Those who watch the excitement are the layman after all, and those who know the inside story will not think that the demo is messed up just because the test system has crashed; On the contrary, it reveals the real existence and possible dangers of the "millennium bug". Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

Looking at the real target group, all of them have solemn faces, and the richest man who leads all this is inevitably dark.

Although a number of banks in Xiangjiang were eliminated during the banking crisis in the 1980s, most of them belonged to Chinese-funded banks with irregular operations, and they were able to settle accounts after the autumn when they were looking for their own death, while the status of Xiangjiang as one of the world's financial centers has not changed in a relaxed environment -- almost all of the world's major banks have branches in Xiangjiang.

This makes it easier to pass on the results of this living experiment to the headquarters of all the banks around the world - you need to upgrade your existing computer systems to prevent the harm of the "millennium bug".

I have to say that in order to create this IT business opportunity, Tang Huan is not ordinarily painstaking.

You know, it's not easy to find a financial center with international status like Xiangjiang to be a demonstration platform; And it's not so easy to have institutions like Hang Seng Bank and Sun Hung Kai Bank, which run well, risk their reputations and join forces as test subjects – but how can they be convincing without such weighty examples?

The reactions of the representatives of the banks proved that the demonstration had achieved the desired impact.

The so-called "millennium bug" stems from the inherent way computers process data - numbers in nature are continuous and infinite, while computer space can only be represented discretely and finitely.

For example, if you use 1 byte, or 8 bits, to represent a positive integer, you can only describe a total of 256 numbers from 0 to 255.

The essence of this phenomenon is that when writing software programs to solve real-world problems, bugs often appear when dealing with extreme data, such as data overflow and so on.

In this case, if the positive integer 255 represented by 1 byte is added to the top by 1, if the computer does not actively report the error, the result returned is often 0 - because the "1" carried to the highest digit in the real binary digit string cannot be represented by the computer, and it is directly truncated, leaving only the "0" of the next 8 bits.

This is just the most abstract and basic principle, and the actual situation is much more complex.

Before the mid-1980s, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when mainframes were booming, storage was very expensive, both in memory and hard disks; An acceptable and inexpensive solution, i.e. punched cards and tapes.

To take an example that is most accessible to ordinary people, the Atari 2600, a home video game console introduced to the market in 1977, has only 128 bytes of memory.

Under such heavy cost pressures, computers usually have only six digits for the year, month and day, as if January 1, 1970 was "700101", and the first two digits of the year "19" were omitted.

To take a more well-known example, it is the first generation of China's resident ID card in the original time and space - compared with the 18-digit code of the later second-generation resident ID card, there are three less digits, and two of them are omitted from the first two digits of the four-digit year number.

Based on the principle of digital overflow, this computer method of representing time, by the year 2000, the result is likely to be 1900.

How serious is the resulting harm?

As far as the banking sector is concerned, excuse me, you're going out of business, and depositor interest is increasing for decades; As far as the field of taxation is concerned, I'm sorry, you are bankrupt and owe the state 100 years of taxes; As far as the telecommunications field is concerned, if you dare to make a two-minute cross-century call at 23:59 on December 31, 1999, then congratulations, the bill given to you by the telecommunications company is likely to be the bill for a lifetime of phone calls -- "100 years minus 2 minutes".

These are just the predictable hazards caused by the automatic execution of computer programs, and the unpredictable situation is made even more unpredictable by the human error of programmers, such as calculating leap years using lax mathematical algorithms.

In addition, there is a custom in software systems to use limit numbers such as "99" to indicate special meanings such as "deletion" and "disposal" of files.

So, once the year 2000 approaches, the problem is not limited to inexplicable miscalculations, but can also be accompanied by vague data loss.

In fact, as early as a few decades ago, Bob Bemer, the father of ASCII - the American standard code for information exchange, first raised the issue of the "millennium bug", and hoped that large enterprises such as IBM, international organizations such as ISO, and the government ~ government would pay attention to its harm, but there was little response.

After all, the year 2000 was still far away, and the cost of memory was too much to bear.

Now, the issue of the "millennium bug" has been officially raised again, and the situation is obviously very different from before.

First of all, the influence of Mr. the richest man is not comparable to that of an engineer like Bob Bemer; Secondly, this year is 2000, and it can no longer be said "far away"; Finally, the unit cost of both semiconductor memory and electromechanical hard drives has dropped dramatically enough to accommodate seemingly redundant data.

Tang Huan gathered representatives of banks around the world to watch a vivid example, and as a result, everyone was frightened and said that they would report to the headquarters about the impact of the "millennium bug" problem.

Since the "millennium bug" is an obscure issue, stakeholders can understand it and value it from the perspective of harm, but when the media reports it, it is certainly not so professional.

As a result, many depositors of Hang Seng Bank and Sun Hung Kai Bank began to panic. Then run to the counter to withdraw money.

This scene made those who were unhappy with Tang Huan gloat - let you show off and play away, the reputation that Hang Seng Bank and Sun Hung Kai Bank had cultivated so hard to be ruined in a flash, and maybe usher in a panic run.

Mr. The richest man, who had been prepared for a long time, would certainly not let the ill-intentioned people get their wish, and immediately issued a joint statement with Hang Seng Bank and Sun Hung Kai Bank -- the two banks only used old equipment to conduct a test, which does not mean that the entire system really has a "millennium bug" problem. In fact, through cooperation with manufacturers such as Zheru and Fangyuan, the problem of "millennium insects" has been steadily prevented. In order to give depositors peace of mind, they will give away a "Millennium Bug" insurance to ensure that the deposit is foolproof.

With this reassurance, the number of depositors of Hang Seng Bank and Sun Hung Kai Bank has increased instead of decreasing.

In this way, with the issue of "Millennium Bug", Mr. the richest man was brought to the public, and various tricks related to it, such as the "Millennium Bug" risk, emerged one after another.

The most exaggerated thing is that the "Millennium Bug" is obviously similar to the "computer virus", which belongs to the category of computers, but it is portrayed by the scammers as a real disaster similar to the plague.

Media Asia TV reported a social news - a woman thought that the "Millennium Worm" was a worm that grew in her stomach, but was fooled by three scammers and bought 100 tablets of "Millennium Worm Medicine" with a unit price of 300 Hong Kong dollars, together with cash, bracelets and rings, and was defrauded of more than 30,000 Hong Kong dollars.

There are even tobacco interests that are in conflict with Tang Huan, taking advantage of the situation to put out a satirical advertisement - smoking a cigarette and killing a thousand-year-old insect.

The richest man who only cared about the reactions of big investors in banks, insurance, securities, futures indexes, telecommunications, electric power, government ~ government, etc., was speechless after listening to his subordinates telling this news to himself as an anecdote -- this world is really full of wonders, and liars can actually catch the ride of the "millennium bug".

According to Tang Huan's original intention, he hoped to maintain the mystery of the "millennium worm", so that the world's big players could further abandon the old system that was stable but outdated, and turn to the Fangyuan computer system, so as to create a sales growth momentum that lasted for several years.

The more he stood at the top of the food chain in this world, the more Tang Huan paid attention to accumulating yin virtue.

So, he thought about it, and then decided that since he hyped the concept of "millennium worm", it was necessary to use his influence to do some popular science on this issue.

Talking about binary and mathematical algorithms to a huge number of computer science laymen is tantamount to playing the harp to a cow.

Based on this consideration, Tang IT simply pointed out in his article the time points with the greatest probability of the outbreak of the "Millennium Bug".

For example, 1 January 1999, 9 April 1999, i.e. 99 in 1999, 9 September 1999, 31 December 1999, 1 January 2000, 28 February 2000, 29 February 2000, etc.

Once completed, the article was officially released in eight languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic, and was quickly reprinted and quoted by major news agencies around the world.

The "Ming Pao", which has already been won by Weng Jingjing, published the Chinese version of this popular science article for the first time in the near water, and received an extra heart-warming reminder from the richest man -- the lie describing the "millennium bug" as a real "worm" in nature is the easiest to debunk, and we are afraid that the kind of deception tricks cloaked in plausible but not scientific principles, such as the credit card number hiding the "millennium bug", etc., everyone must remain calm and rational.

Ming Pao, which rarely uses exaggerated methods such as headlines that shock readers, and does not have a "Fengyue edition", has long been a serious newspaper and has been subscribed by many middle and primary school students in Xiangjiang.

As a result, as soon as this article was published, a Hong Kong-wide science popularization campaign was formed from schools to publicize the correct understanding of the "millennium bug" problem -- primary and secondary school students often brought the problem home to study it with their parents.

This situation made those who were bombarding Tang Huan very depressed from the ~ by the people ~ the main faction, and when they returned home, they were pestered by their children to recite Mr. The richest man's popular science articles were really indescribable, so that some people finally couldn't help but complain about it: "Tang someone, can you not harm our next generation, there are obvious grammatical errors in paragraph X of your popular science article." ”

This kind of noise is not at all in the scope of Mr. Mangyman's attention, and what he wants to see most is the reaction of the world's "big players".

Not to mention, Tang IT's influence is really powerful, and after the joint on-site test conducted by Hang Seng Bank and Sun Hung Kai Bank, other industries and institutions that will obviously be affected by the "Millennium Bug" problem have also been evaluated accordingly.

For example, the Hawaiian Electric Power Company in the United States did an experiment, that is, enter the data of "00" year and see what will happen at the end.

As a result, power plants automatically shut down, and the transmission network can change voltage and frequency in some cases, resulting in total power outages, electrical failures, and even burnouts.

By extension, the instruments in nuclear power plants around the world may get out of control due to the impact of the "millennium bug" problem, causing disasters such as nuclear radiation leakage.

For another example, Bank of America, headquartered in San Francisco, tested the automatic scrapping system of domestic automobiles in the United States, and found that some cars with a high degree of automation that left the factory this year had built-in engine control chips, once they crossed the year 2000, they would get the wrong results that had been in operation for more than 90 years, and then refuse to start the car because it was beyond the service life.

In addition, a preliminary survey conducted by some professional organizations found that although the boom of personal computers since the 1980s has led to a continuous reduction in the price of hardware memory, due to the inertia of thinking, programmers still habitually use two-digit numbers to indicate the year in software systems.

In the case of the personal computer itself, the CMOS used to store time in IBM-PC-compatible computers ostensibly uses four digits to represent the year, but in reality, there is no correlation between the first two digits and the last two digits.

In other words, if one year is added to 1999, the CMOS processing result is: the "19" of the upper two digits remains unchanged, the "99" of the lower two digits becomes "00", and the final result becomes "1900", which is a typical "millennium bug" problem.

In contrast, the young Fangyuan computer company does not seem to be affected by such thinking inertia, and there are no such problems in Fangyuan personal computer products.

The Millennium Bug problem is so pervasive and so alarming that the world is expected to spend at least hundreds of billions of dollars in IT costs to solve this intractable problem.

In the process of investigating the problem of "millennium insects" by "big households", there are also typical cases of successfully avoiding its harm.

For example, China has confirmed that the resident ID card system, which has been in place since the mid-1980s and involves hundreds of millions of people, correctly uses a four-digit processing year and can directly span the year 2000, but the banking and other systems linked to its data still need to be further communicated with solution providers such as Fang Zheru and Fang Yuan.

As a result, all parties who noticed the news were unanimously concerned about the itinerary of Mr. the richest man -- welcome Tang Dajia to come and guide us on how to deal with the "millennium bug" problem.