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To: Trebor who wrote (4824)	5/3/1998 10:02:00 PM
From: Investor2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42834

Re: "Rather, the blame rests with the non-techy top execs who control the company's purse strings, want to sweep Y2K under the rug and even now don't want to part with the resources it will take to fix the problem." Maybe at least some of the blame rests on the short-term orientation of stock holders. If they don't get instant doubling of their investment, they jump all over the company's top execs. Many of these shareholders don't care about the long-term welfare of the company at all. They just want instant gratification - one or two down quarters and the stock gets punished. Best wishes, I2

To: Trebor who wrote (4824)	5/4/1998 1:02:00 AM
From: Ken Brown	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42834

>> don't blame the lowly software engineer for this problem.<< I'd like to qualify that statement a little. Don't ENTIRELY blame the lowly software engineers. I started programming about 2 years after that caller said he did, so we're in the same generation, more or less. I can remember the Y2K issue coming up as long ago as the early 80s. We couldn't afford the luxury of storing the century, of course. But it took only a little extra code (relatively cheap compared to storage of a lot of dates) to ensure that the program would work for 100 years: If the date you're comparing is < the current year, you assume it's in the next century. I also recall having to program for leap year 2000 - another special case. In this case, though, I believe it's an exception to the exception, so it IS a leap year. The point being, while not all code could be corrected for Y2K problems when written, the careful programmer could often do something about it, IF they chose to. The blame goes to those who chose not to worry about it, since it's "so far off". Ken