Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Microcap & Penny Stocks : Tokyo Joe's Cafe / Societe Anonyme/No Pennies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron who wrote (22712)	12/5/1998 8:38:00 PM
From: TokyoMex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 119973

Y2K .. Hollywood prepares to unleash millennium bug disaster movies FILMGOERS are about to be blitzed by a new genre of disaster epics as the millennium bug, or Y2K as it is known in America, takes Hollywood by storm, writes David Parsley. Y2K: The Movie is being developed by Warner Brothers and is scheduled for release in autumn 1999, months before the bug is due to strike for real. Set in New York the film stars Chris O'Donnell, famous for his role as Robin in the Batman movies. He plays a computer programmer who comes across dangerous information as midnight December 31, 1999, approaches and the plot centres on the dilemma he faces on making this discovery. Stu Zicherman, the screenwriter, describes the millennium bug as "the greatest ticking clock ever. It's one of the few deadlines in the history of the world that you cannot push back." Other big Hollywood studios, including MGM, are also planning millennium-bug disaster movies, which, experts say, could trigger panic among filmgoers as the date of no return approaches. One studio has a script involving a Boeing 747 crashing into the Empire State Building as its systems fail. Peter De Jager, who first sounded the millennium-bug alarm bell in 1993, acted as a consultant on the Warner Brothers' film alongside Wall Street's resident Y2K bear Ed Yardeni, an economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. De Jager fears that when film and television wake up to the severity of the problem, they may over-react and terrify the public with irresponsible sensationalism such as plane crashes and nuclear explosions. He said: "I believe Warner Brothers is handling this responsibly. This is not an Armageddon-type film. I have heard plans for other movies that the authorities should be worried about." In the real world, the millennium bug will not be solved with a single "magic bullet", he said. Yardeni said: "From what I've seen, this is kind of like Deep Impact [where a meteor threatens to wipe out Earth] with the year 2000 in the background. Some of these movies are not helpful." Robin Guenier of Taskforce 2000, an independent bug-buster, said people should be focusing on the serious side of the bug issue rather than overdramatising it. "To make it into an apocalyptic event is not what we need," he said. "But at least we won't be around for the sequels in the year 3000." Flaws found in Y2K work By CHRISTOPHER PRICE and AVI MACHLIS The Financial Times Checks by some of the biggest corporations in the United States and Europe have revealed serious flaws in work already undertaken to tackle the millennium computer bomb. Unisys, the U.S. computer systems and services group, said that a testing facility in Britain had uncovered problems with more than 20 of Britain's top 100 listed companies. ''Some of the issues we found would have taken their systems down,'' said David Palmester, Year 2000 program manager for Unisys. ''The quality of testing they have undertaken is very worrying.'' The millennium computer bomb problem has come about because of the inability of older systems to recognize the change of date from 1999 to 2000. The fear is that many of these systems will malfunction as a result. Crystal Systems Solutions, an Israeli information technology group, said that Ford, Pratt & Whitney and a large German car manufacturer were among 20 U.S. and European companies to commission verification services this year for conversions done by other companies. ''More and more companies that classified their systems as compliant or converted are asking for verifications,'' said Ben Levy, Crystal's vice president of marketing and sales. ''In several cases we found date issues were either missed, not converted or converted wrongly. The problem is that one mistake in one program can cause a major problem to a business.'' Palmester said that most of the problems being thrown up in the latest checks were for companies which had attempted to solve the problem in-house. He said this often involved the company employing contractors to address the issue who perhaps were not completely familiar with the systems they were dealing with or the diagnostic tools they were using. David Marshall, managing director of Greenwich Mean Time, a British IT diagnostics company specializing in Y2K solutions, confirmed similar findings. ''Too many companies have attempted to tackle the millennium bomb through a piecemeal approach to their systems,'' he said.