"Cringely is merely an extension of a government bureaucracy thats wired to reassure the citizenry at all costs. Panic, after all, would only exacerbate the problem."

This guy must be visiting our little forum...

R.

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PBS pointlessly probes Y2K bug

Cybergeeks show tries to reassure viewers by belittling them

By Ray Richmond REUTERS

HOLLYWOOD, Oct. 25  Well, we can pretty much rule out any technological meltdown from the dreaded Y2K bug when we welcome the New Year in a little over two months. Y2K: The Winter of Our Disconnect, a condescending and dopey hour hosted by author and cybergeek Robert X. Cringely, maintains that our only legitimate fear is the emotional reaction to the uncertainty of it all. In other words, Y2K is really just U2Paranoid

POP A COUPLE of Prozac and fuggedaboudit. Whew! Thats a relief. If only it were that simple. Y2K: The Winter of Our Disconnect has Cringely reassuring everyone that Jan. 1 will not find planes dropping from the sky or our communications system reverting to pre-Alexander Graham Bell levels, tending to dismiss the looming crisis as mostly a really big misunderstanding. Theres nothing wrong with allaying public fears; but at the same time, his common-sense approach crosses the line to evoke almost a sense of belittlement.

And who the heck is Robert X. Cringely, anyway, to have all of the answers? His simplistic This is a computer chip style tries hard to be homespun but winds up instilling the feeling that Cringely is merely an extension of a government bureaucracy thats wired to reassure the citizenry at all costs. Panic, after all, would only exacerbate the problem. Cringely borrows liberally from cheesy black-and-white B-movies to make whimsical points about how our Y2K mindset is aping the atomic paranoia of the 1950s and 60s. Lots of tedious talking heads are trotted out to help focus on all of the things that will probably go right on Jan. 1 (911 systems will work, water will flow out of the tap, toilets will flush, checks will be accepted by the corner grocery store).

ALL LIFE WILL CONTINUE! The important thing to remember is all life will continue! exults Cringely while touring the hamlet of St. Helens, Ore., to see how the little guy is preparing for cyber-catastrophe (not terribly actively, it turns out). He tests Boeing flight simulators that handle the concept of Jan. 1, 2000, just fine. A thrift-shop owner admits she doesnt think much about Y2K, since, well, the town would remain essentially the same without computer operation, anyhow.

Producer-director Michael McLeod, who co-wrote The Winter of Our Disconnect with Cringely, also grabs a few words from the requisite survivalist or two for their very own hell-in-a-handbasket views. And while those folks are cast as being clearly overzealous, what if they arent? What if, for once, their fallout system and three-month supplies of freeze-dried beef stroganoff were necessary? Nothing presented in this special leaves the impression that any of the participants know much more about what the new century will bring in the way of cybergeddon than do the rest of us. It must be our cue to avoid the rush, and start worrying today.

-- Roland (nottelling@nohwere.com), October 26, 1999

Answers

link...

www.msnbc.com/news/327298.asp?cp1=1

-- Roland (nottelling@nowhere.com), October 26, 1999.

Cringely has been talking about Y2K since 1991. Gary North is quoted as saying that he ignored Cringely's early warnings!

He seems to have softened his position in recent years, but I still consider him one of the good guys. After a quick glance at the InfoWorld front page every week, I immediately jump to the back page and read his column. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), October 26, 1999.

Sysman,

He seems to have softened his position in recent years, but I still consider him one of the good guys. After a quick glance at the InfoWorld front page every week, I immediately jump to the back page and read his column. <:)=

Me too! I've always loved his jabs at industry players. I bet his upbeat take on Y2K comes from his chummy relationships with the big boys, most of whom are sailing away on the 'wishful thinking' yacht. You almost never hear him reporting 'tips' from the little guys anymore...

-TECH32-

-- TECH32 (TECH32@NOMAIL.COM), October 26, 1999.

One of the real ironic and pitiful facts in this whole "pile o'" is that Cringely might be absolutely right. I think he probably is right, and if this were 1995, I would not give it another thought. But it's not 1995. It's two months before rollover. Six months ago, a lot of important industries were not finished. The statements made by important industries today are legally incompetent since big business railroaded through Congress the waiver of legal liability attached to such statements.

There is a price to this brinksmanship, to the procrastination, to turning it into a nailbiter. We don't know what the price is, but we will soon enough.

I'm going to watch Cringely tonight. I hope he has evidence to support his conclusions. Many thoughtful people will not be satisfied by the self-serving conclusions mouthed by big business and government. A business's conclusory admission of non-compliance is more reliable since it is a statement against the business's own interest. I have not yet seen a sufficient rebuttal to the admitted non-compliance.

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), October 26, 1999.

A PBS station may offend a company or two here and there in the interest of investigative journalism (frontline, etc.) but ya think they're going to broadcast anything that will spook the market and seriously damage their funding sources?

They depend on corporate sponsorships, endowments and .gov money for their very survival. Koskinen has his hand up Cringely's back.

In Cringely's own snide words about his show:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19991021.html

-- Fiver (Fiver2000@yahoo.com), October 26, 1999.

Robert X. Cringley (c) is a creation of InfoWorld magazine. There have been a number of ghost writers who have filled the column with computer industry gossip over the years. This individual was one of the ghost writers who has tried to claim that he is THE "Robert X. Cringley".

I have never found any of the gossip of these columns to be more than rumor mongering with a dash of steamy innuendo tossed in for liveliness. The present RXC is fairly bland. Als o I have never found much in the way of 'Y2K' seriousness there either.

It is obvious that the PBS show was designed to be nothing but pablum and seconol.

-- ..- (cit@dot.dash), October 26, 1999.

Hummm, here's a couple of pictures (current and elementary school) of this "creation."

This the same person that, having nothing to do with InfoWorld:

1) Wrote a book in 1992, Accidental Empires.

2) Hosted the PBS miniseries, Triumph of the Nerds.

3) Has a web site, I, Cringely.

Tick... Tock... <:00=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), October 26, 1999.

What it boils down to is

1. Will the failure mode resemble a "cascading cross default" or will the systems' redundancy provide resilience?

2. How will the people of the world (including its leaders) react to a bad situation?

On those two questions, the fate of Western Civilization hangs.

-- a (a@a.a), October 26, 1999.

The person who did this PBS show is the original "Robert X. Cringley." He left InfoWorld in 1995 and has been embroiled in a legal dispute (that remains unresolved, BTW) over who owns the intellectual property of the Cringley character. Since he left InfoWorld in 1995, there have in fact been a series of writers doing the column, and IMHO not doing nearly as well as the original.

It was the orginal who wrote the book, who did this show, who has done a previous PBS show/series titled "Revenge Of The Nerds" and who has a new show "Revenge Of The Nerds 2.0.1" coming out on PBS in November.

-- Paul Neuhardt (neuhardt@ultranet.com), October 26, 1999.

Sorry, that's "Triumph Of The Nerds" and not "Revenge Of The Nerds."

Brain cramp.

-- Paul Neuhardt (neuhardt@ultranet.com), October 26, 1999.

How do YOU define BITR?

FAIR USE DOCTRINE - EDUCATIONAL USE/PURPOSES ONLY

= = = = = =

Y2K: The Winter of Our Disconnect?
Not If We Stay Calm and Don't Do Anything Stupid

By Robert X. Cringely

About once a year in this space I get to shamelessly, promote my own work. Next week, PBS will air my one-hour special, "Y2K: The Winter of Our Disconnect." In most places, it will be shown Tuesday night. For those who can't see the show or don't want to, here's my take on what to expect come January and why. It's written not for nerds but for normal folks. It was written, literally, for my Mom.

After 20 years of ignoring the problem, five years of trying to fix it, and two depressing and alarmist segments on "60 Minutes" (with a third to come), we are down to the wire on Y2K, the so-called millennium bug. In these last months and weeks of 1999, it is too late to do anything more about Y2K than to make our personal preparations. How will Y2K affect our lives and our fortunes, our economy and our public safety, our stock portfolios and our children? The media coverage to date has for the most part offered no help at all on any of these questions, preferring instead to express fears and to document the hoarding of canned goods. We deserve better.

For the three people in America who still don't know about Y2K, the term refers to a problem that many computers will have in determining dates after the new year. The goof goes back to the 1950s, when, in order to save computer punch-card holes, programmers left off the numerals "1" and "9" and 1953 became just "53." The obvious problem comes in 2000, which many computers may interpret as 1900. Uncorrected, this ambiguity will mess with the minds of computers at the phone company and the bank, and we may find ourselves owing (or receiving) 99 years worth of back interest. Worse still, there is the fear that any computer that pays attention to dates will go berserk and simply freeze in some logical paradox worthy of an old "Star Trek" episode.

How could this have happened? The people who made the mistakes those many years ago never expected their programs to still be running 50 years later. They underestimated both our innate laziness and the extent to which we would make ourselves dependent on automation. They assumed, too, that programs would get easier to write over time and that their poor efforts, no matter how well they worked, would be quickly superseded. Didn't happen. Software is hard to write, good software almost impossibly so, and when it didn't break, we didn't fix it. Alas, we also didn't save any of the original manuals or programmer comments, so much of the problem with Y2K is that our economy is dependent on programs we no longer even understand.

What's the likely scenario for January 2000? The short version is that Y2K will probably not be a big deal for most of us. Extremist expectations exist on both ends, but what's likely is a normal curve with a few really bad events, a few really good events, and a lot of medium-sized events.

Fortunately, there are plenty of things not to worry about, especially clock chips in devices. Most clock chips don't care about the date at all but rather are concerned with "how long since the last event happened?" Traffic lights (a common focus of anxiety) don't care about dates, just days of the week, and should be unaffected. Elevator controllers might care about the time of day, but generally not the date, except for reporting capabilities. And their failure modes -- at least for dates -- generally allow them to keep running.

The important thing to remember here is that physical devices are designed by engineers, not programmers. So these physical devices are designed to cope safely with failure, unlike computer programs, which just bomb. Engineers know that things will fail and that failures can hurt people. Engineers try to anticipate problems and prevent them. Programmers do not. They just re-boot the computer. This is a vital philosophical difference.

Let's talk about severity and duration. We could have a ton of things go wrong -- millions of things -- but have it all over in a single day. Would that be a problem? Not really. But what if we have a few thousand things that bug us for years? Now, that's a problem.

The real and enduring problems will be with the world financial system and in big software. In the case of big software -- mission-critical applications that have been running for years on mainframe computers -- the applications are old. They have been tweaked by many hands and complexified over the years until nobody at all understands anything. Software is the key: The greater the extent to which something has software, the more dangerous it is.

Accounting systems will be especially vulnerable, because they are dependent on time stamps. This is going to be a mess -- but one we can deal with. In the short term, we'll probably make crude arrangements: "Let me pay you what I paid you the same time last year (or last month), and we'll sort out the details later." Sure, people will take advantage of this, but are we going to let the world grind to a halt because we're off plus or minus 10 percent? No. We'll move on. Y2K might actually make us talk to each other.

Now, just because an application breaks doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem. Failure is not, in itself, a problem. In each case of failure, we have to differentiate between productive activities and the accounting return loop through which we pay for them. It's the money that might get screwed up, not the delivery. AT&T sends out 80 million invoices per month. Could AT&T keep the phone system running even if it wasn't being paid? Of course it could -- and would. The electrical grid has no date dependence. Your power is unlikely to be turned off.

If these predictions sound bad, take some comfort in knowing that the United States will be among the least affected parts of the world. Western financial markets and most big businesses are likely to greet the new year just fine. The problems that do happen are likely to be localized or to be in other parts of the globe, specifically South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Indian subcontinent. But since this is a global economy in which financial jitters in Brazil and Russia can easily knock a few hundred points off the Dow, we should expect that there will be some impact.

Certainly some individual companies are likely to lose their luster for a while because of Y2K, specifically the outfits that have done so well from preparing for it. U.S. companies have accelerated their purchases of PCs as one response to Y2K, so Dell, Compaq, and the other big suppliers to corporate America are likely to see orders drop in the new year. So, too, computer-services outfits like IBM and Electronic Data Systems may see their business drop for a while. If Y2K problems are localized in the third world, there will also likely be trouble for companies that have large exposures in those regions.

What matters is how we respond to these troubles. Now we are in the emotional part of Y2K, the really dangerous territory. There is no reason at all that Y2K has to have any significant effect on the world economy, unless we expect it to. If everyone expects a depression and pulls money from the market, we'll have a depression. If, instead, we view Y2K as a buying opportunity, it will be business as usual. Fortunately, recent opinion polls show that most consumers and investors aren't particularly concerned about Y2K. Let's hope it stays that way.

Then who the heck are those Y2K extremists, the ones who are stockpiling canned goods? Most of them are religious fundamentalists and survivalists. The former seem quite certain that God is on the decimal system. Until very recently, Rev. Jerry Falwell was making lots of money selling Y2K video sermons predicting an apocalyptic January. Meanwhile, the survivalists have generally been looking for excuses to hide from the world. They are gratefully leaping on this excuse to build cabins and purchase generators. Their fear, interestingly enough, isn't Y2K itself, but rather the reaction to Y2K of the rest of us, the unprepared. The survivalists choose to be apart because they expect us to want their stuff and to come for it with weapons. I am not making this up.

Here is an important insight about both these groups. I have met with many of these people and what becomes clear is that the outcome they say they fear is really the outcome they want. The religious right seems to want some kind of cleansing of our society and see Y2K as part of that. The survivalists just want to be right. And both groups have done a very good job of making many perfectly normal people nervous enough about Y2K to consider taking some not very well-advised actions like cashing-in their savings and stocks. This will only get worse as the year winds down.

The rest of us just need to do a few simple things: get your financial records in order. That's it. No heading for the hills, withdrawing your savings, or stockpiling food. T

-- Greg (balzer@lanset.com), October 26, 1999.

BTW --

The above is from Cringley's web site.

-- Greg (balzer@lanset.com), October 26, 1999.

Thanks for the update ..- and Paul! Also from his web site:

"For eight years from 1987-95, Robert X. Cringely wrote the Notes From the Field column in InfoWorld"

Jeez, talk about live and learn! I didn't know that he left! Yea, I did notice a different style in the column I guess, but I also noticed him go from early doomer to almost polly over the years. I figured it was part of his natural evolution!

I think I just lost a little respect for InfoWorld, using his name...

Tick... Tock... <:00=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), October 26, 1999.

Sysman,

I thought I read something about Cringley having worked with Apple at one time. Do you know anything about this?

-- @ (@@@.@), October 27, 1999.

After viewing this irresponsible piece of opinion disguised as "reporting", all one can conclude is that logic and rationality are out the window in favor of corporate interests disguised as "common sense".

Don't worry, adjust your attitude, and you'll be just fine. What pure crap!!! We're disgusted and have told PBS to forget a pledge this year.

This guy should be sued for his remarks and the potential damage they may cause.

-- Sara Nealy (keithn@aloha.net), October 27, 1999.

As I recall, John Dvorak used to have "the column" at Infoworld. This was back when it was a "real magazine" (i.e., glossy cover, the size of Time or Newsweek, sold at newsstands for real money -- before they became a "controlled circulation" bingo card trade rag). One day, he split. Shortly thereafter, the Cringley character was invented to fill the vacuum.

Then again, maybe I'm just misremembering Ancient History.

(And I was *not* amused when shortly after I paid for a subscription renewal, they went "controlled circulation" AKA "free", but didn't bother to refund my money.)

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), October 27, 1999.