Cheesy Javascript Patches

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

If you use "view source" on many web pages that show the correct date, you will see that the original javascript routines that return 192000 or 19100 (depending on the browser) have been replaced with the date hardcoded as 2000. This is quite a pathetic patch as IE can be accomodated with a simple if/else statement to produce the correct date by filtering for 4 digits vs. 2, and netscape can be coded properly with a line that sums 1900 with the result of the year query. Makes me wonder how many critical dates have been patched in a similar manual, no effort kind of way that will cause trouble next year, the real start of the new millenium.

-- (foo@bar.com), January 02, 2000

Answers

Good point, FUBAR. There are literally millions of lame, immediate Y2K fixes everywhere. You're right, we will see another spike of Y2K glitches next year.

-- Think It (Through@Pollies.Duh), January 02, 2000.

Alot of the fix-on-failure methods will be band-aids. People who didnt want to fix it right the first time will fix it just enough when it dies to keep it running.

Everyone who rolled back to previous years just to keep things afloat have created a perpetual "pre-y2k" environment in their systems. Sooner or later the computers MUST be fixed. When real remediation comes to those systems we will see the same problems we worried about for the past months and years.

I cant wait to see this in action. I already know two people who are printing out forms with last years date because their programs cant do 2000. Should be interesting to see their business clients reaction to that.



-- hamster (hamster@mycage.com), January 02, 2000.


web page have screwed java. Too bad. Java is for web pages. who cares. They have nothing to do with what the programmers have done with software in mainframes. But then I know 12 year old who can create webpages using java. Most have done a pretty good job.

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), January 04, 2000.

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