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

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (392)	8/21/1999 8:04:00 PM
From: Ken	Respond to of 662

Everyone better check your neighbors' bracelets, espically if you are storing food and water! Remember Those Released Prisoners Who Wear the GPS Location Bracelets? Where Will They Be in 2000? Oops! marketplace.state.tx.us. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is taking bids on y2k-compliant GPS equipment for released prisoners. Deadline for award: November 29. * * * * * * * * * * The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) hereby provides notice for a Request for Offer (RFO) from all interested and qualified contractors providing offender monitoring services utilizing a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) System. This procurement is being solicited through the catalog purchase procedures contained in the Texas Government code, Title 10, Subchapter B, Sections 2157.067-067 and/or Texas Administrative Code 113.19. Each vendor desiring to submit an Offer in response to the RFO must have received approval from the General Services Commissions (GSC) as a "Qualified Information Systems Vendor" (QISV) under class 724-43 for the services/items being requested. Copies of the GSC QISV approval letter and pages from the contractor's approved catalog identifyng the services/items will be required prior to award. If your firm is not currently an approved QISV, you may download the CMBL and QISV applications at the following address so that you may be eligible to receive the RFO: gsc.state.tx.us. You may also request that a copy of the applications be sent to you by calling the GSC at (512) 463-5315. The TDCJ Parole Division requires an offender monitoring system utilizing GPS tracking technology for an estimated 25 participant offenders (hereinafter referred to as participants) identified by the TDCJ as appropriate candidates for supervision on the system. This system is an "active" monitoring system that has the ability to monitor and track a participant's travels and locations on a 24-hour basis and provides real-time violation notification. This system will be used to enforce daily schedules and home restriction by supplementing the supervision provided by Parole Officers. The GPS system shall include: (1)personal tracking unit; (2) ankle transmitter; (3)central monitoring station (host computer hardware and software); (4) remote computer workstations for parole offices; (5) pagers for Parole Officers; (6) tracking and mapping technology; (7) monitoring and maintenance of the system; (8) technical support; (9) computer-generated reports; (10) storage of monitoring data; and (11) training of TDCJ parole office staff and instructions for participants. The GPS system shall be able to: (1) provide a means of detecting, tracking, mapping, and reporting a participant's location on a continuous 24-hour, 7-day-a-week basis; (2) allow for pre-programmed exclusion and inclusion zones; (3) recognize and alert the contractor's monitoring facility of participant violations; and (4) provide formal written and verbal violation notification to the Parole Officer. This contract will be Statewide throughout the State of Texas. TDCJ intends to award a firm fixed-price contract for an initial period of one year and eight months, with two two-year option periods. Anticipated award date is 11/29/99. Link: marketplace.state.tx.us.

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (392)	8/21/1999 8:55:00 PM
From: C.K. Houston	Respond to of 662

Summarizing the important points of the MCI network failure debacle, involving 30,000 MCI business customers 1. A single point of failure can bring down a large section of a complex network. 2. It is not always easy to figure out exactly what is wrong, or even where the error is. Note that they still did not know exactly what caused the error more than a week after it occurred. 3. Even software that has been "certified" by a large, well respected company like Lucent can fail disastrously when it is put into production. 4. One of the main ways that errors are "worked around" is to revert to an earlier version of the software. 5. As indicated by the AT&T problem, this is not an "isolated example" with no wider significance. 6. The failure of one critical supplier can cause disaster to hundreds or thousands of businesses. 7. You can't count on suppliers to tell you what they are planning to do to their systems, even if a failed "upgrade" could have disastrous results for you. 8. You can't count on suppliers to tell you the status of their repair efforts, or to compensate you fairly for their failures without quibbling. 9. It's not necessarily easy or fast to "work around" critical failures by switching to another supplier. 10. Failures of suppliers to your suppliers (e.g., Lucent) can be just as devastating as failures by your direct suppliers. RAMIFICATIONS OF THESE POINTS WITH RESPECT TO Y2K 1. What would have happened if this were the year 2000 and MCI didn't have a Y2K compliant version of the software to fall back on? Since they still don't know what the problem was in the software that failed, the answer is obvious: they would still be out of operation, and so would their customers. 2. Testing is not equivalent to production. The software that MCI installed had been certified by Lucent, presumably after extensive testing. Yet it did not work in production. The significance of this is that every "Y2K ready" application in the world is going to go into production almost simultaneously when the clock rolls over. That is, no matter how much testing anyone has done, until their applications actually are receiving live data with dates in the year 2000, no one knows whether they will work properly in that circumstance, just as Lucent did not know that their software would not work when it was installed on MCI's switch. CONCLUSIONS A single problem of this sort can possibly be worked around by the customer, assuming alternate sources of supply. It can be worked around by the supplier if they have an older working version to fall back to. Multiple concurrent failures of critical services with no fall back available, as is likely to be the case next year, will be fatal to many organizations. koyote.com Interesting discussion here. Cheryl