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Technology Stocks : 2000: Y2K Civilized Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (195)	8/13/1999 11:38:00 PM
From: Jeff Mizer	Respond to of 662

Ck and all- I am sad to say but Ken and Bearcub have now taken the enjoyment out of the SI Y2K threads for me. They seem to think arguing and bullying is the way to get people to prepare. I urge anyone who is lurking to link this site- garynorth.com and follow it daily. Many don't like Gary North but the fact is he posts articles from both sides and you can keep an eye out for the inevitable. Best of luck to all and thanks to many for a year of lively debate and information. My personal opinion is that we will be watching Bowl games on Jan 1 2000 but by feb or march will be in serious economic trouble. Breakdown of our way of life is a real and serious threat though I see danger from terrorists or an armed thug more likely. Jeff

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (195)	8/14/1999 11:41:00 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 662

Cheryl, thanks for calling attention to the Y2Ktoday Koskinen interview. With all the "stuff" posted on the two threads yesterday, I overlooked it. So I spent some time this morning reading it carefully. I guess we all read things in the framework of our past experiences. I must say I didn't see anything disconcerting in this interview. Seemed reasoned and reasonable to me. How in the world did Koskinen come up with: <><"87 percent of the people say that, two weeks before the end of the year, they're going to make sure that they have a minimum three-day supply of food and water for the weekend.>> I don't think he did. I think what he was saying is that he would have preferred that the poll results were 87 rather than 18 percent reporting that they were planning to have a few days of rations on hand. I have no clue why he chose 87% rather than 86 or 91. Perhaps that was from some part of the poll that was not documented, or perhaps that is just a number that pollsters consider the threshold of high commitment. But I didn't read his words as you did. Regardless of the red herring "87," I think he was simply saying that 87% would have been a more satisfactory answer than 18%. I also don't think he's advocating waiting until 2 weeks before the end of the year to buy batteries. I agree that there's some risk of that being "picked up as a sound bite." There's always a risk of those things being taken out of context, particularly on the short-attention-span TV newscasts. Perhaps the reason we read his words differently was due to a different perspective of what is involved with "having a minimum 3 days supply of food and water for the weekend." To me, that means, at most, picking up a jar of peanut butter and a couple of boxes of crackers at the time you buy your Christmas turkey. It doesn't mean backing up the truck to the grocery store. I've been kidded on this thread about my JIT approach to grocery shopping. But even I always have enough food in my pantry to last me several weeks in an emergency, longer if I have the means to cook. There are all sorts of strange jars, boxes, and cans in there--things that I bought once and forgot about. Couple of jars of salsa, a can of coconut milk, some smoked oysters. I don't know that a can of corn and a handful of raisin bran will tempt my palate much, but it will make a meal if need be. One of the more useful things he said: ...we're all binary...What they miss is the problem in the middle, which is where the real problem is. Karen

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (195)	8/14/1999 12:20:00 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 662

Great to have you posting again. MCI WorldCom still under the gun zdnet.com MCI Worldcom Inc. is still struggling with a debilitating weeklong outage on its frame relay data network, an error compounded in some customers' eyes by the company's lack of communication during the disruption. As of Friday, MCI WorldCom engineers were still investigating the cause of the outage, so a precise explanation for the event "is not available yet from a technical perspective," said an MCI WorldCom spokeswoman. The Jackson, Miss., company was working to fully restore service to the few customers still disrupted. About 30 percent of MCI WorldCom's frame relay customers from Chicago to the West Coast were affected. The outage disrupted business networks, nixed transactions at automatic teller machines and took the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) offline for several days. Outages were also reported in Boston, New York and Albany, N.Y. The problem began as the result of a scheduled upgrade of software from Lucent Technologies Inc., the vendor of both the hardware and software MCI WorldCom uses in its frame relay network. MCI WorldCom engineers are still working with Lucent to identify whether the outage was software- or hardware-related. Lucent 'part of' outage As for the role of Lucent software in the outage, "It was part of it," said a Lucent spokeswoman in Murray Hill, N.J., adding that it has yet to be determined whether a fundamental flaw in the software caused the outage. MCI WorldCom officials said the company sent all its frame relay customers letters notifying them that a scheduled software upgrade was about to occur. Once the outage struck, the company followed up with a series of letters to those customers that were affected. But some customers have reported that once the network foundered, they received few answers from the carrier. Chicago is fuming At the Chicago Board of Trade, where MCI's problems have disrupted transactions since Aug. 5, board officials were fuming -- and looking for financial compensation from MCI. In a letter to board members, board President Thomas Donovan wrote, "This latest problem with MCI WorldCom comes despite numerous past assurances." According to Donovan, MCI's own top operations executive in charge of running the network called the outages a total "meltdown of the network." As they seek redress from MCI, CBOT officials also are developing contingency plans for future outages. For corporate users, the outage again demonstrated the peril of relying on a single data network. In many instances, companies have standby ISDN or dial-up data lines in preparation for the loss of major data circuits. In the wake of a catastrophic outage of AT&T's frame relay network nearly two years ago, many corporations implemented network emergency plans, often including either ISDN backup or even redundant carriers for critical applications.