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

To: Clarksterh who wrote (20498)	6/17/1998 10:53:00 AM
From: Ian@SI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Clark PS This doesn't mean that I think Y2K is going to be a complete disaster, but I suspect that there will be a substantial hiccup(s) to the economy due to the problem. (After all, you can see the effects of the weather on the economy.) Generally, I agree with most of your points. 1. Some Programmers have known of this issue for more than 30 years. i.e. they first encountered it on the change of the decade from 69 to 70. During the 60s, only 1 digit was used to represent the year in order to economize on use of Core memory. Most programmers have been painfully reminded of the issue for more than a decade. What other programming issue has made the front page of newspapers and magazines for the last 3 years? This might have become a disaster if not so well publicized. IMO, that's extremely unlikely at this point. Now, if I were a Y2K consultant, I'd have a different story. What line of business are you in? :-) Just the fact that this issue has been known and understood (by the insiders) for so long, implies that it won't be a calamity. In my experience, calamities generally come from unknown rather than known dangers. 2. I haven't seen any lasting, overall impact of weather pro or con on the global economy. Clearly, there are individuals or specific businesses that have been absolutely devastated. On the other hand, there have been individuals and businesses with windfalls from weather events. I see a similar parallel for Y2K. Some businesses will miss out and may very well fail if they're unable to provide acceptable customer service for long periods of time. Most will survive and so will the global economy. I don't think I'll short the market as we approach Jan 1, 2000. My main objection to the Y2K hype is that it's unbalanced, generally uninformed and designed to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt. That, IMO, is not helpful. FWIW, Ian. P.S. My 28 year example was merely that. How to bypass a specific instance of a Y2K glitch with minimal effort. It is not applicable, as you pointed out, to most business applications.