flint, from...

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001SX6

"So saying that remediation has failed is practical nonsense. Remediation has been a rousing success..)

The only problems flint sees in the midst of this 'ROUSING SUCCESS" are isolated pockets where there are screw ups.

If anyone of you out there, pollies or not, can read this and still not see why flint is not only a moron, but a lunatic, then little more can be said to reach you. No one in their right mind could even come close to calling Y2k a 'rousing success'. Only sheer stupidity and abject malignance could make somebody write such utter foolishnes no matter what your position is on Y2K.

I have seen a lot written on Y2K in the last two and a half years. Not de jager, nor Koskinen, nor Zvegnitov nor Ratcliffe has written anything at all so utterly stupid.

Maybe now you will understand that no matter what is said, flint will take the opposite position merely to me misanthropic, merely to be argumentative, merely to continue in his own gross self-delusion.

Read what he said again. "Remediation has been a rousing success"

Maybe now you will realize what a RAVING maniac flint really is and go out and make some serious preparations. No one but an out and out dyed-in-the-wool manaic could claim that Y2k is a "ROUSING SUCCESS".

-- Paul Milne (fedinfo@halifax.com), September 24, 1999

Answers

Just like no one but an out and out dyed-in-the-wool maniac could claim (hundreds of times) that Y2k remediation has already failed.

Hoo boy.

RC

-- RC (randyxpher@aol.com), September 24, 1999.

stop sweating y2k--something FAR MORE EVIL approacheth.

-- in the spiritual realm. (dogs@zianet.com), September 24, 1999.

Yikes! While I think Flint can defend himself, I am reminded of the pessimist camp in early 1998. Back in those "old days," the concern was the apparent Y2K ambivalence in the public and private sectors. If we look back over the past two years, the increase in public awareness around Y2K has been astonishing. Even more amazing has been the amount of work done. Corporations and public agencies have invested billions of dollars in remediating or replacing aging systems. Innovative solutions have been developed by third party vendors. Reports from the "iron triangle" have been increasingly positive... consider the results of the Yardeni 100-day conference. The consensus opinion is that basic services and the infrastructure in America will remain functional through the rollover. Thus far, 1999 has been a far cry from the 1999 envisioned by Milne and others.

While I think we can find room for improvement, the "push" on Y2K has been impressive... far beyond that predicted 18 months ago. It may not meet Milne's definition of success... but perhaps Flint has a lower standard.

-- Ken Decker (kcdecker@worldnet.att.net), September 24, 1999.

Deck, Milne lives in the binary, Northian world of "compliant" or "failure".

Don't disturb him. In his own words....

"Won't be long, now"

-- Hoffmeister (hoff_meister@my-deja.com), September 24, 1999.

99 per cent is not good enough. Cascading cross defaults=Bankruptcies.

The hip bone is connected to the leg bone. The leg bone is connected to the kneebone. The kneebone is connected to the foot bone. exerpted from the song "Dry Bones" of many years ago before some of you young Wall Street whippersnappers were born.

-- Alan (Big Al) Greenspan (BigAl@USGobmint.fed), September 24, 1999.

Hoffy and Decker, yep, the Y2K remediation has been a rousing success alright. I'm simply staggered by the number of companies declaring that they are compliant (not "ready", but compliant). Actually, I can't think of one. There are certainly a few out there, but even so, that's going to be a lot of FOF in 2000. It should be interesting.

-- Realist (noone@nowhere.com), September 24, 1999.

Flint = Professional Doublespeaker = Deceiving and Bitter Individual = Loser !!

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), September 24, 1999.

Good call, Paul. Flint is clearly a raving lunatic. Fortunately, he and most of his idiot polly cohorts will be dead soon, so at least that's something to look forward to.

-- (brett@miklos.org), September 24, 1999.

I answered the substantive objections in another post, on the thread from which Paul extracted his quote out of context (what else is new?)

Apparently Paul's (and brett's) notion is that if they call me an idiot enough times, it will somehow come true. Do you believe in magic?

For those who are more interested in the *evidence* for the success of remediation, I'm always willing to discuss real issues. Because this evidence is becoming harder and harder to ignore (which is probably WHY Paul and his sycophants can only debate it by calling names.

As it is, the SUM TOTAL of Paul's 'evidence' is an impressive list of terms. Let's see, his logic consists of "a moron", "a lunatic", "sheer stupidity and abject malignance", "utter foolishnes", "utterly stupid", "gross self-delusion", "a RAVING maniac", and "dyed-in-the- wool manaic".

Yup, substantive, logical reasoning a la Milne. Reduced to its essence, all in one place. Persuasive.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 24, 1999.

Flint, with all due respect, almost all the reports of success are based on self-reported information (with the exceptions of much of the Federal government, utilities, and financial institutions). How can you be so quick to judge the remediation, then, as a "rousing success"? Everyone pay attention: the proof is in the 01-01-2000 pudding.

Scott

-- Scott Johnson (scojo@yahoo.com), September 24, 1999.

Scott:

I agree the proof will come next year. And while most accounts we have are indeed self-reported and subject to reasonable doubt, they are making the same noises as the utilities and financial institutions, and our better insight into those is very good news. About the ONLY bad news we have in the private sector is lack of sufficient information in many cases, combined with speculations about what might go wrong unless they aren't lying to us.

But I'll gladly make an exception for the public sector. I admit I wasn't thinking about them. I've seen no persuasive indication that most government bodies will be in very good shape. But they *can't* go out of business.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 24, 1999.

"Remediation has been a rousing success"

Not to split hairs here too much, but I'd have to say it depends entirely on your point of view, now doesn't it?

Consider: What if no one had even tried remediation? What if everyone had buried their collective heads and decided y2k wasn't a real problem, and if it was, why we'll just FOF, of course. Where would we be in that case? I submit that there are quite a few foreign countries with exactly that circumstance now. (Personally, I'm rather glad I'm not there.)

Now, I'm reasonably sure that Flint wasn't thinking of this comparison when writing that statement. Not certain, by any means, but pretty sure. But I'm also fairly convinced that he *Wasn't* thinking that "Y2k is a 'ROUSING SUCCESS'" as Milne stated above while saying that such a statement could only come from a "maniac". That may be because Flint never said that.

I'll agree with Milne's statement as it stands, BUT- Equating the state of remediation with the overall situation in general in order to discredit someone is reprehensible. Remediated code is only part of this hydra we've come to lump under that ubiquitous shorthand "Y2K".

Notice please that Flint didn't say that, Milne merely implied he did. (BTW, Flint is the same 'pollyanna' that said on a different thread that a Bhopal style accident wouldn't surprise him. ?!?! That was a more depressing opinion than just about anything I've seen recently, considering the source.)

Now, whether or not the remediation process has been a 'rousing success' or a 'miserable failure' is still open to debate. Will be for years, I hope. (I hope, I hope)

From my POV, partially remediated code (i.e. we know where all the hard dates are coded, we know the ins and outs of the system, we just haven't fixed all of the above with whatever method we're using) is a world better than nothing at all. And the sheer SIZE of the remediation effort, if nothing else, got some of our attention. "If there's no problem, why are these companies spending billions on it? Perhaps I'd better take a look at this, too."

So I doubt that I'd call remediation a success just yet. At present, I might call it a qualified success, given the information we've seen so far and always assuming that info is essentially correct and accurate. And I'd have to say some of the effects of that effort has been positive. (Be honest, did you really get interested in Y2K because no one was doing anything about it? Natch, if No One was doing anything, you'd never have heard about it. Neither would anyone else, and we'd have all been blind-sided in less than 100 days.) But, um, what year is it, again? Still, even given that this is only a portion of the problem, I'd rather see remediation than the alternatives....

I'll go back to lurking, now.

-- Harl (harlanquin@aohell.com), September 24, 1999.

Mr Decker,

The amount of work done is remains a "SELF REPORTING" process as far as I can tell for most major companies. So pick a number between 1 and 99% for a completion rate put it on paper and send it to the press as it means nothing. Where is your eveidence that the federal government is 93% complete?? Or the telecommunications industry is 99% complete when there is not independent auditing? And what has increased public awareness gotten anyone?? A few more people preparing or just humming the BITR song "OVER IN 2 to 3 DAYS". And is that awareness based on a smiggett of information that is available on the interent. Hell no its all happy talk that Joe six pack is comfortable with for now.

-- y2k dave (xsdaa111@hotmail.com), September 24, 1999.

Flint, you said:

"As it is, the SUM TOTAL of Paul's 'evidence' is an impressive list of terms. Let's see, his logic consists of "a moron", "a lunatic", "sheer stupidity and abject malignance", "utter foolishnes", "utterly stupid", "gross self-delusion", "a RAVING maniac", and "dyed-in-the- wool manaic"."

Now, now. Let's give credit where credit is due and quit running ol Milne down. His repetoire also includes the classic "butthead" and I think that even though he doesn't use that old chestnut much anymore, he should get credit for it.

Speaking of things he doens't use anymore, have you noticed that he's stopped railing about the certainty of how "millions and millions and uncounted millions will die" because of Y2K? Think the old Milnester's going soft on us? (Or did he finally decide that after I asked him 29 times [and others God knows how many times] to show any single piece of evidence suggesting that this would happen, he finally realized that the line wasn't working? Nawwwwww. Probably not.)

-- Paul Neuhardt (neuhardt@ultranet.com), September 24, 1999.

Mr. Flint wrote, "I've seen no persuasive indication that most government bodies will be in very good shape. But they *can't* go out of business."

This is the same kind of statement that might be getting Milne's blood pressure up. I know it shocked me.

Governments can and do go out of business. My gosh...aren't you familiar with known history?

Think civil war. Think about how the government would operate under diminished capacity and how citizens who are impacted might react, etc. How much of our current workforce actually works for the government right now directly or indirectly? There are a whole lot of reasons why our government could "go out of business".

As for the "rousing success" comment. It's Flint's opinion. Personally, I think it's overly optimistic and a fundamentally flawed assumption but that's just my opinion.

Mike

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-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), September 24, 1999.

flint wants some evidence that his "ROUSING SUCCESS" is a figment of his deluded mind? Fine, then he shall have it in spades.

You may all go to the flint bashing in the above thread. "More on flint's rousing success."

Let's see if flint can remain on topic. LOL LOL LOL

-- Paul Milne (fedinfo@halifax.com), September 24, 1999.

Michael:

I didn't say that governments don't go out of business. Of course they do. I was talking about particular agencies. Hell, the Bureau of Mines doesn't even do anything and has no known mission, but we fund them every year just the same. And if their computers were to vanish like soap bubbles, we'd STILL fund them to do nothing. In that sense, a government agency only goes out of business because it's reorganized away, NOT because it's nonfunctional or broke.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 24, 1999.

Admit it Flint and Milne,you both seem to possess elements of mental derangement. all this constant mudslinging reminds me of two homosexual school boys suppressing their sexual desires for each other by hurling insults while secretly wanting to play pocket pool with each other. when two extremes are articulated it's always better to find a middle path---how about 4-8 as a real picture of coming woe.

-- Dear Boy (nomincinghere@swish.com), September 24, 1999.

all this constant mudslinging reminds me of two homosexual school boys suppressing their sexual desires for each other by hurling insults while secretly wanting to play pocket pool with each other.

This says much more about you than it does of them.

-- (look@in.the.mirror), September 24, 1999.

There always will be extreme positions taken on any controversial subject. I am grateful to both Flint and Milne for framing the argument and defining the edges of the Bell curve.

In all likelihood, they both will be right. There will be countries, industries, regions that go Milne. Others will go Flint.

The most troublesome of all to me is that Flint has prepped for a year. And he represents the bump faction!

-- Hawthorne (99@00.com), September 24, 1999.

Here's my idea...

The federal government of the great republic of the United States of Americe needs to do the following:

Establish Friday, 29 October, 1999, as the "end-to-end" test date. At 9:00AM PDT, all systems will be set to 5 minuted before 12:00PM 31 December, 1999. The systems will run for 5 hours without rebooting.

Since the "small" glitches we are to expect can be easily fixed, and we are not to have any problems that are any greater than a "bump in the road", the recovery should be accomplished by the opening of business on Monday, 1 November, 1999.

The weekend could be used to bring all systems back on-line, unscramble any data, and determine any fixes needed.

It also gives our great Republic 61 days to contemplate the year 2000.

Feedback please...

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@Y2KOK.ORG), September 24, 1999.

Mr. Flint wrote, "Hell, the Bureau of Mines doesn't even do anything and has no known mission, but we fund them every year just the same. And if their computers were to vanish like soap bubbles, we'd STILL fund them to do nothing."

rofl...yep...you'll get no argument from me!

Where we may run into problems is the very funding of the government itself and the collapse of social services. That was the point I was trying to make. Hey, maybe Y2k will be the catalyst to kill all the pork in the budget.

Mike

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-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), September 25, 1999.

OH Ye Of Little Faith. Flint has deckared remediation to be a rousing success, surely he could not be wrong. Further he has now added this little nugget of hope, "On balance, in a bad y2k situation JIT is a decided net benefit." Well that's it for me, I'm giving all my stuff away at daylight. For further laughter please reference the thread -Why I don't believe the power is staying on.

-- Nikoli Krushev (doomsday@y2000.com), September 25, 1999.

Flint has the answer, but what is the question?

How many Fortune 500 companies have completed remediation and testing?

How many oil refineries?

How many pipelines?

How many of their vendors?

-- Tom Beckner (tbeckner@xout.erols.com), September 25, 1999.