Anytime computers fail in full public view is not good news. Our financial system is based on confidence that things will work properly. To think that these institutions are using the front office for beta testing is naive to say the least. My take is that despite all the screening and preparation, these systems are BEGINNING to allow us a glimpse at the systemic nature of y2k. Fasten your seatbelts it should be one helluva ride.

Roger

-- Roger Altman (rogaltman@aol.com), October 29, 1998

Answers

Visible computer failures are nothing new, and probably have nothing to do with Y2K. The securities industry is too full of hot heads with a short time horizon to do a good job in managing software, and the exchanges and brokerage houses have a lot of funky code. Besides, if this is a Y2K related failure, it means that they probably will actually get all of the bugs out by the year 2000.

-- used to work in the industry (anon@somewhere.com), October 29, 1998.

If it's Y2K-remediation-related, then this is GOOD news not bad.

It means that they have enough confidence in their remediated code to try putting it into production, with 13 months to spare during which they can take it out of production if so-far undetected bugs show up. In other words, they'll have it working as right as it ever will by 2000.

This is of course speculation until someone can actually confirm what the source of this problem really was.

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), October 30, 1998.

Anyone remember that chimp which beat a team of stockbrokers in a stock-tipping contest? Well shortly after that contest victory he was headhunted and signed up to Lehmann Brothers derivatives desk where he starred for 3 three years. Management decided to see if he could work his magic on their woefully-behind y2k remediation project. Unfortunately, his latent-psi abilities were of no use in software re-coding, but his superiors won't fire him because he still has those photos of the CIO with the office boy in the photocopier room. His ability to get it right 80% of the time was brilliant on the trading floor but che disastro on the mainframe.

-- humpty dumpty (we'rein@ticca.com), October 30, 1998.