What is the JoAnne Effect please?

-- NSmith (nitnat3@aol.com), July 16, 1999

Answers

A few doomers are still holding out that there hasn't been time to see the 7/1 rollover yet, but just wait until month end processing.

The rest have retreated to the last line of defense - 1/1/00. At least everyone seems to have sense enough not to squawk about Sept. 9 anymore.

-- Trollyanna (r@t.com), July 16, 1999.

A few pollys think that the few programs that do look ahead processing have been fixed, and are working with no problem. It really doesn't matter because:

Begin rubber stamp mode] THE NUMBER OF PROGRAMS THAT DO LOOK-AHEAD PROCESSING IS TINY WHEN COMPARED TO THE TOTAL (IE. MAINFRAME - PC - EMBEDDED SYSTEM) NUMBER OF PROGRAMS THAT HAVE A DATE PROBLEM. THESE PROGRAMS WOULD BE FIXED FIRST, BECAUSE THEY ARE NEEDED FIRST!

[End rubber stamp mode]

They call it the Y2K problem for a good reason, not the various dates in 1999 problem. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), July 16, 1999.

Also see the following thread for more info on the Jo Anne Effect, fiscal year rollovers, accounting software, and a March 28th comment by Ed Yourdon about April 1st:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00122f

"Significance of States Fiscal Start"

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), July 16, 1999.

Thank you, Linkmeister.

My goodness, a person asks for a simple definition and receives answers regarding what pollies and doomers think.

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), July 16, 1999.

NSmith--

As I understand it (and always willing to accept criticism and corrections) the JoAnne Effect was named for JoAnne Slavin, a financial professional and frequent contributor on the comp.software.year-2000 newsgroup on the Usenet.

Basically, what Ms. Slavin pointed out was that Y2K errors would begin to show up in forward-looking financial software programs--this year! No waiting for January 2000. It makes sense that unremediated forward-looking financial software would begin to generate errors when calculations reached forward (for whatever reason) into the 2000.

The context you need to be aware of, is that some Y2K pessimists expected JoAnne Effect problems to appear in April and at the beginning of July when many states' and countries' fiscal years began. There haven't been many reports of such failures. The Y2K optimists took that fact to be proof for their position. I think that most of the folks on this forum assume that such failures are accumulating slowly, and are simply not being reported by the various bureaucracies and government agencies.

Hope that helps. Did I miss anything?

-- William in Dallas (bcheek@onramp.net), July 16, 1999.

Accumulating slowly??

That's not what the 'experts' told us. They made it pretty clear that we would SEE the effects in our everyday lives. I know of no one that is suffering due to the JoAnne effect.

Doesn't make much sense that they could 'cover up' something of this nature. Unless there's not much to cover up.

To answer your question - What's the JoAnne effect? I'd have to say nothing at all, really.

Anyone have proof that the JoAnne effect caused some serious life-altering problems?

Deano

-- Deano (deano@luvthebeach.com), July 16, 1999.

OK, OK, OK:: Here it is.

The difference is:

Computer people viewed the JAE with fascination more than doom: we deal with systems/software failures for a living and are interested from a LEARNING standpoint. I doubt few participants expected life- altering failures.

People who really want TEOTWAWKI anticipated damaging failures from JAE.

There IS a difference.

I DO expect life/lifestyle-altering events from the 01/2000 rollover.

-- Lisa (lisa@friday.but_not_payday), July 16, 1999.

Cory Hamasaki posted this today regarding JoAnn Slaven and the JoAnne Effect

On Fri, 16 Jul 1999 05:27:06, joanneslaven@home.com wrote: > There isn't any healthy fighting any more - just a lot of mud-slinging > on both sides. It seems as though the Y2k issue has become a "TEOTWAWKI" > vs "No Impact" argument. People who are in the middle (or people who are > not certain what might happen) are being left out. Many threads seem to > be mainly concerned with discrediting certain posters. > > People who used to post interesting articles seem to have vanished. > > Long-time "regulars" have gone. Jo, We've pretty much covered all the topical areas, what's left is the finnessing and waiting for the hammer to fall. However, SAG and I (and the assembler programmer, Steve, who posts as "Pollyanna") have had an interesting discussion about S/370 architecture. You may have skipped over it, assembly language and S/370 datatypes are not everyone's cup of tea. The Y2K'ish aspect was that there are assembly language sequences that will fail at the rollover, I saw a similar event at the 1979 to 1980 roll. The Jo Anne aspect was that we took the hit on December 1, 1979 as the machine resource accounting system attempted to bound in a step-end resource record. It had to generate the end bound and calculated that as 00:00:01 January 1, 197A. The framed in transaction was passed to our User SVC, an extension to the operating system, and caused the 0C7 program check that took down the mainframe(s). Until SAG, who's also a Steve and Steve the Pollyanna and I went through the code, I wasn't fully aware that 000197AF was a JAE. It wasn't fiscal year processing but it was bounding a transaction into a month. The business of bounding and comparing is common. One of my pals saw his company fail after the 1989 to 1990 rollover as a result of software problems caused by the roll. The 1999 to 2000 roll will be much worse. Your contribution to the body of knowledge is that it's more than lookaheads; it's framing and bounding of volumes of transactions. This is important because until you pointed that out, I was thinking that the early failures would only be projections even though 000197AF was a kind of JAE. Until you pointed that out, I had not seen a clear statement of what the fiscal year problem really entailed. There is a lot we don't understand but this has to do with how common are faulty instruction sequences and the complexity of code and systems. We now understand the general failure modes and this helps people who are fixing software to focus on the problems and solutions. You're right about the Polly-wars, these are not worth the effort and are a waste of time. I'm glad that R... Don Joe and the others are willing to have at them. I need to concentrate on the WRPs and getting my clients into a position to ride this out, oh, and getting Site-A, B, and C ready for whatever evil comes our way. You might stop in at the chat some evening. Also, the pat article that you reviewed will be in WRP124, I'm still fonting it up. WRP124 is an important one because it's all reader contributions and the diversity of viewpoint is striking. I kinda wish I had a Nunja or Tom Benjamin in it but you can't have everything. It's huge too, it's 12 pages which is 6 regular newsletters. cory hamasaki http://www.kiyoinc.com/current.html 168 days, 4,050 hours 

-- Desertj98 (jturner@ptway.com), July 16, 1999.