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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: B.K.Myers who wrote (5498)	4/13/1999 7:54:00 AM
From: Christine Traut	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9818

B.K.: A very insightful point that Microsoft has a family of products, many of them built upon legacy systems. I find their situation particularly instructive because so many innocents still think that Bill Gates will find the 'magic bullet' to save us all from Y2K. Heck, they are putting windowing techniques into Windows 95 - an operating system - which sounds like a disaster in the making for applications running on it to me. I wonder what you think about my observation that Microsoft seems to be running a 'gee guys, it's only a bug' campaign. Sounds like you, Cheeky. :) Last time I looked, Y2K was a design flaw. At least a design flaw anytime after, oh, 1980 or so. If this isn't a wake up call about industry quality control, I don't know what is. I'm very concerned that Microsoft is not committing to really fix anything. In fact, they seem to be coming out with a workaround strategy. And I have reason to suspect that the underlying architecture of Windows 2000 is just as messed up on the two digit date issue as what came before it. Do you think that enterprises and individual consumers will just meekly accept that Microsoft products will now just be more unstable than ever? I'm rebooting an average of twice a day as it is. Putting my PC through nothing more than surfing and writing. Christine

To: B.K.Myers who wrote (5498)	4/13/1999 1:43:00 PM
From: B.K.Myers	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

Tuesday, April 13, 1999 City computer snag taxes patience By KATHLEEN HARRIS, Ottawa Sun A computer glitch at city hall caused some property taxes to be withdrawn from bank accounts without warning. Accepting full blame for the mistake, Ottawa's treasury department is mailing out letters of apology to residential taxpayers on the pre-authorized payment plan. Due to a computer system error related to fixing the Y2K bug, interim tax notices weren't issued before the payments were pulled from accounts on Feb. 26. Of the city's 77,000 residential taxpayers, about 2,700 weren't forewarned of the date and that the amount that would be withdrawn. "Our policy is to give people notice of at least one week," Ken Hughes, manager of treasury services, said yesterday. "That didn't happen, and that's not right. It's inexcusable and we're taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again." Hughes has personally spoken with about 100 taxpayers since the error was first recognized. Last week he became aware of a second category of residential ratepayers who also had not been advised of the tax payments. City resident Erwin Dreessen was tired of waiting for an explanation and fired off an angry letter to city hall. His bank account was "raided" for $1,880 without prior notice. "Mr. Mayor, in all the years that I have put my trust in pre-authorized payments I have never had any surprises," his letter said. "To have this happen now by my local public authority is truly shocking." The letter landed on Mayor Jim Watson's desk yesterday. The city regrets any inconvenience caused by the mistake and will reimburse citizens for any additional bank charges stemming from the error, Watson said. canoe.ca I imagine there are some very upset people in Ottawa. We are advised to keep copies of our financial records at the end of the year, just in case on Y2K problems in 2000. Looks like we had better start keeping copies of our financial records this year. I suspect that we will be seeing more stories like this as Y2K remediated software is moved to production systems through out 1999. B.K.