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A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is programming art? Are hackers artists? Join the ongoing debate in Table Talk's Digital Culture area - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y The software that refused to die Let's Get This Straight Quake-r state Let's Get This Straight Instant histories of the browser wars
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______Millennium bugging out
BY JANELLE BROWN | Candace Turner used to sell industrial freezer units; today, she sells Survival Domes -- insulated geodesic shelters heated by wood-burning stoves. In the last year, she and her husband have stocked their Missouri farm with a cornucopia of livestock, seeds and canned food and bought a horse-drawn plow and a covered wagon. Her four children have been told they have to learn to feed themselves, just in case. On Jan. 1, 2000, Turner fears that the chaos will begin: the power grids will go dark, and airplanes and trains will grind to a halt. The stock markets will crash and burn, along with the U.S. government, and banks will shut down. Cities will erupt in riots and looting. Starving urban refugees, Turner believes, could eventually show up on her doorstep as beggars. The disaster she anticipates is not the apocalypse, but what some feel is its real-life technological equivalent: the "millennium bug." Turner isn't alone as she prepares for this scenario. Across North America, groups of concerned programmers, economics experts, consultants and techies are preparing for a varying scale of "Y2K" (geek shorthand for "Year 2000") disaster. The Y2K survivalist, or "safe haven," movement is burgeoning as Jan. 1, 2000, approaches. The millennium bug is a programming glitch in many older computers, programs and "embedded systems" that use only two digits to record the date. When the year "00" comes around, no one knows how they will react -- and whether they will stop working. Problems could extend from local electric companies to nuclear reactors, from the Internal Revenue Service to the telephone companies, from the airlines to the retail distribution chain. Any large-scale system that relies on complex digital information technology is potentially vulnerable. The government and private companies are beginning to spend vast sums of money to fix all the code, and some experts are confident that the millennium portends little worse than a few bumps. But rewriting all that code is a laborious process, and other observers argue that it's already too late in the game to repair many major systems. No one can guarantee that a Y2K disaster will happen. What concerns the new Y2K survivalists -- the pessimists who are joining in what some participants are calling "the Great Geek Migration" -- is that no one can guarantee that it won't. "It's not a question of who's right -- it's a question of mitigating the consequences of who's wrong," says Paul Milne, a vocal Y2K survivalist. "If I'm wrong I'm still here, the birds are chirping, the sky is still above. But if they're wrong, they're dead." N E X T__P A G E .|. Defending your turf from "Cannibal Welfare Mutants" - - - - - - - - - - -
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