Trump Orders Government to Stop Work on Y2K Bug
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"The year is 2017, the Y2K bug has still not manifested itself. However our agency remains vigilante and prepared for the day when it does."
>“Many agencies have forgotten how to deregulate,” he said. “It’s been so long since somebody asked them to look backwards.”
This is why it's generally a bad idea to make the government responsible for things that can be done by private businesses. Even the most bureaucratic corporation stopped working on the Y2K bug 17 years ago.
> The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
So sure, it's good to get outdated rules off the book, but don't pretend like people were still writing reports about Y2k.
It's human nature. Nobody wants to be the one to remove a test case, procedure or process. If something goes bad shortly afterwards guess who will be to blame?
Even in software, I've seen countless man hours updating and fixing tests that were little more than "is this code what I just wrote" and many of which weren't even testing the code that was going to production.
Source?
Y2K is still an issue in some places. Without knowing more, it's possible that this could be a really bad move. Or maybe it's fine. It depends on the state of their code, which I'm not familiar with.
2050 (or whatever cutoff they're using) will suck (again) if that was their solution.
You might not care about records that are 100+ years old, but you might.
Space (both RAM and storage) is a premium on these systems and therefore much thought is given to what you place within any given row. As a result, no one stored unix timestamps as that would have required 10 characters more per timestamp per row, which would have had other ramifications on other parts of the code and/or memory. It would have required all stored records to be re-written somehow, which depending on the available online storage may have been an impossible task in and of itself. Not to mention how one would handle the recovery of any existing backups.
Due to these complexities, most organizations settled for code that shifted the meaning of the 2 digit year by some predetermined offset.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/me... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Mulvaney
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/08/08/changin...
Or eliminating the Core Federal Services Council which was setup to identify and improve the Federal services with the highest volumes:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/omb...
So, since an employee works around 2000 hours/year, this is something on the order of 10 employees.
> Seven of the more than 50 paperwork requirements the White House eliminated on Thursday dealt with the Y2K bug, according to a memo OMB released. Officials at the agency estimate the changes could save tens of thousands of man-hours across the federal government.
They're not talking about the Y2k paperwork requirement when they give their estimate of hours saved, but the totality of the paperwork requirements.
I can't tell if you're being snarky or not because you wrote so little. My finger was hovering over the downvote button, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt.
>The agency didn’t provide an estimate of how much time is currently spent on Y2K paperwork, but Linda Springer, an OMB senior adviser, acknowledged that it isn’t a lot since those requirements are already often ignored in practice.
If this is the case, then the move to remove the Y2K regulations likely won't cause much of a dent. The other regulations might have an effect, however.