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To: d:oug who wrote (40196)	9/13/1999 8:33:00 AM
From: KobaltBlauw	Respond to of 117013

Hi Doug, Yes, I know I was correct when I discussed the 9999 date thing as I've been a programmer/developer for some 21 years now having worked on everything from legacy COBOL and FORTRAN systems to the latest OOP, client server and inter/intranet programming. One of my colleagues wondered aloud at lunch last week what the big deal with 9999 was about and I explained to her it was really nothing more than a propoganda ploy for the media to spin so that they could say that everything will be alright for Y2K. We all pretty much agreed and got a chuckle out of it until the sobering thought of just what had taken place with the media sunk in. Of course they also told us that no pyrotechnics were used at Waco and that the Branch Dividians started that fire themselves... Honestly Doug I don't have much of a feel for what's going to happen @ midnight on 12/31/99. I know all of the systems at the very large bank that I work at have been reviewd with a fine tooth comb but who knows about the feeds we get or the feeders who are feeding them. We're only as strong as our weakest link. Not only do we have to worry about math errors when calculating date ranges on a date field with a missing century but if we're expecting a century and don't get it entire records are shifted by two bytes potentially putting alpha data in numeric fields totally unrelated to dates... Are local and federal governments even close to being ready? Who knows? Do they pay their programmers market rates or do they hire flunkies well below market? I know the last time I checked they were willing to pay me about $25,000 less than I'm making now... While I can't see things getting really bad come Y2K (wishful thinking perhaps?), I will continue to maintain my several months supply of food, water and money like I've been doing for years in the event anything untoward happens to me. I'd much rather be safe than sorry! Bill

To: d:oug who wrote (40196)	9/13/1999 9:10:00 AM
From: KobaltBlauw	Respond to of 117013

OT Doug did you see this story? Knowing what I know about date storage I'd be really interested to hear what the true cause of this shutdown is? Just exactly what's the format of their date field that it would match 9999? 9999' Glitch Suspected In Chinese Corporate Exchange Failure invest.insidec hina.com/markets.php3?id=91455 9-11-99 SHANGHAI (Agence France Presse) - A computer failure likely caused by the "all nines" date glitch has forced the indefinite closure of China's only automated exchange for corporate shares, authorities said Friday. The announcement came as initial reports from around the world indicated that fears the bug caused by Thursday's 9/9/99 date -- a relative of the Y2K or millennium bug -- would cause havoc were largely unfounded. "Because problems have appeared on the Net system, we must shut down equipment for repair," said the Central Treasury Bond Registration and Settlement Co. (CTBRS) which runs the system, in an announcement published in the official China Securities daily. The firm said repair work had already begun but it could not yet say when trading would resume. An company engineer confirmed that the problem emerged with the main computer on Thursday, when experts warned the all nines date could cause some older computers to shut down. CTBRS earlier this week ordered Net system trading suspended on Thursday because of suspicions that such a problem might emerge. "We still cannot definitively confirm the cause but it could be 99 related," the engineer said. The computer that failed was an IBM model AS400 dating from 1992 or 1993, he said. Other company officials blamed the breakdown squarely on the nines glitch. "The main computer went down yesterday because of the 9999 problem," one said. Chinese government experts earlier said only decades-old systems used to automate factory production were expected to be vulnerable to the bug. Warnings were issued after it was suspected some programs could mistake the "9999" date for an end-of-file command sequence used in some software to bring certain processes to an end. The Y2K glitch is also date-related but stems from some systems' inability to distinguish between the years 2000 and 1900. sightings.com