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Strategies & Market Trends : Three Amigos Stock Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LTK007 who wrote (6644)	7/5/1998 9:53:00 PM
From: MoneyMade	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29382

Thanks.It's greatly appreciated!!I think the key here is a $57 BILLION Dollar market, IMO that's plenty to go around...Tomorrow I will be loading up on SEEC at the close and building my portfolio of Y2K stocks with the likes of Computer Associates & PeopleSoft Lastly, in the next week or so Bill Clinton will be addressing this issue for the first time publicly!!Should be something to watch. Regards, MoneyMade

To: LTK007 who wrote (6644)	7/6/1998 8:14:00 AM
From: Tx Buck	Respond to of 29382

I regard to your point about large vs small Y2K firms and responsibility. I spent a few months last year trying to get bids on farming out assembler language conversion (to COBOL) and Y2K conversions. Old language versions often are not compatible for conversion and must be upgraded. Since assembler programmers are a passing generation, even in the government, the conversion to COBOL is necessary. At that time the lead was about 3 months. Now it is up to 6 months before a company can get to new work and it costs twice as much. The small firms to which we provided sample programs sent us back some really horrific code. Bottom line for them, the programming worked. Bottom line for us, our programmers have to maintain the code after these companies leave. We ended up settling with a fairly large company which was working with another of our center's conversions and the firm assured us that there would be few problems. Famous last words. The sister center is nearly a year behind in completion and our project, only six months old, has now slipped three months. My first point is that there is so much work out there that all the companies, large and small, will be raking in cash. Second, there is so much work out there that many firms are biting off more than they can ever chew, assuming they can hire the necessary temporary staff and get them on-line within a short period (wrong and wrong). It's an old programming adage that development programmer is the glamor work but it's also the easiest type to program. Maintenance programming, which is what conversion and Y2K are, often is assigned to the better, more experienced programmers. They are forced to work within given frameworks to resolve sticky problems and, since these programs are often required for immediate production and operations, do not have the luxury of time, cost overruns, new development, and pie-in-the-sky solutions. Many of these Y2K companies are finding out how difficult maintenance truly is. This brings me to my third, and last, point. Responsibility often becomes synonymous with culpability. As the Y2K problem becomes larger and companies realize the overload that they have assumed, there is going to be a lot of backing off from final solutions. That is to say, firms might be happy to consult but, as time becomes critical, the customers will be left to do the final repair work themselves. Y2K Companies do not want to be the scapegoat when their systems work begin to fail (not to say that all is doom and gloom... it's simply inevitable that not all coding will work as intended). There was a small article just last week in the WSJ which brings this fact to the front. Can you say law suit?

To: LTK007 who wrote (6644)	7/6/1998 10:56:00 AM
From: andy steele	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29382

FDO hits new 52 week high 20 1/4! (EOM) ANDY

To: LTK007 who wrote (6644)	7/6/1998 6:14:00 PM
From: Tx Buck	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 29382

Now you know what I think of Y2K, and here's something else that crossed my desk and often crosses my mind... Remember when... A computer was something on TV from a science fiction show. A window was something you hated to clean And RAM was the cousin of a goat Meg was the name of my girlfriend And gig was something you did on stage for money Now they all mean different things And that really mega bytes An application was for employment A program was a TV show A cursor used profanity A keyboard was a piano Memory was something that you lost with age A CD was a bank account And if you had a 3 1/2" floppy You hoped nobody found out Compress was something you did to the garbage Not something you did to a file And if you unzipped anything in public You'd be in jail for a while 'Log On' was adding wood to the fire Hard drive was a long trip on the road A mouse pad was where a mouse lived And a backup happened to your commode Cut you did with a pocket knife Paste you did with glue A web was a spider's home And a virus was the flu I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper And the memory in my head I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash But when it happens, they still wish they were dead Author Unknown