You've never heard of Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series? (City of Bones, City of blah blah, City of Blah blah blah . . .)

I don't know about the fic, but by the time it was turned into a book and published, it wasn't bad. I had decent hopes for it, until the series upped the angst to 11 for no reason, resolved it, then upped it again for no reason again. I thought the actual story line was interesting enough for the first couple of books. Even the third one held my attention. But that's about it.

Oh, and at least in the published works, no was Harry/Draco (or their substitutes, although there was some slash in it between what might be the Harry character and another. Although honestly the Harry character doesn't really look like Harry).

 

Does such a Hall of Fame that we're talking about consider the character of the individual in addition to the individual's achievements? For instance, Pete Rose's gambling on baseball has effectively precluded him from entering the Baseball Hall of Fame and it will be difficult for members of the steroids era (Bonds, McGuire, Sosa, et al.).

If so, then wouldn't that preclude individuals like Cassandra Clare (Plagiarism) or Thanfiction (Leading a cult? Fraud? There was a lot of crazy shenanigans)?

 

Dude, if you start disqualifying fanfic writers for shenanigans, that list is gonna be pretty short. Online fandom is not exactly the most stable hobby on the 'net.

 

lol..I used to get this all the time. I don't remember the exact date I published originally, but it was around 2003/2004. But at one point my story was removed for violating a copyright claim from an author who had actually plagiarized me. Thanks to the support of my readers, they petitioned FF.net into actually looking into the claim (which apparently wasn't done much back then), and FF.net eventually re-posted my story. But when they did, the publish date got reset to Dec 31st, 1969, which is apparently an important date in computer programing. I don't know. But I never asked anyone to fix it, since from that moment on I had the distinct pleasure to be the oldest HP fanfic story.

 

If you're curious, that's because of how computers track time. In computer terms, time is simply a number that gets +1 added to it every second, which then has a bunch of math done to it to convert it into a date display that you can understand. When they were building this system, they had to decide on a 0 point, such that that time number will be "number of seconds since the 0 point". It was the early 70s when this system was developed, so they just happened to pick 12:00:00 AM January 1, 1970 UTC as the 0 point.

And so whenever a date value in a computer system is missing or 0'd out, it will resolve to that date, adjusted for your timezone (e.g., in the US, 6-8 hours earlier).

This has been your random fact of the day.

 

Was that also part of the reason Y2K was going to be a thing?

 

No, Y2k was for software that used a two digit number for years, and couldn't differentiate between the year 2000 and 1900 (or 1800, 1700...). There's going to be a new issue in 2038, when the the timers counting seconds from the beginning of 1970 reaches 2³¹ seconds, and some software is expected to roll over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

 

Nah. Y2K was because, pre-2000, a lot of software had years recorded with only 2 digits (e.g. "68" for "1968"), for a variety of reasons, ranging from the programmer being lazy to often because when that software was written the storage for the 2 extra digits was actually meaningful/expensive. Naturally, this meant that once 2000 rolled around, the software would then start to assume, for the example above, that "68" meant "2068", and if that was for a birthday, then all sorts of records would get gnarly and confused, which in turn means software interacting with it would break.

Fortunately, a lot of very smart people spent a lot of manhours going through the code for old systems and updating it to use 4 digit years instead, so Y2K ended up not really being a major disruption for most people.

Unfortunately, while they were at it, they didn't also update the systems to use 64 bit time, which has led to what folks are calling the 2038 problem IIRC. The TLDR is that in computers numbers are just a collection of 1s and 0s under the hood, where each 1 represents an exponent of 2 and then all those exponents are added together to get the final number (e.g., binary 0101 = decimal (0*2^0) + (1*2^1) + (0*2^2) + (1*2^3) = 2 + 8 = 10). And in the early days of modern computing, it was decided (thanks mostly to hardware limitations) that 32 bits was going to be the largest possible number of bits in any given number. The first bit would be used to tell if the number is positive or negative, and then the other 31 bits would be for the value of the number. This means that, in those systems, the largest possible value for a number is 2,147,483,647.

The 2038 problem arises because 2,147,483,647 seconds from 12:00:00 AM Jan 1, 1970 is 03:14:07 AM Jan 19, 2038. Meaning once we hit 03:14:08 AM Jan 19, 2038, the number is literally too big for 32 bit systems to understand, and it would loop around to become a negative number. Meaning 32 bit systems would think it's actually somewhere in the 1790s or thereabouts.

Good news is that we started moving to 64 bit systems, which are big enough to track out to the year like 550,000, twenty years ago or so and everything built within the last decade is entirely 64-bit. We just have ~15 years to go through and update all the systems older than that before they get bricked.

Edit: And I didn't see Ark's post. Guess that's what I get for not refreshing the thread.

 

Any other impending systems catastrophes on the world of computing we should worry about?

 

I'm sure there's one or two ticking timebombs somewhere, probably somewhere in the gigantic mess of Win95, COBOL, and other archaic systems known as the banking sector if I had to guess. I'm not aware of any with any real urgency behind them though.