From: year2000-discuss@year2000.com
Subject: Sightings: Y2K Snippets
GENERAL NEWS
news.com
Who will bust the Y2K bug?
November 19, 1997, 12:20 p.m. PT
BOSTON-- At a Year 2000 conference being held here this week,
company executives and millennium bug experts shared ideas about how
to deal with the IT worker shortage problem and how to formulate
Y2K management strategies. IT salaries have risen considerably
as companies struggle to retain the workers they have.
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www2.computerworld.com
IS managers and supervisors wrestling with staffing issues for
their online efforts have some new help. Meta Group offers a free
"1997 Inter/Intranet Staffing Guide" that provides a variety of
information related to recruiting and retaining Internet, intranet
and extranet professionals.
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computerworld.com
Paying through the nose
Our third annual skills survey finds nearly all IS skills now
command a salary premium, some over 30%.
"People with legacy Cobol skills have experienced a bit
of a rebirth because of the year 2000 problem," says Greg
Scileppi, executive director at RHI Consulting. Contract Cobol
programmers can look for pay premiums averaging nearly 27%,
and as outsourcing continues to grow, independent contractors
are seeing pay offers from $60 to $200 per hour.
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chicago.tribune.com
Year 2000 ills could be widespread
Wednesday, November 19, 1997
Federal Reserve Board Gov. Edward W. Kelley Jr. testified this
month before the House Banking Committee that 10 percent of the
system's 90 million lines of code will have to be rewritten.
"The Fed is giving Y2K the highest priority," Kelley added.
Some 175 full-time Fed employees and 500 to 1,000 part-timers
are expected to work on the problem between now and Jan. 1, 2000.
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foxnews.com
nytimes.com
Georgia Bankers in Hot Millennium Water
November 18, 1997
The Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
and the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance all issued
cease-and-desist orders against the Putnam-Greene Financial Corp.,
which is based in Eatonton, Ga. Earlier this year, balances were
not updated for a full week because of problems with its computers.
"If you were on a board of directors of a bank, you would have
to be brain dead at this point not to realize the regulators are
very much concerned about this issue," said H. Rogdin Cohen,
a top banking lawyer with the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell.
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yahoo.com
Fed Official Says Millennium Glitches A Worry
Wednesday November 19
MIAMI (Reuters) - U.S. central bankers fear regional economic
issues may distract European and Asian banks from dealing with
a "millennium timebomb" threatening the world banking system,
a Federal Reserve official said.
"It's number one on my agenda every day," William Ryback, associate
director for banking supervision at the Fed, said at a Latin
American bankers conference. "We at the Fed are terribly worried."
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computerweekly.co.uk
HP offers year 2000 support for old 'uns
As Hewlett-Packard begins shipping its latest version of Unix to
the UK, it admitted that it has had to extend date change support
for older releases.
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computerweekly.co.uk
Building society clears out mainframes for year 2000
Yorkshire Building Society is overhauling its entire IT systems
to make them year 2000-compatible. The organisation is migrating
from a mainframe-based system to a client/server environment,
and the first phase of the project will cost 19m pounds.
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computerweekly.co.uk
Guenier issues final warning
Taskforce 2000 chief Robin Guenier yesterday warned MPs that the
next few months mark the last chance to avert a millennium disaster
in the UK.
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computerweekly.co.uk
IT jobs reach new peak
Demand for staff with IT skills has reached a record peak, according
to the latest results of the quarterly SSP/Computer Weekly survey.
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computerweekly.co.uk
Big Apple will be bomb site in millennium
New York will be like Beirut in the year 2000 unless there is a
sea change in attitudes towards the date bug problem, IT guru Ed
Yourdon has warned.
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computerweekly.co.uk
KLM to fly in rivals to thrash out date bug
Dutch airline KLM is seeking to co-ordinate industry-wide action
on the year 2000 problem, in a bid to avert most planes being
grounded over the millennium. The airline said there are up to
160 date-dependent systems on commercial aircraft, and in many
cases suppliers need to be contacted to complete compliance work.
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computerweekly.co.uk
Telecom suppliers to be quizzed on compliance
The Telecommunications Managers Association is targeting about 30
major telecoms and networking supplers and carriers to force them
to declare their progress towards year 2000 compliance.
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fcw.com
FAA's Y2K tools not up to speed
NOVEMBER 17, 1997
The Federal Aviation Administration, faced with a time and date
software problem that threatened this month to bring down one of
its air traffic management systems, was forced to manually sift
through more than a million lines of code after software tools
designed to find code containing times and dates failed to find
everything that needed to be fixed.
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ft.com
Millenium Watch: Grey compliance area
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 19 1997
An analogy can be made between Y2K software compliance and a
certificate of roadworthiness for a vehicle, with programmers/
users as drivers. The certificate indicates that the vehicle will
not endanger the driver or passengers. But it makes no assertions
on the competence of the driver, of other cars and drivers or on
road conditions.
Similarly, businesses can make no assumptions on the basis of even
a substantiated claim of compliance that the software will operate
without Year 2000 errors in the hands of their own programmers,
in association with other software and programmers or with other
IT platforms.
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ft.com
Taskforce 2000: Blair urged to take lead
By David Wighton, Political Correspondent
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 20 1997
The prime minister should take the lead in increasing awareness of
the "millennium bomb" computer problem, the head of the government's
Taskforce 2000 said yesterday. Robin Guenier called on Tony Blair,
the prime minister, to make tackling the threat - caused by the
inability of many software programs to recognise dates beyond 1999 -
a priority for next year's UK presidency of the European Union.
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NOT STRICTLY Y2K RELATED, but might show potential problems with our
approach or the consequences of failure
www2.computerworld.com
Despite Microsoft's efforts to push users to its 32-bit
platform, nearly half of the approximately 72.3 million
users of the various Windows varieties are still struggling
to run their legacy 16-bit applications, shelling out
millions to rewrite them and digging deep for costly
hardware upgrades.
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www2.computerworld.com
Changes in technology, management and business objectives
can wreak havoc on outsourcing contracts. A Dataquest study
this year of 130 corporations showed that 53% of information
technology outsourcing deals and 73% of business process
outsourcing deals were renegotiated or being renegotiated.
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wired.com
California Computer System Bites the Dust
21.Nov.97
California's failed attempt to create a statewide system to
track deadbeat parents is the latest public-agency computer flop.
On Thursday, the state announced that after spending US$100 million
over the past five years to set up the Statewide Automated Child
Support System - and implementing it in only 11 of California's 58
counties - it pulled the plug on the project.
The project was described as "one of the most inefficient
expenditures of tax dollars in California's history" by state
Assemblywoman Elaine Alquist.
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INTERESTING LINKS
Title: MS products with year 2000-related Knowledge Base articles.
URL: microsoft.com
Title: FEI Year-2000 page
URL: fei.org.uk
The Federation of the Electronics Industry (FEI) is the
lead Trade Association for companies in the Information
Technology, Communications and Electronics Industries.
Title: Computing Services & Software Association Y2K Information Service
URL: cssa.co.uk
Lots of useful Y2K links, including
* CSSA Directory of organisations with Year 2000 services/products
* CSSA Year 2000 Initiatives
* Guidance for IT Suppliers - Guidance Note
* Year 2000 Product Directory
* Year 2000 Tools Directory
* Surveys, Reports and Publications
* links to other sites
Title: Scottish Software Federation Year 2000 Help
URL: scotsoft.org.uk
These pages aim to provide a brief synopsis of the Year
2000 date change issue and the ways in which it will affect
all industries. |
