Word: todays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Much of the Big Three's luxury lag has to do with changing consumer tastes. The high-end market has detoured dramatically from the posh, living-room-on-wheels tradition of Cadillacs and Lincolns that once defined upper-middle-class status. Today's luxury buyers, guided by the Information Age, are less extravagant, more practical and technologically sharper. "The status symbol used to be 'I've got money,'" says Jim Press, general manager of Toyota Motor Sales USA. "But here in the late 1990s, it's 'I've got good taste.' The days of conspicuous consumption are gone...
...crush him into the ground? Schlichtmann--now married with two children, and seemingly more stable than in his frenetic Woburn days--says no. He claims to have become an apostle for a completely different approach to environmental law. "I don't have another Woburn left in me," he says today. "We need to come up with another...
...more careful calculations, the millennium began a few years ago. A large part of the misunderstanding stems from Dionysius Exiguus--Latin for "Dennis the Short"--a 6th century monk who should be thought of as the original millennium bug. Dennis laid down the basis for the calendars we use today by figuring how far in the past Christ's birth was. As it turns out, he was off by several years. Historians now place the Nativity no later than 4 B.C., the year King Herod died. By that reckoning, the 3rd millennium would have commenced no later than...
...cards, COBOL programmers used just six digits to render the day's date: two for the day, two for the month, two for the year. It was the middle of the century, and nobody cared much about what would happen at the next click of the cosmic odometer. But today the world runs on computers, and older machines run on jury-rigged versions of COBOL that may well crash or go senile when they hit a double-zero date. So the finger of blame for the approaching crisis should point at Hopper and her COBOL cohorts, right...
Programmers ignored Bemer's fix. And so did his bosses at IBM, who unwittingly shipped the Y2K bug in their System/360 computers, an industry standard every bit as powerful in the '60s as Windows is today. By the end of the decade, Big Blue had effectively set the two-digit date in stone. Every machine, every manual, every maintenance guy would tell you the year was 69, not 1969. "The general consensus was that this was the way you programmed," says an IBM spokesman. "We recognize the potential for lawsuits on this issue...