Re: Y2K issues

In article <387200AF.FC129818_at_Unforgettable.com>,   Kenneth C Stahl <BlueSax_at_Unforgettable.com> wrote:
> Paul Bennett wrote:
> >
> > [this is not directed to anyone in this thread]
> >
> > Why are people so stupid?
> >
> > Managers are now talking about how y2k was hyped up, and it wasn't a
big
> > disaster like everyone thought, and how they spent to much money on
a problem
> > that wasn't bigger.
> >
> > Um, try to follow me now Mr. Managers. This is a tough one. If you
had not
> > spent the money, it would have been a bigger problem.
> >
> > -- Paul
>
> Agreed. All of the work corrected things that should have been
corrected a
> long time ago - the Y2K thing just got everone off their duffs to
track
> down all of the different problems.
>

Well, I'm sure we are all dead keen for the Y2K development/deployment freeze to end, but the truth is that it's not quite over yet: Y2K isn't quite over yet.

1. January 1 2000 was a Saturday;January 1 1900 was a Monday. It is possible, particularly at the chip level, that some systems think they are on a Friday (today Wednesday 1/5/00) in the week and will hit Saturday tomorrow. eg. In some office skyscrapers, systems go into 'doze mode' on weekends - 1 elevator, 10% of aircon, lighting etc - basically any system which is pre-programmed to take action based on day of the week rather than an actual date, but was originally setup based on a date.
2. Cascade effect. Small transactions that are carried over into other areas or applications and start to manifest a snowball (growing in size) effect. Some of these problems may only show up at the end of the first quarter.
3. Transactions that appear to have gone through okay, but have gone to the incorrect sort-order in processing queues eg. Some emails have come through in the last couple of days with a year field of '100' - in Netscape this defaults to 1969 and the email goes to the oldest point in your email queue (if you use date based sorting) - you may not even be aware that you received it, but the sender thinks it went through fine. Extrapolate that concept to any one of a number transaction systems, or scenarios where the timeous reading and processing of transactions can have a real business effect.

After we get through Thursday, we should be through the grosser symptoms of Y2K - the rest of them may take weeks or months to manifest and require some really intense 'down and dirty' post-mortems on transactions and event logs to correct.

E

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Before you buy. Received on Wed Jan 05 2000 - 07:34:27 CST