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

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (725)	12/17/1997 10:29:00 AM
From: Bill Ounce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

interesting Ed Yourdon comp.software.y2k post it seems to be me that we're going to be moving into panic mode by Xmas of '98, and full-scale foaming-at-the-mouth mode by Xmas of '99. From: Ed Yourdon <ed@yourdon.com> Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000 Subject: Re: Survey4Q-1997 Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 21:59:54 -0500 cory hamasaki wrote: <snip> > I'm going to have dinner w/ my pal, the survivalist nut-case > who owns the 100+ acre farm, tomorrow night. Got lots of plans to make. > Maybe I'll give him a 55 gallon drum of diesel for his Christmas present > instead of the NRA T-shirt (I get them at a discount, patches too.) Y'know, this brings up an interesting point: what should we all be doing about relatively innocent-but-clueless friends and family members? I'm not so concerned about my siblings and kids -- they're all reasonably healthy and intelligent, and can take responsibility for whatever decisions they make after hearing my particular perspective about Y2K. But what about my parents? Should I send them a 55 gallon drum of fuel oil? Granted, I may be a bit older than some of the folks on this forum, but I'll betcha there are a bunch of us who have parents with very modest incomes, and who are very dependent on Social Security -- not only that, they get their monthly SSA stipends direct-deposited into their bank account. At one point, I tried to guesstimate how many systems are involved in the SSA-to-Mom's-bank-account "logical transaction," and gave up after I ran out of fingers and toes with which to count. Obviously, there's not much I can do, personally, to ensure that the banks and FedWire and telecom and SSA systems will all be working to ensure that Mom gets her SSA check. But on the other hand, your image of the 55-gallon drum is an important one: THIS is the likely to be the last year when you'll be able to find such things at a reasonable price, and in reasonable quantity. For obvious reasons, I don't envision shipping a large drum of diesel-fuel through the Post Office, but what about a one-month supply of emergency food? It's still readily available, at a reasonable cost -- and it might turn out to be very, very useful in a couple years. In any case, it would sure be a change from the banal Xmas gifts I usually end up sending a lot of relatives. Has anyone else thought of this? More to the point: has it dawned on anyone that this could turn out to be the last calm, peaceful Xmas season we're gonna see for a few years? Even if a miracle occurs and Y2K turns out to be a Sally-Katzen-style "non-event," it seems to be me that we're going to be moving into panic mode by Xmas of '98, and full-scale foaming-at-the-mouth mode by Xmas of '99. Ed -------------------------------------------------------------------- Edward Yourdon , 161 W. 86th St, NYC, NY 10024 phone: 212-769-9460, fax: 212-769-9458 mail: ed@yourdon.com Web: yourdon.com --------------------------------------------------------------------

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (725)	12/21/1997 9:00:00 AM
From: R. Bond	Respond to of 9818

From The Times On Sunday in London. Located on front page of the Business section or at sunday-times.co.uk. Regards, Bond ------------------- Costs soar as suppliers struggle Millennium bug alarms Unilever UNILEVER, the Anglo-Dutch consumer-products giant, has trebled to œ300m its estimate of the cost of eliminating the millennium computer "bug" from its operations. Niall FitzGerald, chairman of the British arm, warned last week that up to a fifth of its small and medium-sized suppliers may not have fully removed the bug by January 1, 2000. Unilever's discovery that the cost of fixing the bug is far higher than anticipated, and FitzGerald's warning about the risk to smaller suppliers, will sound an alert throughout British industry. "I'm concerned that up to one-fifth of our suppliers worldwide may not be fully ready for 2000," said FitzGerald. Unilever has set its executives the target of ensuring their operations are 2000-compliant by next October. In common with many big companies, it is likely to drop suppliers if it concludes that they will not be ready for 2000. The group is warning of the disruption to the business cycle the bug will cause, with takeover activity likely to dry up and huge inventory-building expected to create buffer stocks ahead of January 1, 2000. Iain Anderson, Unilever's technology director and a British Telecom (BT) non-executive, said last week: "There will effectively emerge a sterile zone for acquisitions. I don't know when it will start, but I doubt if there will be many acquisitions after September 1999." Unilever's comments will attract the attention of the government, whose efforts to tackle the bug in Whitehall and to alert business to its danger have been criticised by Robin Guernier, head of the independent Taskforce 2000, which is trying to raise awareness of the threat. The problem has arisen because many computer systems use only two digits, rather than four, for dating purposes. When the year changes from 99 to 00, experts say many applications will crash or create data that are, literally, rubbish. Many systems in the food industry would, for example, decide goods so labelled were out of date and should be scrapped. Anderson said the costs of tackling the bug were soaring because of the scale of the problem, particularly concerning so-called "embedded" chips - microchips installed deep in manufacturing equipment and computer systems whose software has to be checked line by line and, if necessary, rewritten. Anderson said: "The challenge isn't because it is intellectually difficult, but because there are just billions of things to be done. It's the sheer scale of the task and the relatively small number of people in the world qualified to do the work." Cap Gemini, Europe's leading computer-services company, believes solving the millennium bug will cost Britain œ31 billion. The global cost could be as much as œ340 billion. Many British companies are still reluctant to reveal how much they are spending on the problem. Unilever's estimate is one of the biggest so far, equal to that stated by BT. However, following news that Unilever has underestimated the cost of the operation, experts believe many firms will realise that the problems are deeper than first thought. Americans are already feeling the effects of the millennium bug. In Kansas, a 104-year-old woman recently received a letter telling her to register for kindergarten. In Washington, a Pentagon supplier with a contract for delivery of goods in 2003 received a warning that it was 94 years behind schedule. Many critics claim the process of re-writing software is moving far too slowly. One survey conducted by Cap Gemini found that only 33% of America's biggest companies had detailed rescue plans in place.