Opinion is one thing. Disinformation another.
Isn't there a moderator on this forum?
Really, some articles should not be allowed to be published.

This article is a waste of pixels.

Y2K overdone? Tell that to my sysadmin friend who got a 12:15am call on 01/01/2000 and had to go to work because of a midnight server crash - quite the worse for champagne too I might add!

The author is rewriting history. For the article to work, it depends on people's memory deteriorating seven years after the event.

Mischevious, malicious and pointless.

And WTF has any of this got to do with global warming/climate change? The subtext seems to be 'the world didn't end on 01/01/2000, therefore global warming is a leftie hoax, QED.'

Bizarre.

Perhaps the author would care to compare notes with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on that other great 20th century hoax??

I'm one programmer who had to make changes to a number of systems that would have stopped, or malfunctioned if programming changes weren't made prior to 01/01/2000. I did NOT gain financially from doing this; it was just part of my job, and a necessary task. Simply, we made the changes and everyone would conclude - "see, nothing happened, it was a big hoax". If changes weren't made, they would have complained.

Comparing Y2K and climate change, is just ridiculous.

Y2K was recognised as a problem, and was FIXED, even if some did get rich from it. I'm happy if the same happens with climate change.

It was a massive POTENTIAL problem. I have close friends who monitored the main frame computers covering two States. These massive contraptions are kept in temperature controlled 'bunkers', along with the personnel who were responsible for them.

In the final few days of of that year, a couple of them slept on camp-beds overnight counting down.

Nothing drastic happened, BUT these highly qualified men knew of the possibility of a major problem.

That's the irony of that situation; when nothing extreme occurred, well..; it had to be a fraud didn't it?

What nonsense.

as a IT consultant formerly involved in y2k patching...

HA HA... suckers...

come and enjoy a martini on my 50 ft'er moored in Matilda Bay.. nahhh on second thoughts, your microsft servers need patching...$190 per hour..

heh heh... suckers..

I think there is some confusion amongst people like Chris. I suspect Chris is the sort of person he claims to despise "...consultants, most of whom got their qualifications from reading Windows for Dummies...". It's telling that much of his column talks about date storage in EXCEL.

Of course systems that were released in the 90s, including most PC based systems were Y2K compliant. But as I said earlier, the big systems that actually did the hard work of many large organisations - debtors, creditors, general ledger in accounting, and withdrawals and deposits in banking - were full of Y2K bugs.

It's interesting that the only posting that has supported Chris (apart from the obvious troll) is mhaze. He or she says that all his or her systems were Y2K compliant because they were recently developed. I'm sure he or she is right. But he or she has missed the point. Most of the Y2K work was on old systems - systems that had been around for decades.

On a tangential issue, I am concerned about the deterioration of the quality of articles in Online Opinion. It seems that anything that can make the most obscure point favouring climate change denialism, no matter how silly, gets a guernsey. CitizenK is right. Opinion is one thing. Ignorant (or worse) disinformation is another thing altogether. Doesn't this blog have some editorial board that at least checks the facts of articles?