VCR I had at the time lost, I think, a day or it might have been an hour
that could not be fixed.

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On Sat, 21 Jul 2012 05:17:45 -0400, Stephen wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> On Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:14:04 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>>
>>
>> Sure, there were some relatively minor issues.
>>
> The VCR I had at the time lost, I think, a day or it might have been an
> hour that could not be fixed.

Yeah, I probably had an item or two that had issues as well.

Jim

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