disabled, taken out of service, and not used at all unless isolated completely from the other systems to preclude contamination of the critical systems and subsequent failures. This may be obvious to some, but the ones talking about how they have fixed the mission critical systms apparently do not realize the problems they will have trying to operate without these other systems. Curly asked me to remind the forum of this fact. Although we are not brilliant, we can see that 1 plus 1 equals 3 or 2 or whatever. Maybe these folks should do a trial run with the non critical systems shut down to see what happens. They may be amazed.

-- Moe (Moe@3stooges.gom), November 03, 1999

Answers

Curly...

Smart as he is funny in this case..

What are the approx. 6,300 non-critcal systems in the government?

I read long ago that a critical mission system could be a B-1 bomber or a squadron of aircraft depending on the whims of the classifier. I don't have the gov't document or article, but I remember being surprised at the time by how system equaled aircraft. Can someone comfirm this?

-- PJC (paulcri@msn.com), November 03, 1999.

Yeah, I get this disturbing picture of the government classifying systems as critical if anyone had any idea what they did, and noncritical if nobody could guess. This might explain the very small number of critical systems!

And unfortunately, since they have no idea *what* the noncritical systems do, they don't know how to best handle them during and after rollover. So they'll probably ignore them

[whimsy off]

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), November 03, 1999.

Did'nt you all here or read the IEEE chairmans essay?

Compliancy was never possible and all remediation does is add to the problems that will occur!!

Read his essay!!

-- D.b. (dciinc@aol.com), November 03, 1999.

Moe and Curly ask good questions. Soon we will find out, but it's too late now to do much about it except to beef up the contingency army.

-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), November 03, 1999.

Havent you heard. Windowing has fixed everything

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@Tminus58&counting.down), November 03, 1999.

In the hackneyed phrase, all criticality is local. When Egypt Air's Flt 990 was on the ground the thrust reverser was not mission- critical. According to what I read, it seems that in the air that device may have been as critical as it's possible to be.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), November 03, 1999.

Somehow I expect that "mission critical systems" translates into "Payroll" and "Personnel" before all other systems.

I wonder if the government employees involved really think that their mere presence without any means of accomplishing real work is mission critical? Maybe what qualifies for a paycheck 98.5% of the time won't cut it in a crisis situation.

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), November 04, 1999.