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Technology Stocks : Y2K (Year 2000) Personal Contingency Planning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Wexler who wrote (128)	4/20/1998 12:14:00 PM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Respond to of 888

Bill, believe me, this post to you was meant for others since I consider you a hopeless case. My only point is posting to you -- one last time on this subject -- on the "contingency" thread is so that others may have a better sense of your credibility which, I, as a programmer, frankly find as nil in that regard. Granted that many applications capture years in two digits, but this does not necessarily mean that: 1) That any date dependent calculations are then done on this input. Well, if there are no date calculations, as Svejk so aptly puts it, duh. We're obviously talking about those cases where there is, such as calculating age from a birthdate. 2) That if any date calculations are done, that there aren't already some assumptions built in for post 2000 dates (i.e. windowing). Windowing is almost always used as an after-the-fact patch for Y2K where the effort to expand a date to 4 digits would be, for lack of a better word, a pain. Obviously if the programmer needed to be Y2K compliant they would have captured a 4 digit year in the first place. 3) That even if incorrect date calculations are done, that this will necessarily crash the program. That's precisely the problem. The computer will go on thinking it's, for example, 1900 and process data accordingly. We might be better off if the system crashed. - Jeff

To: Bill Wexler who wrote (128)	5/3/1998 12:35:00 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 888

Well Bill, although I'm a little late to this conversation on the SSA and your monthly checks, why don't we look at reality. SSA began work on Y2K back in 1989-90 and were considered to be one of the more progressive gov't agencies who were farsighted enough to recognize and deal with the date problem. SSA discovered they had some 30 million lines of code to assess and remediate, which they basically were close to finishing late last year. But unfortunately last summer SSA discovered ANOTHER 30 million lines of code lying in the computers operated in each state that interfaced with their own mainframes. So this should be a state problem right?? One would think so, except that these computer systems were all funded by Federal dollars and thus the responsibility for remediating them has fallen on SSA. But they only have less than 2 years left to finish and test their systems. You can talk all you want about the details of date sequencing in computer programs. However, apparently SSA had enough of a problem to warrant their spending 7 years fixing 30 million lines of code. They only have 2 years to fix the OTHER 30 million. Aye, there lies the rub, and I'm not feeling very hopeful. Regards, Ron