John--Germany has a few other worries as well. My understanding is that Germany get a large portion of its' energy from Russia. Oooops! This is courtesy of Rodney Victor, "Our Man" in South Africa:
---------------(Warning this article does not have the HFSA (Happy Face Seal of Approval.)
NB: The Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom mentioned here supplies one
third of Europe's natural gas. (bold mine) Last week the CIA warned that Europe
could lose its supplies of natural gas from Gazprom.
(Darn those pesky global relationships and dependencies.)
Russian Official Warns Cos To Fix Millennium Bug - Tass
MOSCOW (AP)‹A Russian deputy prime minister berated the country¹s
largest companies Tuesday for not taking the Year 2000 computer glitch
seriously enough, a news report said.
Vladimir Bulgak said the potential computer hangups expected Jan. 1 were
a large problem for which Russia isn¹t adequately prepared.
While many countries have been working on the so-called Y2K "millennium
bug" problem for years, Russia has been slower to address it. Last week,
officials in charge of preparing Russia for the changeover conceded the
cash-strapped country needs $3 billion to fix the problem.
"The speed of work (on fixing the glitch) is low and doesn¹t correspond
to the importance of the problem," Bulgak said Tuesday, the ITAR-Tass
news agency reported.
He urged several organizations to step up work on the problem, including
Russia¹s largest company, the natural gas giant Gazprom (R.GAZ); the
country¹s largest bank, the state-owned Sberbank (R.SBR); the
government¹s Pension Fund, the State Statistics Committee and the
country¹s largest airline, Aeroflot (R.AER).
He ordered them and several government agencies to give quarterly
reports for the rest of this year on their progress, ITAR-Tass said.
The problem arises because early programmers trying to save memory space
used only two digits to identify the year - meaning that 2000 looks the
same as 1900, throwing off calculations involving dates and making some
computers go haywire.
Russia has appealed to NATO for help in rehauling computers that control
nuclear weapons and other defense equipment.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires 09-02-99
2024GMT(AP-DJ- -02-09-99 2024GMT)
(via the South African Press Association's wire service) |
