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Technology Stocks : Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (411)	5/24/1998 12:07:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 618

[NAVY] 'I"ve been predicting one of the Y2K markers will be when our Navy ships start tying up and anchoring. If they are not fully Y2K compatible, it would be both suicidal and irresponsible to risk using them. I believe every ship will have to go through major repairs and then test in extensive sea trials just as if it were brand new. The entire fleet will have to be thoroughly shaken down and all systems will have to be fully tested before it will be safe to put any vessel or any group of vessels in sensitive circumstancesor even just to be at sea. And all of this work has to be completed before Y2K can create unpredictabilities. Think about how the Aegis system malfunctioned in electronically normal times and shot down the Iranian airliner. What does Y2K do to those systems and how can the electronically integrated task forces function reliably and predictably? How does anyone know what is good data and if the system will perform as designed? Even if it turns out system performance is not degraded by Y2K, how can that be known and trusted without exhaustive testing at individual system level, vessel level, task force, fleet, and all the way to the Pentagon? All of the system integration testing has to be accomplished in eighteen months, or is it less? Allen Comstock -------------Begin Forwarded Material------------------ Federal Computer Week MAY 18, 1998 Intercepts BY BOB BREWIN (antenna@fcw.com) IT-21 sticker shock. The estimated cost of upgrading a Navy Carrier Battle Group and Amphibious Ready Group has jumped from roughly $50 million to between $80 million and $100 million - and that covers only the major ships, according to Monica Shephard, Atlantic Fleet N6. Shepherd said the Navy faces "tough" decisions on how to allocate its IT funding and resources as "all the easy decisions are gone.'' My Pentagon antenna site also has picked up strong signals that Rear Adm. John Gauss, commander of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Command, may not end up with all the Navy IT funding. There's a good chance that the money will still be controlled by the bases and other systems commands. -->snip<-- Y2K SWAT teams. The Marine Corps "has no reasonable expectations'' that it will have fixed all Year 2000 date code problems in all its computer systems by Jan. 1, 2000, according to Col. Kevin McHale, the Year 2000 honcho at Marine Corps headquarters. McHale said the Marines plan to have Year 2000 SWAT teams standing by at major installations on Jan. 1, 2000. The Marines plan to dispatch these teams rather than provide phone support as the service also has concerns about the effect of Year 2000 problems on the phone network. Almost Y2K-ready. The Navy Year 2000 Project Office thought it had discovered one Navy ship with no Year 2000 problems - the four-masted sailing ship USS Constitution. But, according to Cmdr. Jim Gillcrist, the Navy discovered that "Old Ironsides'' sports a Global Positioning System receiver, "which has its own date problems." ____ Subject: The Navy is Toast Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 23:29:01 -0700 From: comstock@wild-life.com (Allen Comstock) Organization: Comstock Graphics (Montana) Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000

To: John Mansfield who wrote (411)	5/24/1998 12:09:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 618

[CLINTON] 'Bob Hermann <hermannrg@nospamerols.com> wrote in article <01bd8682$c67579a0$52a2accf@oemcomputer>... > I think most of this is by design. As many readers of this ng know, about > a week ago the CIA gave an interview to the Reuters News Agency in which > they made a warning about massive worldwide disruption due to the year 2000 > problem. I suspect that they have been giving even more realistic--and > chilling--reports to the administration for months. Clinton has to know > that the st is really gonna hit the fan in 2000. But to name that as the > greatest threat to our infrastructure would underline the fact that the > present administration has done nothing substantive for 5 years to prevent > the problem. It would take a rare politician--Churchill, perhaps?--to step > up to the plate on this one. A very plausible explanation and I cannot offer any alternative that has any plausibility. I doubt however that he will be able to continue this dance much longer. It might be worse than you say. The biomedical and cyber terrorism threats might be super emphasized as deliberate distractions. They can be understood by the general population as plausible threats, as opposed to Y2k which cannot be satisfactorily communicated. A possible deception may be to fabricate all these reasons for partial mobilization to combat individual threats and then when the Y2K threat becomes evident, say "Gollee, it's a good thing we mobilized, because we needed to do that for this newly-perceived Y2K threat. He may be deliberately softening us up for some bad news.** He has already said that we are threatened by cyber terrorism, possible biomedical attack, asian financial crisis etc. What's then just one more threat -- Y2K. He can say, "Well I told you that we were threatened, there's just this one more threat." Harlan ____ Subject: Re: - Bill Clinton still "doesn't [Y2K] get it" -- Speech at Annapolis Graduation Ceremony Date: 23 May 1998 16:11:07 EDT From: "Harlan Smith" <hwsmith.nowhere@cris.com> Organization: Paperless Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000 References: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5

To: John Mansfield who wrote (411)	5/24/1998 12:30:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 618

[CPI] Chemical Process Industry Article of July 1997 _______ 'Left unchecked, the Year 2000 problem -- called Y2K, for short -- could be catastrophic for the chemical process industries (CPI). The date glitch could cause innumerable shutdowns and horrific accidents. Indeed, a manufacturer's process-control system could be stymied by "00" and shut down altogether on New Year's Eve. .... Although many firms are well on the way towards Y2K compliance for their applications and mainframes, process control is another matter. At one large CPI company ($5 billion in sales), says the IT manager, "A lot the DCSs, PLCs, lab instruments and so on may have problems." At his firm, as well as at Shell, the Y2K team is working with plant managers to inventory equipment with embedded chips. "We have to see what we have, and address the vendors for each," says Quiggins. "We simply don't know how big this problem is yet," says de Jager, pointing out that embedded chips have only surfaced as a problem in the past six months to a year. A large number of instruments don't care about the date at all, of course; but for those that do, "We're nearly having to go in and test each and every one," says another IT manager for a large CPI multinational. che.com