this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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I think we can defederate that company's name from our personal vocabulary instances.

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[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The Y2K issue wasn't just a scare though. If the Devs and IT in general didn't had a strategy to overcome that ridiculous windows issue, things could have go bad. Media did media things and pushed it to a world ending scenario though.

[–] Poiar@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure that it wasn't Windows that was the main offender, but instead legacy systems of all kinds made since 1970, where people were not expecting for their programs to run for more than 30 years.

Surprise! Businesses don't care whether the code is old, as long as it works - so that data type you store the year in only held two characters, and hard-coded the 19 onto it.

1999 would be written as 99. 19 + 99 = 1999 = computers were happy.

2000 would be written as 00. 19 + 00 = 1900 = computers went to shit

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Yeah good explanation. I was too young to had any further knowledge about this issue way back and only saw it manifesting when I had to adjust my windows 95 clock :)