TJ started it .. this landed in my box today -- and tonite, while sitting
in the sauna where I get a massage, one of the guys started talking about
Y2000 (yes, this is MS country, but the massage cooperative is in the heart
of the University district).
Interesting article -- and it suggests there are other dates to worry about
-- snippets below -- anyway, this article makes Franko's "tongue-in-cheek"
comment less off-hand ...
>http://www.techweek.com/articles/Survive.html
>
>pretty freaky, eh?
<quote>
TechWeek also spoke with a programmer who works for a Midwestern nuclear
power plant with lots of embedded systems. He was a member of a Y2K study
team that concluded that plant operation in the year 2000 would be
difficult at best, and fixes would cost about $30 million. Plant management
axed the proposed
fixes. He's now planning to pack up his family ASAP and head out to a small
town
in the country. Under NRC rules for "unanalyzed situations," the plant will
have to be shut down in December 1999 for testing, he believes.
IRS burnout?
According to May, we won't have to wait until January 1, 2000. "The financial
collapse will occur when the investors wake up and realize what's coming," he
says. Just one example of what's in store: "July 1, 1999 is the start of
the IRS
fiscal year 2000. The IRS won't be able to process W2s and 1099s at that
time. It has 100 million lines of code and isn't even awarding a Y2K
conversion contract until October 1998-plus the delays from the usual
lawsuits," he says. "I predict that no vendor will bid on this impossible
contract."
IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti shares his concern: "If we don't fix the
century-date problem, we will have a situation scarier than the average
disaster
movie you might see on a Sunday night," he said in The Wall Street Journal on
April 22. "Twenty-one months from now, there could be 90 million taxpayers who
won't get their refunds, and 95 percent of the revenue stream of the United
States could be jeopardized."
<snip>
This whole line of apocalyptic thinking really alarms some people. William
Ulrich recently wrote a somewhat cranky opinion piece in Computerworld
(http://www.computerworld.com) on April 6 exhorting Y2K programmers to be
good citizens and stay on the job. He was concerned that "clearing out bank
accounts and food stores might become commonplace. The alarmists essentially
would have created the problem they intended to flee."
Financial consultant Gary North (http://www.garynorth.com) responds: "In Asia,
Africa, Europe, South America-where 80 percent of the world's code is-it can
all be solved if American programmers just stay on the job in large cities.
And if the COBOL fairy shows up on time.
<snip>
Dangerous dates
Jan. 1, 2000 isn't the only problem date. According to Capers Jones,
chairman of
Software Productivity Research (http://www.spr.com) in "Dangerous Dates for
Software Applications," in the next 50 years at least 60,000,000 software
applications will need modification because of various date problems at a
cost of more than $5 trillion.
According to Jones, other problem dates in the next few years include:
Aug. 22, 1999: A GPS (Global Positioning System) rollover (reset to zero). GPS
is used in most planes and ships, as well as guided missiles. It's also
used in many major banks and thousands of financial systems for accurately
recording time of day.
Sept. 9, 1999: "Nines" end-of-file problem (some legacy applications used
"9999"
in the date field to indicate end-of-file).
Feb. 29, 2000: The year 2000 is not a "normal" leap year and may be missed by
many legacy applications, creating havoc on that day.
Allen Comstock also suggests Jan. 1, 1999: "A lot of computers will be going
down after that date because many programs such as spreadsheets and accounting
apps will look forward at least during the current year and it ends with
'00,' so there will be problems."
Then there's July 1 and Sept. 1 of 1999, the start of the fiscal year 2000
for many organizations.
</quote>
Kathy
===============================
Kathy E. Gill, Guide - http://agriculture.miningco.com/
Publisher, eNetDigest - http://www.enetdigest.com/
WWW design � writing � training - http://www.dotparagon.com/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. - Gandhi
____________________________________________________________________
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now
Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants
If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done
directly from our website for all our lists.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
