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

To: John Mansfield who wrote (240)	5/1/1998 5:35:00 PM
From: Bill Ounce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 888

content police :-) Cory's story missing required copyright header. Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report V2, # 18 "April 30, 1998 - 610 days to go." WRP74 (c) 1997, 1998 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and reproduce this newsletter as long as this entire document is reproduced in its entirety. You may optionally quote an individual article but you should include this header down to the tearline. I do not grant permission to a commercial publisher to reprint this in print media. As seen in USENET:comp.software.year-2000 elmbronze.demon.co.uk kiyoinc.com --------------------tearline ----------------------------- This story is just Cory having some fun, which may confuse people when the rest of the newsletter is absent.

To: John Mansfield who wrote (240)	5/2/1998 8:31:00 AM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 888

[HAMASAKI] 'Re: How many people would perish because of Y2K?' 'Subject: Re: How many people would perish because of Y2K? Date: 30 Apr 1998 23:43:23 GMT From: kiyoinc@ibm.XOUT.net (cory hamasaki) Organization: IBM.NET Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000 References: 1 , 2 On Thu, 30 Apr 1998 15:53:50, Robert Egan <nospam@ptc.com> wrote: > > Based on which previous disasters? The closest thing we've seen to a > modern plague is the epidemic which swept the globe earlier this > century. What was it, typhoid or influenza? I'm not a historian. What > percentage did it wipe out? How about our greatest natural disaster. It was the Spanish Lady Flu, influenza, just after WWI. May have been exacerbated by the population shifts after the war, poor sanitation, killed millions in the U.S... I don't have the exact numbers. If Y2K kills in the same proportion, we'll see it on the news non-stop... assuming that the power is on, but by 2050, people will have pretty much forgotten the deaths. > What percentage of India's population does a typical monsoon wipe out? Tiny, but a monsoon is small. Trashes one city and leaves another, a hundred miles away essentially intact. Flooding is the problem. > How about our greatest man made disaster? What percentage of the world > population was wiped out by WWII? Why do you think Y2K will be > cumulatively more devastating that all of these great disasters > combined? I'm hoping it's not as bad as WWII. Here's the calibration. Cancer and Heart disease kill about a million people in the U.S. each year. Out of a population of 250 million, you have a couple million dropping dead every year. If Y2K kills less than a million, you and I won't notice it, won't be touched by it unless we are very unlucky. That said, if it gets very bad, very fast, goes milne and we kill off 5% due to riots, starvation, disease, freezing, bad medicine, whatever... 5% is 12.5 million dead in the U.S. So look around c.s.y2k, of a 100 regular posters, 5 die in the 5% scenario. > > It's a pretty vague statement you've got there. What percentage do you > think will die from starvation, from exposure, from fires caused by > improper use of heating materials, from angry hoardes of looters? > Specific FACTS to back up these numbers would help your cause greatly. Can't be done. Y2K is unlike any other event. This is a predicted software failure, not a war, not global warming, not el nino, not a crop failure, not a strike, not a black out, none of those things... but it could be all those things and more, all at the same time, and everywhere. > > > Again, ANY relevant facts. Anyone can pull percentages off the top of > their head. There are no percentage facts about the future... Only guesses, some of us have better guesses than others. We do know that the software will fail. We also know that most large enterprises will fail to fix more than a token amount of their mission critical systems. And last, we know that software problems cannot be fixed quickly by experts and definitely not at all by clueless nubies. My last WRP included the Washington Post's story about a 15 month attempt by Metro to fix their train control software. This is very simple system, recently built at a cost of $20M. There are systems out there that were built by hundreds of programmers decades ago. In some cases, none of the original team are around. Who speaks for them? > > > Cheers > Robert Egan cory hamasaki 610 days, 14,647 Hours