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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stewart kagel who wrote (19013)	4/25/1998 11:30:00 PM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

*OT OT OT * Re: to say nothing of the year 2000 calamity that awaits us all! Actually, the Year 2000 problem occurs when a program first attempts to work with dates from different millennia. e.g. a provisioning system kicks out a valid order because it calculates that the minimum contract period has already expired simply because that period went into the next century. The bears don't have to wait until January 1, 2000. Most of the systems that will fail will already have failed long before then. Another point that Yardeni and other Year 2000 bears seem to ignore is that vital programs fail all the time (Ask AT&T). That's one of the reasons that companies spend between 30 and 70% of their IT development costs on system maintenance. The Y2K problems can be readily patched on a temporary basis (good for about 50 years) and corrected properly when it makes good business sense to do so - whether that's immediately or 10 years later. But I guess I should pay more attention to the news. Then I'd know that nothing will happen for at least another 1 1/2 years; at which point I should hide in a cave for several months while all civilization crumbles. FWIW Ian.