'Things get much more inefficient.'
Paul Milne is pretty extremist on y2k (on the pessimist side). Here he makes a good point: it will be much more difficult to remediate after 1/1/2000. All the more reason to work on it as hard as we can right now.
John
__________________
'>Tractors will still plow. Farmers will still plant. Workers will still
>harvest. Trucks, trains, and boats will still carry the food.
Only IF the infrastructure is fairly intact enough to support these
activities.
As just a single example of a possilbility: If embedded controllers at
water pumping stations fail, then irrigation may fail, thereby
destroying the crops the farmer planted. Imagine this scenario
happening around the second or third week of January, 2000.
No doubt DWP employees would rush out to fix the faulty machinery... on their bicyles. Because gasoline is getting scarce due to the fact that 3/4 of the gas stations in town are down due to computer failures. And the few that *are* open have mile-long lines around them. And even those are not expecting new shipments any time soon.
So the engineer manages to locate the faulty chips, and replaces them with brand new ones that have no Y2K problems. Just as he is about to leave to service the next trouble spot, the lights wink out again. For the 20th time today.
They come back on again, but with a surge so powerful, he could smell the smoke coming from the chip. He replaces it again, but wonders about the rest of the electronics.
It took forever to get to the site because of his mode of
transportation, so now all he has time to do is pedal home. As he does, he notices power goes out again as the traffic lights stop
working. Later that night, he falls asleep, wondering which of the
remaing 2419 controllers he'll replace tomorrow...
-----
This is just an example, and a mild one at that. But the point is,
that everything depends on infrastructure to work. As the
infrastructure gets damaged, it gets exponentially more difficult to
fix things. Things get much more inefficient.'
_____________
Subject: Re: Paul Milne
From: Abraxas@hell.com (Tiberius)
Date: 1998/03/07
Message-ID:
Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000
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