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Technology Stocks : Y2K (Year 2000) Stocks: An Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (11277)	4/29/1998 11:32:00 AM
From: Narotham Reddy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13949

> Anybody hear of code 99 computer shutdown.. Today the New York Governor George Pataki said he does NOT have enough funds to fix this Y2K glitch. This is per Bloomberg this AM. Narotham

To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (11277)	4/29/1998 12:39:00 PM
From: Christine Traut	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 13949

Bobby: There is a concept in programming called 'high values' where a programmer puts in an arbitrary value that he/she believes will never happen in real life in order to trigger another process. Since programming is done by individuals and is an art - not a mechanical process - I guarantee you that some programmers used '99' as a high value and have it triggering something that will be inconvenient. In the grand scheme of things, is this as big a deal as the '00' problem? Not even close. We've got plenty enough to worry about with Y2K.

To: Bobby Yellin who wrote (11277)	5/1/1998 12:07:00 AM
From: David Eddy	Respond to of 13949

Bobby - anybody hear of code 99 computer shutdown secret..somebody just mentioned it to me..not sure if it is a hype or real..but supposedly the interpeted meaning of code 99 to a mainframe computer signals "cease all computer functions" This is a wonderful example of how the nitty gritty details of the daily grind of technical work gets easily distorted when someone tries to describe in 'understandable' form. Firstly... the use of '99' to mean something special is in no way confined to mainframe software. Primarily the use of '99' (or '98' or '97' or something else) to have special additional meaning (assuming we're talking of just the year field in a date) is a bad, but fairly common habit of "overloading"... assigning additional meaning to a piece of data. Whereas you should ideally have a completely seperate field to indicate unknown, not applicable, forever, etc. it was common to use special values to indicate some sort of different condition. It would not be uncommon to use 99 in a date field to mean stop. It could also mean simply 'unknown, but you have to have something here'. It is impossible to generalize. Analysts must look at the specifics of both the code and the data (these are two different things). An additionally nasty twist here is that the 'system of record' works one way, but the users have actually put in additional data values and run ad-hoc 4GL reports against the data. It's quite typical in the corporate scheme of things that central IS controls the production programs (what they believe to be "the system") while the end-users control the 4GL/ad-hoc stuff (what the system is REALLY doing!). Short answer to the 99 question... maybe yes, maybe no... ya gotta look. Completely impossible to generalize one way or the other. - David