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

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (20490)	6/17/1998 9:11:00 AM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Now I am* worried.... I would have expected them to mention potential problems with the control software/firmware for their machines, too.* 1. Y2K problems primarily occur when dates from different millennia are compared. This has been happening for decades. i.e. - consider the determination of interest owed/paid on a 30 year bond/mortgage/etc; calculation of Pension entitlements,... 2. Prime elevator concern is for the scheduling control software - i.e. Weekday vs weekend schedule. For non Y2K compliant software, a quick and easy bypass for that problem is to set the system date back by 28 years (in order to preserve the relationship between weekdays and weekends). Most elevator riders are unconcerned whether or not their elevator software believes the date is 1972 or 2000. In fact, many could care less whether anyone thinks it's 1972 or 2000. 3. The ultimate fix of the logic, the date data, any backups including the date data, any generations of files including date data, new documentation, user training, testing and system validation is extraordinarily expensive, time consuming, and in general won't be completed any time soon, if ever. 4. Most systems will be replaced by already planned enhancements, retired (because they've been of limited or no value for years), or patched because that can be done by upgrading the logic alone. This is, in part, the function that has been performed by maintenance programmers for decades. In fact, maintenance at the best organizations consumes more than 30% of the total manpower budget for IT technology; in most corporations maintenance approaches 70% of that budget. 5. Is there a Y2K problem? Definitely. Is it specific to Jan 1, 2000? Only in the minds of the uninformed gurus such as Yardeni who clearly demonstrate that they haven't much of a clue everytime they open their mouth. 6. Re Y2K and 10K warnings: It's now a SEC requirement. Further, it's a legal precaution designed to reduce the number of frivolous lawsuits that the scum of the legal community throw at industry. (Note how I avoided foul language such as Lerach there). FWIW, Ian.