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To: John Mansfield who wrote (8893)	1/14/1998 3:43:00 PM
From: Mike Winn	Respond to of 31646

>>>Roger Barnett Natron Software Maintenance Ltd, York, England Most Y2K problems are discovered in England. Most gold stocks and penny stocks are traded on the Canadian stock exchange. The largest gold mine is in Indonesia. UFO always landed where few people see it. canoe.ca

To: John Mansfield who wrote (8893)	1/14/1998 3:54:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 31646

<Y2K-EMBBEDDED - '99' problem Mark A Young 11/2/1997 on C.S.Y2K. This is a typical sample of the so called '99' problem. Many '99' problems will also occur widely in embedded systems when YY=99. Sample dates are: 1/1/1999 9/9/1999 This sample is not from embedded sw, but serves to illustrate the problem. Large scale y2k panic will start in januari 1999, IMO. John ---------------- '1. A so-called 4th generation language we used required that at least one record be written out before it would open the output file. This meant that something would have to be written out or the next step would pick up whatever garbage was being passed in that file from a previous job. We got in the habit of writing a 9's record to avoid that problem. We still have a number of programs that still check for a date (mmddyy) of 999999, SSN of 999999999, or course/section = 999999999, and ignore such records. (Most of our batch applications now use a modern variant of that language, and the new one _does_ open the file for output if the current "job activity" has a PUT for that file, even if that PUT isn't reached, so in the no-records case at least one has a null file instead of left over garbage.)'

To: John Mansfield who wrote (8893)	1/14/1998 3:58:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 31646

'...one electric company that's got the guts to publicly recognize that Y2K's an issue for them' Rick Cowles, 16/10/1997 on C.S.Y2K John ----- Sometimes the industry leaders are the relatively small guys. At least there's one electric company that's got the guts to publicly recognize that Y2K's an issue for them. Basin Electric Power Coop in Bismark, ND. (a regional power co-op in ND-SD-WY) has a couple of Year 2000 articles on their website: basinelectric.com talks to the embedded controls issue at electric companies. basinelectric.com discusses Y2K issues in general. --- Rick Cowles "Electric Utilities and Year 2000" accsyst.com

To: John Mansfield who wrote (8893)	1/14/1998 4:01:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 31646

North American Air Defence Command Found on C.S.Y2K, from Cory Hamasaki John ------------ 'I found this in rec.radio.amateur.space Note the YY format in the NORAD two line element set. The two line element set is the standard definition of a satellite orbit and is used by all commercial, military, and amateur orbital simulators. There are hundreds of millions, billions (US billions) of dollars of software distributed in the hundreds of thousands of computers that track the satellites and control the pointing of antennas for communications, voice, digital, images, etc. NORAD, the North American Air Defence Command, based in the hollowed out Cheyenne Mountain, shown in the movie "War Games", tracks the satellites and issues the two line element sets. When these element sets fail, lots of very high tech communications will also fail. The element sets describe the position and vector of the satellite at a specific starting time. The orbital simulator uses Newtonian mechanics to predict the future (or past) position of the satellite, this is called "Flying the bird" <not to be mistaken with 'giving the bird', which Frank seems to be fond of giving me.> or "propagating the orbit". Again, like all these Y2K issues, this ain't a big deal. Simply change the definition of the standard NORAD two card element set to include the century or implement windowing in all the hundreds of thousands of orbital simulators all over the world. Oh, no one knows where they are? Oh, there are databases of these things with the YY and DD and the fractional day as keyed fields? Too bad for the high tech world. Here's another thrill ride. Analytic Graphics Corporation pressed and gave out 75,000 freeware copies of their $10,000 Satellite Tool Kit. Every one of these copies is not Y2K compliant and they're all over the world, some are doing critical work. Oh, and the seed year and day isn't just for the report and -28 year windowing won't work. The orbital simulators take into account the absolute time and the effect that the Moon's gravitation has on perturbating the satellite's orbit.' <snip>