Talk:Exe0.1 Linda Hilfling
Hi Linda,
Thanks for your article. It is an interesting read to recall and reflect the incident in 2000, perhaps can help us to think about now? There are few issues that I am thinking may be you can help to dig into this:
1/ The problem was initially caused by the data field of time/date right? Why there was such two digital type of a data format?
2/ As you said, software is about heterogeneous linkage of components, and you raise the social and technological relation of software. Software cannot be seen as final (end) product as it is a constantly updated and maintained thing, so why was this issue so difficult to fix from the first place? Does it relate to any political and economic agendas? (which might be you have kind of touched upon, may need more elaboration on the situation)
The potentiality of failure and its potential consequences were big deal by that time. As you said it might impact different financial institutions and daily systems. I believe there was also a consideration of risk, the risk calculation between fixing that type (to avoid potential threat) and letting it continues to run till 2000. The Y2K issue also exposed some of the matters e.g consequence of structure? (structure of code, structure of database, structure of computational objects). Therefore, the fact that when we look at software, database or any kinds of objects might need to take into consideration of the implications of structure, where you have put in as the social matter. I think there could be a more elaboration about the social dimension - I understood as more than the inter-linkage with memory, storage and processor.
--Winnie S (talk) 15:07, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Dear Linda,
Thanks for a very interesting and detailed piece about Y2K! I really enjoyed the text's linkage between the personal dialogue with the senior developer, the incident, Heidegger's theory, and science fiction, all the the scope of execution. I am wondering what makes this incident particularly interesting in 2015? The complex relation of hardware and socioeconomic actors is, I guess, still relevant, but how has it changed since then?
In continuation to this, how has maintenance of information architectures changed? I think there is some really interesting relations between your article and Wendy Chun's concept of 'crisis + habit = update', which you probably have considered but didn't touch upon in this work. It might be interesting to discuss this at the workshop. In this sense the maintenance, and the update, shows itself through the economy of hardware as materiality, but hardware as materiality which cannot easily be updated. I think the social circumstances, that you mentions in connection to this, is very interesting and shows how every system is interwoven. These social factors is very great exemplified by pointing to (science) fiction, maybe you could dig deeper into this reference, and also elaborate on your distinction between the 'othering' vs. 'community of danger' which I find very fruitful.
See you soon, Marie Louise
hi Linda -- this was fun to read and nice reminder of all the Y2K drama that so quickly was forgotten. I too am compelled by the social implications of how Y2K exposed networks of anxiety, and I think you could bring this out more in the future.
I think it's fascinating how this potential disaster remained latent in the system -- much like "exploits" and 0-day vulnerabilities that make hacking possible. In this case it was a hack that (almost) executed itself. Or perhaps it could be compared to a cancer, a small defect that spreads until it becomes malignant at a critical moment. It also speaks to the labile versus the static that Audrey talks about -- are there limits to the adaptability of our current infrastructure?
How Y2K relates to the decisions made regarding the ASCII specification I think might also be interesting to address, and also the UNIX timestamp -- there's going to be another Y2K when timestamps (arguably far more used than numeric dates) hits the 8-bit integer limit...
Hi Linda. Great paper. Shows in great ways and through the example: - execution as heterogenious, fragile, social and economic process. - the way it connects things, countries, companies, etc. including things that does not fit. - How are ‘values’, ideologies, etc. transferred by execution? What is the economy of this? Is it pure (neo-)liberalism or capitalism or is it beyond such descriptions? - Y2K shows these heterogeneous connections, but I believe it also shows how our signs and the signals of execution is combined and mixed in strange ways. E.g. how a date, that by a simple act of economy is shortened, becomes a possible signaletic error. In this way it is in some way not the computer that fails, but our programming and naming. This would of course be the traditional engineer understanding, but it also shows, that this naming and programming error potentially creeps back on us. That we can’t escape it and that execution is also an act of language – including language’s nominalistic dimension and problems. - How is Y2K in itself a cultural event (maybe it had less to do with computers)? - the image of the executional bug room - keeping execution and systems running, the role of the human is to correct the error vs. the computer as emancipating tool (HCI) and aesthetic experience. How do we relate execution to the full potential of computers as also tools and experiential machines?