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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (29888)	12/2/1999 11:32:00 AM
From: James F. Hopkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

HI Les; I just thought of some Y2K problems the talking heads don't want to talk about..I need to think about how to express them before I get to deep into it. Some has to do with how brokers and market makers can take advantage of any glitch, or even create one and blame it on Y2K, I have no doubt some of that will be done as this gang is know for it's high rate of crooks. Any one going into the New year on margin could get hit. I'ts likely others will start thinking along those lines before Y2K hits. ---------------------- What happens to what they don't seem to talk about, "Chips in the older Satellites that went up before this Y2K compliant thing are not as easy to fix as changing a simple program" I have an old NC77 digital navigation computer that has to be trashed..the basic algorithms are burned into the EPROM's and would it cost more to replace them than buy a new computer, fact is even if you could replace there are no new ones that would be compatible with the older circuits. So much that's date sensitive takes more than a new program, hell it's burnt into chips..I think NASA knows about a myriad of problems they have orders not to talk about. Many of our older computers "cant" be made Y2K compliant, the space shuttle itself is running a computer that's so out of date I don't see how it could be upgraded with less than anything than a whole new system. Crap half the GPS Navigation system is subject to fail and it's a dirty little secrete they don't want to talk about because they are under pressure not to panic the markets. --------------------- Do you remember the BIG north east power failure back in the 70s.. ( or was it early 80s) where "one" small circuit the size of of a shoe box shut down the entire N.E. power grid as others had to trip in a cascading fashion to protect them selves from over load..well they have never figured out how to avoid the cascade effect it was just on the history channel , but they never said any thing about Y2K. ---------------------- I had in my mind that Y2K would be no big deal, but just last night I thought of my own NC77..and then saw that History show, and said It's not what they told us about it's what they aren't talking about how do you change out chips on 1000s of satellites forget the idea that we beam up a new program , this date stuff is hard wired into most of them, and the circuit boards are not compatable for upgrades Sheeet.. ----------------------- So what happens not just before Y2k, what happens after when the dirty truth of reality hits. They know of this stuff and will be careful with Air Traffic and stuff, but it's still going to put a big crimp in the ability to "assume" a GPS fix is correct. What else can be effected ? ---------------------------- Don't get me wrong as for the longest time I have been one who has been playing down Y2K fallout..and now I think maybe I played it down too much. Cobal programs are not that hard to update but where date functions are hard wired and or but into eproms is going to be a real mother sucker. Technology has changed so much in the last few years there is no fix for a lot of older computers. ------------------------------ Even if the fallout is not so much, there will be some cases that because of all the play down are going to appear to the general public to be worse than they are just because they didn't count on them and that could cause fear to feed fear until we get a panic. It looks to me the Government is over doing the damage control before the fact, they got to know crap they arn't talking about. You can bet I'm coming off all margin and killing GTC orders. Jim Jim