Donna Laframboise's new exposé book on the IPCC

View from the Solent says:
October 14, 2011 at 3:27 pm
“I was one of a small team that spent 1-2 years fixing an essential financial system for a *very* large international, erm, computer corp. If that hadn’t been done, on Jan 1 2000 the brown stuff would have left the fan and coated the walls to a depth of several feet.
Probably hundreds of thousands of hours were spent on sorting out badly-designed business systems around the world. (It was boom time for us softies) That the Y2K effect was minimal was a result of that effort.”
Millions of hours go into every new release of Microsoft Windows. Hundreds of thousands of hours are nothing. The thing of it is that it was very very easy to test for what would happen on the rollover date by isolating the system under test and set the clock forward to the rollover date. It’s a pretty slothful programmer who didn’t bother using 4 digits to represent the year in his code, there wasn’t much of that sloth out there, and what problems that existed were easily identified. This was the most anticipated and proactively fixed non-problem in the history of computing.
Now, as I recall, 2038 is the real date to get scared about because that’s when the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 exceeds the maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer. This measure of time used in computers is truly ubiquitous and not at all easy to fix. But it’s still over 25 years away so nothing to sweat about quite yet.

Jeff Alberts says:
October 14, 2011 at 3:26 pm
“Rude in what way? It seems to be ok when the mods do it. And if you think this kind of error is occasional, you haven’t been paying attention.”
========
Why are you here?.
You have your own blog, which appears to draw no traffic.
Your “comments” here add nothing to the conversation, and appear to be aimed towards embarrassing your host.
I suggest you Google “social graces”, as you seem to have none.

In the interests of balance, may I request that everyone also consider purchasing Pachauri’s volume?
http://www.amazon.com/Return-Almora-Dr-R-K-Pachauri/dp/8129115743

Donna L. says, “In my mind’s eye I am addressing an audience of ordinary citizens and the questions under discussion are: What is the IPCC? and Can it be trusted? I’ve marshaled my evidence and ordered my argument in the way that seemed to me to have the greatest chance of persuading a reasonable person with an open mind that this organization wields an inappropriate level of influence over our lives – and that it has a credibility score of zero.)”
Laframboise, Donna (2011-10-09). The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert (Kindle Locations 2590-2593). Ivy Avenue Press. Kindle Edition.

—————–
Given that our culture’s support of the IPCC is negatively accelerating, the IPCC’s credibility isn’t zero . . . . its credibility is below zero; negative.
John

O Donna, this is thorough, balanced, perceptive… hopefully you can get your work raised to a visible level with help here and from the precious minority of other still-independent reporters.
Thank you for your hard and dedicated work.

“Now, as I recall, 2038 is the real date to get scared about because that’s when the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 exceeds the maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer.”
I calculate a span of 136 years worth of seconds fitting into a 32 bit memory space.
Also the software development environment I use have milliseconds as the smallest units, reducing the maximum time span by 1000.

Congratularions to Lazy Teenager on your possible candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize!

The hype on Y2K was so far over the top, it seems impossible when we look back on it. I had people who SHOULD know better telling me that cars wouldn’t start, cable descramblers would freeze, telephone relays and internet switches and cell phone towers would stop. I found myself many times asking where you set the Year on your car’s engine controller…
Yes, there was an issue. As ferd says, nobody writing code in the 70s and 80s actually believed it would still be in use, because everything was being changed and updated so frequently. Besides, worst case you could just continue using the two digit years and add 100. I had some nice maintenance contracts in the late 90s, one was for a pharmacy system from the early 80s that was still being used in 1999, written in compiled BASIC on DOS, and they had lost the source code some years previously. They hired a team of programmers to completely rewrite the system for Windows in 1996 and barely got it done in time.
Almost everyone I know involved in IT was rolling in dough back then, and a huge amount of that money came straight from governments. There is obviously a plus side: more coders think farther ahead now. It’s a lot easier to get a company to spend more on testing.
I’m very concerned about the looming Y10K problem, and the less anticipated but potentially horrific Y32768 issue. We should immediately begin “tackling” these “challenging” issues, and reduce our code output to pre-1990 levels to “mitigate” these coming disasters…

Gary Mount says:
I calculate a span of 136 years worth of seconds fitting into a 32 bit memory space.
Using an unsigned int, yes, but time_t is a signed integer to allow for manipulation of dates prior to 1970. That also rules out converting to an unsigned int.
64 bit systems will, of course, not have quite the same problem, as a 64 bit int is large enough to keep counting about 20 times longer than the assumed lifetime of the universe. 32 bit programmes running on 64 bit systems will have problems but that’s relatively easily solved by recompiling (assuming you have access to the code). The real problem is embedded and legacy 32 bit systems that can’t be upgraded, or software that relies on time_t being a 32 bit signed int for whatever reason.

“UN Gender and Diversity criteria [were applied] when selecting people for positions …”
—
So were there by any chance any female scientists from Almora?