Nostradamus was almost right about the Y2K problems:
Subit venu l'effrayeur sera grande,
Des principaulx de l'affaire cachés:
Et dame en braise plus ne sera en veue,
De peu à peu seront les grans faschés.
(Come suddenly the terror will be great,
Hidden by the principal ones of the affair:
And the lady on the charcoal will no longer be in sight,
Thus little by little will the great ones be angered.)
- Century V, quatrain 25
This can be interpreted two ways¹. Both have one thing in common, promise that "important systems" are unaffected ("hidden by the principal ones of the affair"). However, people won't be able to view pr0n ("the lady on the charcoal will no longer be in sight") and they'll get mad.
So the two possible interpretations:
- Javascript date display problems were fairly common in early 2000, and for some sites whose webmasters had been sleeping or something, they still are. (People just don't believe it when the API reference says "Deprecated" or "It won't return the last two numbers, it will return century - 100"... =) Also, many pr0n sites used Javascript (according to many, to annoying extent.)
- While IIS (the optimal server solution for pr0n serving, as shown by Mindcraft) didn't have any Y2K problems (much), Microsoft.fi had a bad enough date problem that it ended up to evening news.
So, while Nostradamus wasn't entirely accurate, he came close.
Now, I would highly appreciate it if these riddles could be solved in advance... they won't do much after they're solved.
Thanks to GURPS Y2K for pointing out what this bit was about =) translation of the text is from nostradamus-repository.org.
¹ In this context, anyway. Others have probably interpreted in a lot of many ways =)