5 ms·

What is the famous S500K problem? Your comment here is the first result on google for "S500K". Completely agree wrt the other points though...

• gumby 5y ago
  Sorry, it was a bit of a joke: Y2K was Year 2000 and my made up name S500K was Stockprice over around $500K. I suppose I should have written "famous". Those of us over a certain age remember how much work went into patching the Y2K issue, and how it changed the software industry, and yet was pooh-poohed by the general press in the final year of the last millennium (2000) when nothing material went wrong. My point was the article was a little bit alarmist, which it almost had to be to spin out a brief article about what is otherwise an amusing piece of trivia that would fit in a sentence: "Berkshire Hathaway's price has almost reached the point where it can't be represented in NASDAQ's computer, but they are patching their code and expect everything to work fine by the time the stock reaches that point, if ever." I'd be glad to chuckle in passing upon encountering that sentence, but was annoyed at the padding used by the poor reporter to make an article of it. Given the state of the world it's hard to blame anyone (reporter, editor, Bloomberg management...) for this phenomenon.
  • LorenPechtel 5y ago
    Nothing material went spectacularly wrong. There were things like the supermarket whose inventory computer was tossing a bunch of perfectly good product until someone noticed that the "expired" goods they were disposing of weren't expired at all.
    • gumby 5y ago
      That was thanks to a tremendous amount of work beforehand. The nasdaq thing will be easily fixed in time too.