Sunday, Dec. 5 —
I ‘ve decided to celebrate the Millennium when it actually changes — a year and (almost) a month from now, not midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. I explain why in my Sunday column, part of the Mercury News’ Y2K special coverage.
UPDATE
I also suggested in the column that the Internet might be subject to a relatively early test of Y2K problems because of the way Unix records time. That prompted an intriguing addendum from Tom Christiansen, who’s well-known in the Internet development community as an author, lecturer and all-around expert on the Perl programming language. (Caution: His reply is fairly technical.)
More on the “Shortage” of Programmers and Other Tech Workers
An e-mail correspondent points out this strong opinion piece on a hugely contentious labor issue. It’s from Linux Journal.
I still say the employers who want to bring in lots of foreign workers should be pushing for laws giving green cards to anyone who qualifies for an H-1B visa. That would let foreign tech workers shop their skills around rather than being bound to one employer. Then we’d see how bad the shortage really is.