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Gold/Mining/Energy : Silver prices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Harry K who wrote (333)	12/26/1997 12:58:00 PM
From: Bill Ounce	Respond to of 8010

Re: what is Y2K -- the fundamentals Alot of systems will get confused when they encounter dates past December 31, 1999. (Systems were consructed to use only 2 digits for the date field, when they should have used 4. This was necessary in the past to save on expensive memory, but even today some people still do this out of laziness/stupidity! So, one shouldn't assume that new software is OK without someone explicitly testing for this.) What types of systems will fail? (1) Some very old hardware can not function with '00' in the date field. (2) COBOL programs used by financial institutions must be Y2K compliant. (3) Accounting/Payroll software for ALL businesses must be Y2K compliant. (4) Scheduling/Inventory software for transportation and warehouse industries must be compliant. (5) Telecommunications systems must be compliant. (6) Embedded industrial sub-systems where a microprocessor needs to know the year (or more commonly day of week derived from the calendar date) need to be Y2K compliant. What is the fallout? (1) Huge problems for governments world-wide. The private sector is better managed/funded and can afford to pay top dollar for a finite pool of "geeks" that are critical to achieve Y2K compliance. (2) Big problems for International Trading/Banking. USA banks are in a panic, spending big bucks with 2 years to go and should just make it. But World-wide, banks haven't gotten to this point yet. (3) Market crashes word-wide as I-banking/I-trading no longer works. (4) Possible spot shortages of commodities/industrial supplies from plant shutdowns caused by embedded system problems. This area is a big unknown. Hopefully elecricity and petroleum products will be O.K. Look for big problems to emerge in 1H 1999. Many companies have fiscal years that do not start in January, and the transportation industry must schedule several quarters in advance. Any resulting panic looks very good for metals...