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Technology Stocks : Y2K (Year 2000) Stocks: An Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TEDennis who wrote (7060)	10/23/1997 3:42:00 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13949

Re: More Bemer stuff For Bemer to be successful, he has to convince IBM to modify their tools. To do so, he'd first have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that his solution will work (which takes time). Second, he'd have to convince IBM that it would be worth the R&D expense to actually undertake such an endeavor (which takes time). Third, assuming he got that far, he'd have to assure IBM that they won't get their asses sued off if they screw up-- after all, Bemer's proposed changes would affect all code, not just the stuff with bad dates (which takes time). Even if IBM were granted immunity by the US Government, they'd still have to assemble a programming team, do the work, and test it (which takes time). Tick tick tick... Worse yet, all programmers know that an instruction that was legal in v1 of a linker may not be valid in the most current version, say, v4. Even if IBM were to finally undertake Bemer's project, they would no doubt modify v4 to create v5. That means code written and maintained in v1 would have to be run through v5 in order to assure the dates were fixed. Well, what about all the potential incompatibilities that may have been introduced (in other areas) with v2, v3, and v4? When I modify legacy code, I always use the same compiler-linker combination that I used originally. The more I think about it, the more hare-brained the whole idea is from an implementation standpoint, not to mention that time is ticking away. - Jeff

To: TEDennis who wrote (7060)	10/26/1997 8:12:00 PM
From: tom rusnak	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13949

TED, regarding sending modified data to VISA, Any solution that modifies your data is going to have to look at modifying the process before sending data outside of the complex. One aspect, however, of using the zone digits of character data is that using a real hardware PACK instruction functions the same regardless of what is in the zone digits. This allows a program that has not been modified for Vertex to continue to work whether or not the data has bigits or not, assuming that the program operates on the data with a PACK, PACKED OPERATION, UNPACK sequence of instructions as I'm guessing high level languages are going to be using. Personally, I'd be making the data 'human readable' before sending it offsite myself. tom