CNN and the Canadian Y2K site both just reported that we may all be breathing a sigh of relief prematurely. Evidently, most embedded chips and Unix systems are set to GMT. So the rollover hasn't happened yet in all of the countries yet to report. GMT 2400 is EST 1900, I believe.
Here is the post from the Canadian site:
Midnight has now passed through 6 - count em - 6 time zones with *no* reported failures! None! Zero! Notta! Zilch!
I decided to wait until I saw what happened in Indonesia before really getting nervous. Why nervous? Because, given that some of the countries the rollover has "rolled over", *something* should have failed. Even a minor system. But nothing.
I started to get the feeling like I was sitting on an unexploded hand-grenade. Or the kind of scene you would see in a Road-Runner cartoon, where a bomb drops right beside the coyote, he jumps for cover behind a rock and covers his head ... but the bomb just sits there. So he goes to investigate, and just as he is 2 feet away from it, it goes off. That is the feeling I am getting - like, as strange as it sounds, something is wrong and we are abandoning our cover prematurely.
Don't get me wrong! If this is the way Y2K is going to work out for the rest of the world, I will be the first person dancing in the streets - probably drunk and naked - but that's another story. But like I said before, *knowing* that some of these countries barely lifted a finger to fix their Y2K problems (with many systems likely ignored altogether), *something* should have crashed.
Personally, I would feel *much, much* more confident if a few (or a lot) of "minor" systems in some of these countries had gone haywire, but the "big" stuff pretty-much held together. *That* would inspire confidence to me. So I did a bit of quick reading on the net.
When I did, I soon found something interesting that *may* just explain it - the only thing that, to me, makes any sense. First of all, apparently, embedded systems *and* most Unix computers (the computers that run everything) are set to Greenwich Mean Time, *not* their local time-zone. What this means (if this is indeed the case) is that all these computers haven't even *seen* the rollover yet! To them, it is still New Year's Eve.
Again, if this is the case, most of the above computers (and *all* the embedded systems) will have their *true* rollover in just over 6 hours from now (5:00 PM Mountain Daylight Time). Any systems *west* of GMT (like the Americas) would rollover according to their individual time-zones, as expected. I guess there is only one way to find out - wait. But until then, do me a favor and stay crouched behind that rock - just in case.
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