General Comment...
A friend of mine is MUCH more savy than me in all things Wall Street (he used to be director of derivatives for Bankers Trust) I tried to get him interested in Topro. Here is an excerpt from an e-mail he sent to me today...
"By the way, nowhere is TPRO to be found. The company still hasn't even sent
me the financials that I asked for almost 2 weeks ago -- which is the sign of
a not so professional company. I wanted to see the biographies of the senior
management and a list of who sits on the board."
He also pointed me to
jpmorgan.com
they have a pretty good Y2K section.
The following is from that page...
As companies have begun to examine the problem internally, anecdotal examples have begin to appear in the trade journals, on
Internet bulletin boards, and in the mass media. These real-world examples help to give some perspective on the dimensions of the problem:
"We analyzed nearly 7,000 COBOL programs totaling about 12 million lines of executable code. To convert these programs,
we estimated that it would require 200,000 hours or 100 staff years. The problem turned out to be much larger than we had
realized."
Charles Parks, project manager for Union Pacific's Year 2000 application inventory and upgrade
"We have analyzed around 2 billion lines of code and produced 5,000 estimates. Next year, we will run out of resources
(people) to continue."
Nigel Jones of Data Dimensions, a Year 2000 consulting firm
"In 1997, 1998 most of IS will wake up and realize they need to increase staff by 30%, or some such number, over two years to
complete the Year 2000 project. If we all require even a 10-15% increase in skilled staff, supply will not meet demand."
John Burns, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) in Toronto
"I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that Global Positioning Satellite programs will not have a "Year
2000" problem. The bad news is that GPS system time will roll over at midnight August 21-22, 1999, 132 days before the turn
of the century. On August 22, 1999, unless repaired, many or all GPS receivers will claim that it is January 6, 1980, August 23
will become January 7, and so on. I would expect that some manufacturers have already solved the problem, but many have
not."
Joe Gwinn, Raytheon
I knew about the GPS issue but I included it to point out the scope of the problem and the fact that brokers are taking notice...
John |
