Government Emergency Mobile Alert

All 3 phones in this house received the alert.

 

We got it too, although I was in the garden weeding and had left mine in the greenhouse, at least all my seedlings were alerted.

 

I really thought I'd switched the alert off. It still sounded, which is worrying.

 

Maybe it wasn't actually off if you only 'thought' you'd switched it off.

I haven't got a phone so I wouldn't hear the alert whether it worked or not.
I don't know what I'd do in an emergency anyway, I'd probably look for Bella to make sure she was all right, and then I'd try to save my cacti.

 

My alert arrived promptly at 14.58 but my daughter's never came. I told her that in an emergency, taxpayers are a priority over students and other riff raff.

 

We both got it here at bang on 15:00. All the pre-test hype was a load of bo££ocks. Just like Y2K.

 

That's a personal bugbear of mine.

As a software developer I can tell you exactly why all the hype around y2k turned out to be nothing. It's because I and people like me worked out bo££ocks off throughout 1999 to identify and fix code that would be affected, often working late into the night, and suspending all other projects. The fact that nothing happened on 01/01/2000 is testament to all the hard work and dedication of a massively underappreciated bunch of skilled professionals.

 

I don't doubt you and others like you did good and necessary work but the equipment I worked on had nothing done to it and despite the fact we were warned it was all likely to fail and having to work through into New Year's morning, to sort the damage, nothing happened. So forgive me for being sceptical.

 

Not all software was affected. It depended on the underlying technology.

Until about the early 1990s, the focus in software development was to make the most efficient use of storage, as storage was very expensive then. Many programmers took that too far. The thinking was, why store four digits for a year when you can store it in two, and the software will be replaced before it becomes a problem. Trouble is, a lot of it wasn't replaced, because the attitude of bean counters everywhere is, if it does the job today, why spend money upgrading it.

Bean counters and senior managers took a hell of a lot of convincing that a problem was brewing, and that without significant effort, 01/01/2000 wouldn't just bring some minor inconveniences that could be fixed by pressing a few buttons, it would shut down the whole business. Software devs often get ignored. I think there's two reasons. Firstly, we have a reputation for being geeks. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, nobody outside of software development understands anything a developer says when discussing issues that by their very nature are very technical and abstract. I remember my frustrated boss coming back from meetings looking very deflated, and asking us seniors to do the tedious task of writing a concise list of all the things we know will fail and the business implications of those failures, which where I worked included things like thousands of fraud investigations being automatically initiated because the claimant wasn't born yet, and millions of pounds of approved payments being bounced because the payment date was a century before the system was set up.

Even giants like Microsoft were affected. One of their leading database engines in the 1990s was vulnerable to it, until they rolled out a patch in the late 90s. Where I worked, many of our systems were built on top of it. This made our life slightly easier than some, as it meant all we had to do was port all our databases into the newer version, then find every single instance in hundreds of thousands of lines of code that involved any calculation or comparison involving dates, and ensure it was converted to use four digit years. Other companies, using older technologies would have had a lot more work to do. Some, using the newer technologies that already used four digits for years would have been completely immune.

 

heard that was happening. cell phone on my desk. I was in the garden. guess I missed it. Darn it.

 

It's very individual how people react in an emergency. I turn into a lean mean efficient boss machine, the pitch of my voice lowers and I give clear instructions to everybody around me while taking total control. My inner Harrison Ford awakens.

Afterwards, Harrison dissolves and then it's time to panic and run in circles flapping arms

My instinctive behaviour was noticed when I was studying chemical engineering, a rather accident prone line of studies in particular when we students were slightly hung over when handling flammable, radioactive and explosive substances.

Invariably I was teamed up with a girl who carefully measured 10ml of ethanol into a flaming bowl, lighted a match and asked me where the stopper of the 10l ethanol bottle right next to her bowl might be.

She still has many limbs and hairs. Worryingly, she graduated to become a chemistry teacher.

Y2K destroyed my Texas Instruments pocket calculator that was not part of the line up that got a pre- fix package. TI offered to replace it for free. Hats off to all Devs who rescued the world, the problem was real and could have caused some serious trouble.

 

But what if the test was to go wrong anyway so that they can then ask for more & more money to fix the problem
Me being