Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (325)	10/26/1997 11:21:00 AM
From: Done, gone.	Respond to of 9818

Millennium mayhem: The world is racing to avert a computer disaster Excerpt from: macleans.ca "The problem? When calendars flip from Dec. 31, 1999, to Jan. 1, 2000, most computers will read 00 and won't know what to do. Unless the code is corrected, many will perform inaccurately, and others could shut down completely. "It would be totally disastrous, absolutely mind-boggling," says a somewhat sheepish Juneau, who is now leading the Royal Bank's fight to fix the so-called year 2000 problem by installing a four-digit year code. "Those of us who wrote computer programs in the old days never thought they'd be in operation by 1999." Call it the ultimate revenge of the nerds. Computers, which were supposed to make modern lives so easy, are suddenly causing mass anxiety. With the moment of truth only 26 months away, businesses and governments are waking up to the full range of potential snafus. Electricity could be interrupted, telephone networks might collapse and airline flights could be grounded if scheduling programs for pilots and support crews go on the fritz. Social assistance cheques may be delayed--if the mail is moving at all--and automatic teller machines could grind to a halt. Elevators, thinking they have not been inspected since 1900, may descend to the ground floor and shut down. Known in tech talk as the Y2K crisis (Y stands for year, and 2K for 2000), the problem threatens to reach into the homes of average Canadians. Some experts believe that Macintosh hardware is immune because it is set on the year 2040 not 2000. But older personal computers may misread the date--though most will keep running. Experts are advising consumers to check with manufacturers to make sure their equipment can handle the year 2000, especially date-sensitive software such as personal-finance programs. Computers are not the only gadgets at risk. Any devices with programmable calendars, such as video-cassette recorders, could malfunction. Some will work properly again by setting the year back to 1972, which happens to have the same calendar dates as the year 2000. Other machines could simply go kaput. How did the geeks goof? Peter de Jager, a consultant from Brampton, Ont., who has emerged as the world's leading Y2K evangelist, argues that executives and politicians are more to blame. With their non-technical backgrounds, they simply failed to take the problem seriously, despite warnings dating back to 1969 from their information-technology gurus. The cost of stamping out the so-called millennium bug could reach $830 billion worldwide, according to the Gartner Group, a Connecticut-based computer consulting firm. In Canada, de Jager predicts, the final tally could total $10 billion, with time and labor accounting for most of the money. Doomsayers predict companies will be so burdened by the expense that their stock prices will plummet and the world economy will be cast into recession. John Westergard, a U.S. technology commentator, takes the computer-chaos scenario one fantastic step further: he insists that Americans, desperate for renewed prosperity, will elect software mogul Bill Gates as president. Despite the doomsday predictions, too many Canadians remain complacent about the problem, says de Jager, 42. He sounded the alarm in a 1993 article published in ComputerWorld magazine, a U.S. weekly. Many companies and politicians are still holding out hope for a magic solution, but there is no silver bullet, he says. "This is a study in denial," says de Jager. "A lot of people still believe that this won't be a problem." Governments have been the slowest to respond. Earlier this month, federal auditor general Denis Desautels slammed Ottawa for dragging its heels, saying it may already be too late to prevent the disruption of critical services such as unemployment insurance payments and search and rescue missions. As of last April, only a third of the 50 government departments surveyed by the auditor general's staff had completed their plans for tackling the issue, the report stated. Desautels pegged the cost of the work at about $1 billion or more. "They're all running against the clock," he said. Canadian companies are only slightly ahead of the bureaucrats. To boost their efforts, the federal department of industry formed a year 2000 task force last month headed by Jean Monty, CEO of BCE Inc. It has been asked to report on the problem by May, 1998. The group's toughest job will be bringing small companies up to speed. Right now, they are in the worst shape, says Jean Allan, the managing director of year 2000 services for Montreal-based DMR Consulting Group Inc. In the age of "just-in-time" delivery, that is bad news for large corporations, which often rely on smaller suppliers to provide critical components. The country's major banks are furthest ahead. Even de Jager says he is confident the banking system will be operating normally when the millennium arrives, and such basic functions as calculating interest on mortgages, RRSPs and term deposits will not pose a problem. At the Royal, Juneau says, employees began mobilizing in early 1995. The bank expects to spend about $100 million to fix its 60 million lines of computer code. "It's laborious work," says Juneau. "The correcting itself is not very difficult. It's just the sheer magnitude of the task." Despite all the hard work, there is no guarantee every glitch will be avoided. The deadline is simply too close. At Canada Post, where executives expect to spend at least $70 million on repair work, chief information officer Gilles Farley vows to keep the mail moving. "We're repairing components as necessary," he says, "but not one iota more than that." At Air Canada, spokeswoman Nicole Couture Simard jokingly promises that planes will not fall out of the sky, and says the situation will be under control by 1999. The bottom line at BC Tel is to make sure that dial tones keep droning, says year 2000 program director William Lin. "But we just don't have time to solve everything." If the oversights are serious enough, companies could end up facing a flurry of lawsuits. Last month, a Detroit fruit and vegetable store launched what is considered to be the first millennium-bug lawsuit. Produce Palace International is suing Tec-America Inc. for $140,000, claiming the cash registers it was supplied with crashed frequently because they were unable to process credit cards expiring on or after the year 2000. Besides lawyers, the bug's major beneficiaries are programmers and consultants. "For many of these companies, there's going to be a real bonanza in revenue," says Farley of Canada Post. Some analysts predict that the scarcity of qualified programmers could push salaries up by 30 per cent to 50 per cent in 1998 and 1999. Despite the enormous expense, some experts claim the cost will be a bargain when compared with the money saved by describing years with only two digits. A recent study by James Cappel and Leon Kappelman, two U.S. business professors, estimates that between 1963 and 1992 companies that used the two-digit year typically saved over $1 million per gigabyte of information stored. Large companies at the time usually stored tens or hundreds of gigabytes. If invested, the return on those savings over the same period would have been $15 million per gigabyte, the professors estimated. De Jager says executives who console themselves with business school equations are seriously deluded. If anything, the worst is yet to come. Because the time for repairs is so short, he says, many companies are sticking with two-digit year codes and making minor adjustments that will allow computers to operate for another 20, 30 or 50 years. However, not all firms are choosing the same time frame. "We're recreating the problem, even as we're fixing it," says de Jager. "Only this time, it will be spread out across the future, without us knowing when systems will fail." Sooner or later, the problem is bound to be solved--but, at this rate, it may take until the year 3000."