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this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Kinda I guess. It was about clocks rolling over from 1999 to 2000 and causing a buffer overflow that would supposedly crash all systems everywhere causing the country to come to a hault.
And it was okay because a lot of people worked really really hard to make it be okay.
Most old systems used two digits for years. The year would go from 99 to 0. Any software doing a date comparison will get a garbage result. If a task needs to be run every 5 minutes, what will the software do if that task was last run 99 years from now? It will not work properly.
Governments and businesses spent lots of money and time patching critical systems to handle the date change. The media made a circus out of it, but when the year rolled over, everything was fine.
Also a lot of people were "on call" to handle any problems when the year changed, so the few problem that had passed unnoticed when doing the fixed and did pop up when the year changed, got solved a lot faster than they normally would.
One program I tested went from (31,12,99) to (01,01,100). Its front end formatted the date and added the century, so it showed 1 January 2000 as 01/01/19100
That wasn't fixed. The fault didn't affect processing (the years were wrong but had the correct offset between them) and was only visible to internal users, and also that system was expected to be retired in 2004
We also got the worst version of Windows ever, ME. Tho maybe with all the BS they’ve done with 11 that might change.
I'm not sure I'd stick to calling it the worst version "ever" since MS is trying really hard to out do themselves.
I'd use ME before the adware that is the current version. It wasn't that bad, it was just Win98 with some visual slop on top that crashed slightly more often.
Millennium Editions ruin everything!! 🤬