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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: novice investor who wrote (36353)	11/16/1998 2:08:00 AM
From: IceShark	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

novice, I haven't bothered to figure out the problem with hard, hardware code and micro code, or "firmware", as you called it, yet. My brain is stuffed with enough, and if I get smart, it won't help me much being ahead of the curve too much, other than behaving like a survivalist. -g- Software is one issue; as you noted the buggers are the embedded stuff. That is the real problem the general monkeyboy doesn't understand. PC's manufactured 5 years ago are going to fail, I have one, let's guess what else might happen to a weak link robot on the XYZABC line? This is what makes me very nervous about predicting PC sales. Can I get a new BIOS and OS which will fix the problem for my home machine, or will it be easier to just throw away the box and buy a 500 buck replacement that will serve the purposes? And I have a P-133. There are many that are still hanging on to older machines, usually word processors. Regards, Ice

To: novice investor who wrote (36353)	11/16/1998 6:12:00 AM
From: accountclosed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

By the way, I'd like to add the IBM's infamous Report Program Generator (RPG) as another major culprit on your list of languages for the Y2K problem. During 60s, IBM in response for acute shortage of programmers, designed RPG as a programming language to be used by accountants. It accepts data in fixed formats similar to ledgers and, yes, it routinely used 2 digit for the year field. RPG-III (IV) is still a very active programming language. The statement that it was designed as a programming language to be used by accountants is curious to me. If I give you the benefit of the doubt and say, Novice Investor may be right about the very earliest beta versions of RPG (like talking about beta "A" versus the "C++" of today), I'll say it is barely possible this bizarre statement is true. However, RPG-III of today is in no way an accountant's programming language. It is a full featured programming language. And a language with billions of lines of code out there. The similarity of fixed formats to ledgers is absolutely nil. The "routinely used 2 digit for the year field" statement is of questionable truth value, too. Yes, lots of programs in every language have two year dates. But no aspect of RPG led programmers astray to using 2 digits when they should have used 4. I really find the over truth value of the RPG section in your post to be pretty low, and certainly misleading about what RPG-III (IV) is today. On the other hand, if you are primarily trying to point out that there is a lot of RPG code out there, you are indeed right.

To: novice investor who wrote (36353)	11/16/1998 6:27:00 AM
From: accountclosed	Respond to of 132070

Try searching for "RPG-III" on altavista.

To: novice investor who wrote (36353)	11/16/1998 9:58:00 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Hi NI, one of the local radio stations is devoted entirely to investment information during the day, and actually has a weekly Y2K program. I can't stand to listen to it, frankly, every time I do, I start thinking about heading into the hills with bottled water, canned food, gold coins, and a lot of guns. What you say about the embedded gadgets with ROM is, indeed, the scariest part. I understand that underground powerlines all have them, and no one can replace them because no one kept track of where they were when they were burying the lines. The solution there is to by-pass, add redundancy, and accept the fact that come 1/1/00, the ones that failed will be painfully obvious. hjsimpson has already posted about his nuclear power plant. What makes it scarier is that, as I understand it, if a powerline has a catastrophic failure, it must be replaced, can't be re-energized. I guess people with pacemakers must not be too happy, either. CobaltBlue