Check THIS out folks...

The LINK.

-- Dennis (djolson@pressenter.com), June 23, 1999

Answers

Thanks Dennis. Pretty interesting. Hopefully, some of the 'trusting' individuals over on the "Nuclear Power Compliance" thread will whip over here to examine this....just as soon as they remove the "deep sea" hooks from their mouths. Got needle nose pliers?

-- Will continue (farming@home.com), June 23, 1999.

" The 98 million bug figure is the most conservative scenario with everything corrected properly. International Monitoring anticipates the actual situation to involve 280 million bugs based on lagging, incomplete and late Y2K projects globally."

God help us...

R.

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), June 23, 1999.

When they count bugs are they counting flawed lines of code (i.e., minimum "bug unit") or flawed packages?

-- Dave (aaa@aaa.com), June 23, 1999.

Flinton, Poole, Decker, for the nth. time, where are youuuuuuuuuuuu??

C'mon guys, don't waste your time phone-calling here and there. Those other guys you are trying to get help from won't know what to say either! Forget about Anita and Craig and the other lightweights.

It's your reputation now, come on!! Or maybe it's your ass that's at stake?

Guys, people on this forum aren't dumb you know. Lately you have been missing EVERY SINGLE worthwhile thread (a dozen at least in the past week, precisely when things aren't looking quite polly you know).

Just where will this strategy lead you to? You think that people don't notice???? Ha, ha !!!

Just as a brief footnote, the whole wide world is waiting for you at

"Bank runs likely, Gallup Poll"... well, well

"IEEE Institute of Electrical/Electronic Engineers letter to the US Senate on liability issue" (maybe not reliable enough for you, eh?)

"US Fed agencies missed deadline for Y2K contingency plans" (it's only a US Senate Report you know)

Guys, guys, where are youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu?????????

-- George (jvilches@sminter.com.ar), June 23, 1999.

Interesting but with something in the neighborhood of 50 BILLION embedded chips out there, even a small percentage of failures will increase that # exponentionaly.ie; Good software makes calls to bad hardware = corrupt data, sent to other software = a *syndrome* of systemic failure.

- Example (previously posted) * malfunction in HVAC system, reporting to the mainframe results in the building security system to fail also.

-- Michael (mikeymac@uswest.net), June 23, 1999.

Interesting number.

Just what conclusions can you draw? It appears to be just an extrapolation of estimates of residual errors, and lines of code.

Again, all software has bugs. Some are inconsequential, some cause system crashes, and most fall somewhere in between. Nobody said there would be no Y2k bugs; and a global number such as this, while maybe attention grabbing, adds virtually nothing to an understanding of what problems can be expected.

Interesting they are also using the Gartner Group's 10% estimate of errors on rollover. Meaning a portion of these 98 MILLION bugs have already occurred.

As for the "embedded chips", if you're going to extrapolate numbers, you should learn to differentiate between "chips" and "systems".

-- Hoffmeister (hoff_meister@my-deja.com), June 23, 1999.

Hoff-

.........NAH!!!Your statement speaks for itself #8:`>

!!!WSUOTS!!!

-- Michael (mikeymac@uswest.net), June 23, 1999.

Well, then. Glad I could help you out.

-- Hoffmeister (hoff_meister@my-deja.com), June 23, 1999.

The methodology looks more like a Delphi method than anything really quantitative. But perhaps this is the best anyone can do.

As for this number (98 million), it somehow strikes me as *much* too small, especially if embedded systems are being counted. If embedded systems are included, this comes to substantially less than one bug per system worldwide. The US must have a trillion lines of code running all by itself. We're finding (IV&V) what, 750 errors per million lines of code just in IT systems. This comes to 750 million errors just in the US for working code. And they expect only 98 million. Well, we can dream.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 23, 1999.

Yet another meaningless statistic (or rather, guess)

I imagine it's on the low side. How many households worldwide contain a computer running Windows 95 that haven't had any bugfixes applied? More than 98 Million, I suspect. On the other hand, since the majority of these are games machines and occasional word-processors, it probably matters not one jot.

ON the other hand, it could take just one bug to cause massive chaos, if it's severe enough and in a critical enough place. So why waste time counting them? It's squashing the ones that would have the biggest impact that matters.

"like being bitten by 1000 gnats, 100 mosquitoes, 10 wasps and a rattlesnake" (Ed Y). Deal with the rattlesnake, and you'll probably be OK.

-- Nigel Arnot (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), June 24, 1999.