Tuesday 7 August 2018

Idiots with agendas

First the execrable Rees Mog, and now Bernard Jenkin, both hard brexiters publicly displaying their ignorance and destroying any credibility that "brexit will be a breeze and we'll look back and wonder what the fuss was about".

Ocean going idiots, both. Not for supporting brexit, for they have their own agendas there (to pick up juicy tit-bits at knock-down prices for their financial empires from the smoking ruin that UK will be after a no-deal crash out next year). No, they are ocean going idiots for displaying their ignorance and stupidity in comparing brexit to the Millennium Bug problem. 

They say "everyone panicked in the late '90s about computers unable to handle the roll-over from 1999 to 2000 dates, and in reality, nothing happened".  

Of course nothing bloody happened! Nothing bloody happened because companies all over the world spent an absolute fortune checking computer code for date fields that would not handle numbers above 1999. I know, I was there, and very much involved with my projects at EDS. And a great deal of code dating back to 1960s mainframes was indeed found to have such limited date fields, coded by programmers in the days when memory and storage space was very limited indeed, and who never dreamed their code would still be in use at turn of the century.

It was a massive operation. Affected code had to be corrected, and then of course it had to be tested to ensure the changes had not introduced any new bugs. Unlike know-nothing politicians with selfish personal agendas who label experts as peddlers of 'project fear', the computer industry took the professional approach of fixing the problem rather than waiting to see what happened and then trying to pick up the pieces from the resultant wreckage.

Of course these politicians have the advantage of being able to hood-wink a not-too-sharp public into supporting their agenda. The Computer industry was, thankfully, a tad smarter than that.

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