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Technology Stocks : Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (84)	2/11/1998 6:44:00 AM
From: C.K. Houston	Respond to of 618

After researching the problem further, it's definitely possible for non-compliant firmware to trash a system despite the fact that none of the applications reference the date. Basically, when 99 rolls to 100, the operating system may or may not use an extra byte for the ASCII or EPCDIC representation of 00, thinking it needs to output 100. If it does, the overwrite may OR may not trash a critical function. Even if the overwrite doesn't occur, the system may take an exception indicating that a third byte is needed to represent 100 -- which may shut the system down. So without figuring out exactly what a given system will do, the outcome is a pure crap shoot. A colleague of mine who has written many, many such date applications in the span of a 30 year career (he said he could do that coding in his sleep), has no idea what his code will do. When he coded, it wasn't that he thought 2000 was far away -- actually, it didn't even occur to him to think about output storage in the 99-to-100 transition. ============================================================== Someone emailed the above to me, and I thought it would be of interest to you. Cheryl

To: John Mansfield who wrote (84)	2/11/1998 1:00:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 618

'...a confined area when there's a real risk of power failure' From www.year-2000.com: 'Millennium expert forecasts doom for Mandelson's dome If you are planning to celebrate New Year's Eve 1999 at Peter Mandelson's pleasure dome in Greenwich - don't. That's the advice of millennium consultant Martyn Emery, who is convinced that official celebrations in the 1,000ft wide, Teflon-coated tent will be put off until 2001 at the earliest. "The celebrations will almost certainly be delayed. It's a question of whether you are prepared to take the risk of having 30,000 people, including royalty, in a confined area when there's a real risk of power failure," he said. Emery is well placed to assess the millennium bug's impact on electricity supplies. As head of Corporation 2000, he has advised organisations in London and New York on the potential effects of the century date change on utilities and urban infrastructures. He said the minister without portfolio, who has taken personal responsibility for the controversial project, would delay celebrations "as the downside of not doing so is far worse than the potential political embarrassment". Emery suggested the site might be used to celebrate the 50th anniversary of 1951's Festival of Britain, or what many believe is the true beginning of the third millennium, 1 January 2001. '