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Surfers' paradise
Dixe Wills
Aaah, The Y2K Bug, how positively quaint that hip-hop and happening phrase sounds in today's thrusting post-post-modernist Y2K8. And all those wonderful scare stories we enjoyed during Y19C9D9. Jesus' return (He was due then, wasn't he?) would be accompanied by the sound of computers crashing and burning. Aeroplanes, we were promised, would drop out of the sky. Lifts would jam between floors, never to move again. Calculators would explode, blowing their operators' faces into the middle of the following month, which would serve them right, really, for taking a calculator to a party in the first place. In short, industrial society as we know it would be plunged back into the Stone Age.
And, as we all know, that was exactly what happened.
Those people who retain such facts for later use in pub quizzes will recall that the cause of the bug was a decision made by computer programmers from the 1950s onwards to use a two-digit number for the year in order to save precious computer memory space. 'How very lacking in foresight,' we all tutted as we slipped our calculators in our pockets and headed off to the local millennium party.
Don't shoot me for I am only the piano player, but I feel I ought to let you know that a similar doomsday is hurtling towards the internet at the rate of a day every 24 hours. Yes, come December 29th 2011 we will have used up every IP address available, including all the second-hand ones. For the uninitiated, Internet Protocol addresses are the unique numbers given to each of our computers/mobile phones/ personal organisers linked to the net. Once we've used them all up, no new devices will be able to connect to the web anywhere in the world.
This time it's a bit harder to shower the boffins with vitriol, even if we had a can of it handy. When the IP address system was devised in 1981 there were only 500 computers on the internet. The guys at Geek Central can be forgiven for thinking that a string of numbers allowing 4 billion different combinations would be more than adequate. Duh!
There's a clock (penrose.uk6x.com) counting down the seconds until the internet is officially full up. If you're reading this at, say, 2.30pm on August 15 (and frankly you'd be mad not to), and current rates of IP address take-up remain constant, I can save you the trouble of looking it up by telling you it says '1,237 days, 10 hours, 29 minutes, 13 seconds'.
There is a saviour on the horizon - a system called IPv6 (ipv6.org) - which would give us billions more addresses to fritter. However, it's kind of pricey and is not compatible with the internet as it functions today, so there's been no political will to implement it. Perhaps, after all, the next war won't be about oil or even water, but internet addresses. It's all there in the book of Revelation. I expect.
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