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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bald Man from Mars who wrote (10653)	6/27/1998 10:27:00 AM
From: Roger A. Babb	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18691

BM, yes, yes, and yes. There are some old legacy software programs, mostly COBOL and FORTRAN, with two digit dates. Even very few of these will fail at y2k because we programmers (yes I am an old time COBOL/FORTRAN programmer) were smart enough in the 1960's and 1970's to look beyond 2000. Most of these old programs with two digits span the period 1961 to 2060, that is to say that 61 to 99 are assumed to be 1961 to 1999 and 00 to 60 are assumed to be 2000 to 2060. Very few of the old programs will fail in year 2000, but look out for 2061!!! We old coots figured we would still be around in 2000 but very few of us expected to make it until 2061. As I said in an earlier post, the embedded chip problem is mostly urban myth. Any chip for which this is a prblem will be in a device that allows date inputs, if the device does not have a date input mode you can stop worrying about it. If it does have such a mode, then it is simple to test it. We engineers get a lot of good laughs out of the y2k hype we see in the papers and on the Internet. Most of it is in the same class as the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot legends. Some of us actually use the stuff to squeeze budget money into our departments from MBA manager types who don't know any better, a good scam to justify that new computer system. Guess I shouldn't be debunking this stuff, my largest source of income in 1997 was shorting ZITL, VIAS, and DDIM. Would like to see TAVA reach the 30's before I short it, but that is beginning to look like a forlorn hope.