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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Christine Traut who wrote (9622)	12/31/1999 3:06:00 PM
From: Eski	Respond to of 9818

Christine, I was here a year ago telling these clowns that Y2K was going to be a non-event along with Cheeky which hung in there and all I got was flame after flame from CK and company and I said I'll let the record speak for itself on that day so I didn't post any more. So here we are a BIG NON-EVENT maybe I should be the recieving a apology. Give me a break. "" I have been staying out of any emotional fireworks on the SI boards. But I have to say that you owe everyone here an apology. ""

To: Christine Traut who wrote (9622)	12/31/1999 5:56:00 PM
From: Christine Traut	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9818

CNN and the Canadian Y2K site both just reported that we may all be breathing a sigh of relief prematurely. Evidently, most embedded chips and Unix systems are set to GMT. So the rollover hasn't happened yet in all of the countries yet to report. GMT 2400 is EST 1900, I believe. Here is the post from the Canadian site: Midnight has now passed through 6 - count em - 6 time zones with no reported failures! None! Zero! Notta! Zilch! I decided to wait until I saw what happened in Indonesia before really getting nervous. Why nervous? Because, given that some of the countries the rollover has "rolled over", something should have failed. Even a minor system. But nothing. I started to get the feeling like I was sitting on an unexploded hand-grenade. Or the kind of scene you would see in a Road-Runner cartoon, where a bomb drops right beside the coyote, he jumps for cover behind a rock and covers his head ... but the bomb just sits there. So he goes to investigate, and just as he is 2 feet away from it, it goes off. That is the feeling I am getting - like, as strange as it sounds, something is wrong and we are abandoning our cover prematurely. Don't get me wrong! If this is the way Y2K is going to work out for the rest of the world, I will be the first person dancing in the streets - probably drunk and naked - but that's another story. But like I said before, knowing that some of these countries barely lifted a finger to fix their Y2K problems (with many systems likely ignored altogether), something should have crashed. Personally, I would feel much, much more confident if a few (or a lot) of "minor" systems in some of these countries had gone haywire, but the "big" stuff pretty-much held together. That would inspire confidence to me. So I did a bit of quick reading on the net. When I did, I soon found something interesting that may just explain it - the only thing that, to me, makes any sense. First of all, apparently, embedded systems and most Unix computers (the computers that run everything) are set to Greenwich Mean Time, not their local time-zone. What this means (if this is indeed the case) is that all these computers haven't even seen the rollover yet! To them, it is still New Year's Eve. Again, if this is the case, most of the above computers (and all the embedded systems) will have their true rollover in just over 6 hours from now (5:00 PM Mountain Daylight Time). Any systems west of GMT (like the Americas) would rollover according to their individual time-zones, as expected. I guess there is only one way to find out - wait. But until then, do me a favor and stay crouched behind that rock - just in case. albertaweb.com