vtcodger

Re: Attitude problem
YOU may have spent New Years Eve 2000 at a great party. I and many others I'm sure, spent New Years morning,2000 booting 100-plus PCs to make sure they at least sort of worked -- never a certainty with Windows-98 even on normal mornings.

MiguelC

Re: Attitude problem
I was on duty that evening. At midnight we nodded, saluted each other, and went to work checking everything was running smoothly. Having had no alerts whatsoever, at around 1AM I went to the nearest ATM and checked my balance and latest account movements (an account in another bank than the one I was working for at the time). There was an interest credit of around the equivalent of 3000€. Resisting the urge to spend it there and then, I went back, showed the slip to my co-workers and pondered on what would happen from there on. At 8 AM, after an uneventful night on the job, I went down and checked my balance again. Without a trace of that earlier payment, it now showed the correct and, unfortunately, much smaller interest deposit...

Someone's night was indeed a lot more eventful than mine ;) //

Bill GraySilver badge
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Re: The bug is in the support library code (libc?) of a 1982 C compiler?

I suspect most time library code of this vintage also omits the year 2000 leap year (as I recall SGI Indigo Irix 4 did) and would be a day out after 2000.02.28.

I dunno how common that particular error would be? To screw things up that way, you have to simultaneously know that (in the Gregorian calendar) "century" years are not leap years, but also not know that years evenly divisible by 400 are leap years. That is to say, you have to be a little ignorant, but not completely ignorant.

If you're completely ignorant of the problem, you'll say that 2000 should have a leap day, and be correct for the wrong reasons.