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To: C.K. Houston who wrote (8330)	1/5/1998 9:28:00 AM
From: Judy Helkowski	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

From Government Computing News Site:www.gcn.com, latest issue I enjoyed reading this article, although the thought of living through such a day is certainly frightening! John McCormick Desktop Computing 'Tis the season to do 2000 testing, before all hell breaks loose POWER USER This may be the last time until well into 2000 that some of you will have time for a quiet read, so I'm writing this column while you can still see some humor in it. Let's set the scene: You told senior managers once a month for several years about the millennium bug and finally got an "urgent, rush, drop everything" order to complete repairs and begin testing by December 1998. You had begun testing quietly more than a year earlier. With the official OK, you can enlist some help. Your team spends the next 12 months working flat-out. Things look manageable by December 1999, so you take a few days off before the big event. Then you head for the office on New Year's Eve, 1999. After making a few test runs, you settle in with a pot of coffee to see what happens. At the stroke of midnight, the building's electrical power goes out. A nearby transformer thinks it hasn't been serviced for 99 years and shuts down. Your uninterruptible power systems keep running, but when you pick up the phone to report the outage to the power company, you discover that the office's private branch exchange has a date-sensitive chip. You can't get an outside line. Your mobile phone account has been closed because the provider's computer thinks your agency won't make a payment for another 30 years. What's the word? The network is still up, so you decide to ignore the distractions and just start testing. But you're locked out of the network. The accounting software thinks you are 130 years old. Even your PC denies you access because you didn't change passwords on schedule. The building's power comes back on, so you head for the elevator. It won't move because its inspection is now 20 years out of date. Stumbling into the lobby 10 floors below, you collapse in front of the night guard. He contacts paramedics on his radio, but their ambulance won't start because vehicles have computers, too. They jog over and rip open your shirt, but their defibrillator's internal clock believes the unit won't even be built for 30 years. The paramedics get you to the hospital only to learn that your health coverage is no good. The insurance company's computer says no payments have been made for 20 years. The doctor comes around with an old, noncomputerized electrocardiograph found in the basement. Happily, it turns out that you didn't have a heart attack, so you head home to find that your access card will no longer open the front door of your secure apartment building. Eventually you do get in. But the coffeemaker didn't start on schedule, and the microwave oven won't heat breakfast until you unplug it to clear the date setting. Staggering back to work late in the morning of Jan. 1, you feel cold. The building heat went off last night--its controller thought it was July. After a day with phone system and elevators working erratically, you arrive home in the evening to the final indignity: Your VCR is flashing all nines and didn't record the bowl games. A neighbor tells you the satellite carrying the feed hadn't been tested before launch, so no one outside the stadiums saw the games. Rag time Cheer up. At least one thing will work. Your GCN subscription won't be canceled by a computer glitch, so you'll be able to read about others who had a worse time. The moral is: Enjoy your New Year's holiday this year. It may be the last fun you have for a while. Those who are looking for advice and not morals can get a head start fixing the PCs under their control. Go to the World Wide Web site at hqisec.army.mil, which posts BIOS test results for selected AST Research Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp., IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other common PCs. It shows which ones passed initial year 2000 tests and, of those that failed, which have BIOSes that utilities can fix. The BIOS firmware is the little troublemaker that causes so much grief when the PC battery dies--you can't even access the hard drive if you lose all BIOS settings. The BIOS sends the operating system its initial date on boot-up. Most applications get the same date from the operating system. When the BIOS ticks past the last second of 1999, it may or may not change to 2000. How 'bout a date? Even if it does, at next boot-up it may tell the operating system the date is 00 (1900). The OS will reject that as invalid and substitute 1980 by default. That date will be picked up by most applications, except for a few that get the date directly from the BIOS chip, and they will set it at 1900. The Web site at rightime.com has a number of useful BIOS utilities. Test2000.zip has programs that evaluate your BIOS chip and report whether a software fix will work or whether you need a new chip. While testing, remember to shut down all software that runs at specific dates or intervals, such as backup or virus-scan utilities. As you read about this topic, you'll run across mention of the BIOS RTC, for which RTC stands for real-time clock. It runs as long as the PC's battery keeps a charge. I remember when an RTC chip was an aftermarket option. If you didn't spring for it, you had to set the system date manually at each reboot. Now even coffeepots have RTCs, which just goes to show the possible scope of the millennium bug. John McCormick, a free-lance writer and computer consultant, has been working with computers since the early 1960s. Judy H.

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (8330)	1/5/1998 2:24:00 PM
From: Jack Zahran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

PC WEEK quotes BMY CIO on Y2K!: 1998: D-Day for Y2K Year 2000 leads CIO action list; lack of skilled pros is 2nd As CIOs kick off 1998, there's one issue that is bound to have them showing up at the office early and going home late. Here's a clue: tick ... tick ... tick ... "The year 2000 conversion is certainly the No. 1 bell ringer for most CIOs in 1998," said John Stevenson, CIO of the Worldwide Medicines group at Bristol-Myers Squibb Inc., in Princeton, N.J. "It's going to keep a lot of people awake nights." Solving it will cause a profound ripple effect throughout most IT shops, robbing funds from new development projects, soaking up an already thin IT talent pool, and refocusing the spotlight on the value and role of IT in the enterprise. Some CIOs already have a handle on the year 2000. For example, at Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association), in Washington, CIO Bill Kelvie expects year 2000 conversion testing to be completed by the end of this year. But according to Howard Rubin, an IT professor at Hunter College, in New York, only one in two organizations has established a high-level direction for tackling year 2000 conversions, and only one in eight has a full program in place. In California, Gov. Pete Wilson ordered state agencies to defer new projects until they start year 2000 projects. As a result, state CIO John Flynn axed $260 million in new projects for 1998. www8.zdnet.com

To: C.K. Houston who wrote (8330)	1/5/1998 4:29:00 PM
From: Jack Zahran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

Re: Embedded Systems-Bigger Problem than Legacy Systems (From news:comp.software.year-2000) ------------------- Craig Dillon wrote: > > Few people have talked about the Embedded Systems problem and Y2K. > This is unfortunate because it is a much bigger problem. Indeed it is! The companies I have worked with have found that their embedded systems fixes will cost 6 to 15 times more than their IT systems. I haven't heard a recent figure, but 6 months or so ago, some DoD was information said that their C3I systems would cost 7.5 to 8.75 times more per LOC to fix than their AIS systems. And that's a whole lot of peanuts folks! The real problem is almost no one is even considering their embedded systems -- they are so busy on their IT systems, they can't seem to take an objective look at the REAL problem. Rick Cowles said it best: "It's time for the non-IT sector of the electric utility business to get out of denial, and start understanding and accepting the scope of this problem. The Year 2000 issue within the electric utility industry is so much deeper than financial control, customer service, billing, and load forcasting systems. This problem has the potential to cut to the core of your business: generating and distributing power. If your company can not generate power, it can't generate revenue, either. If your company can not distribute the electricity it buys or generates, it can't distribute quarterly dividends. Here's what I'm trying to say: if your business systems are functional, but your transmission and generation assets are not, who cares? Business systems are useless if your company can't generate and distribute its product. Your company must start looking at its embedded controls and infrastructure now. You can't wait until December, 1999 to begin this task. It's not an issue of complexity, rather, it's an issue of scale." (Quoted from: euy2k.com His point that (paraphrased) "if you can't make product to sell, then your IT systems are useless" hits the nail on the head! THE CEO, PRESIDENT, AND CIO OF EVERY COMPANY THAT PRODUCES PRODUCT NEEDS TO HAVE THIS ENGRAVED ON THEIR FOREHEAD! Then maybe people will start to get the message! ----------------------