It's official - the U.S. is now Y2K Compliant!

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Hi everybody!

Did anyone else notice that yesterday (11/10/1999), our president, Bill Clinton, made a statement that he expects no major problems in the U.S. as a result of Y2K. All government agencies now report that they are "ready" for Y2K!

Very interesting to say the least. Not a single government agency has gone on record to say they have truly fixed all the problems and those who have won't release their documentation supporting it. The IRS hasn't even completed an INVENTORY of their extant hardware let alone the incredibly difficult task of analyzing, debugging, testing and deploying applications that could fail due to date calculation problems!

I'd say we're in for a heck of an interesting winter. When the president (as honest and forthright as he has proved himself to be) spins at 3600RPM in the Rose Garden it tends to make one a little suspicious!

-- Bruce W. Roeser (broeser@ccgnv.net), November 11, 1999

Answers

Picture it like this:

Clinton, wearing a red necktie, is shaking his finger at you and saying, "There will be NO major national breakdowns caused by the Y2K bug!"

-- Pearlie Sweetcake (storestuff@home.now), November 11, 1999.


Never, ever, believe a rumor.....unless it's officially denied.

Did anyone else who watched the President get the impression that his delivery seemed rather mechanical, unlike his usually masterful speaking style? Notice his sudden contrast in facial expressions when asked a question from a reporter on a completely different topic? He seemed to be just "reading" his y2k blub, without any apparent conviction. And that he seemed genuinely relieved that there was no followup question about y2k readiness?

Dr. Paula Gordon has repeatedly stated her expectations of y2k severity as either a 5 or a 9.5, depending whether or not the administration would warn the American public to prepare for the upcoming crisis. With yesterday's speech, we now know that the administration will not give that warning.

-- Sure M. Worried (SureMWorried@bout.Y2K.coming), November 11, 1999.


Right ... officially denied. That announcement was, to me, a clear signal that the government not only can't fix the problem (which I already knew) but has NO HOPE of even making a dent in the problem.

I've been writing software for about 20 years. I spend most of my time fixing problems in code that wind up being one-line fixes. These one-liners cause payrolls to STOP and it sometimes takes me DAYS to find them (and I have the source code!) Clinton and his group, if they know anything, know that Y2K is a systemic problem that is so deeply imbedded into our infrastructure that all the billions spent on it won't even make the most minor dent in it. I've fixed, recently, bugs in my company's code that were date related. Not Y2K, in this particular case, but similar enough - and these tiny little mistakes in the code completely hosed up the payroll of one of our clients - they had absolutely NO WAY to produce paychecks for several hundred employees because of a tiny little mistake in the code. That was one line out of about 20,000 and it completely shut down a payroll. That client was upset.

Now picture the U.S. economy, hundreds of thousands of companies depending on payroll systems that can be hosed by a ONE LINE mistake in the payroll program's code. Enter Y2K. All of a sudden, a whole BUNCH of "one line" errors all-of-a-sudden appear in otherwise functional programs. One line that makes the wrong decision because it does a date calculation that is now wrong because it didn't consider 4-digits in the year. All-of-a-sudden the payroll, the tax calculation, the process-controller in a water floodgate, a service interval on a critical system ... you name it, fails because of a bunch of little one-line errors.

There are TRILLIONS of lines of program code (many of them undocumented and no longer extant in source code) running in critical systems all across the U.S. All-of-a-sudden there will be MILLIONS of lines of code that now make the wrong decision. Finding any ONE of them can take an expert programmer DAYS (If he has the tools and the source code). Can you spell PANDEMONIUM, Mr. Clinton?

-- Bruce W. Roeser (broeser@ccgnv.net), November 11, 1999.


Bruce, thanks for your excellent posts.

The President became irrelevant some time ago.

But his monumental mistakes re Y2K will earn him a dubious place in history.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), November 11, 1999.


More correctly:

"It's official - The Clinton administration SAYS the U.S. is now Y2K compliant!"

Saying it's compliant doesn't make it compliant....it just makes people think it's compliant.

By the way, has he told the computers yet?

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), November 11, 1999.



---hey, anyone here have and use TRUSTER software? It's that new israeli software used for lie detecting. supposedly quite good. would be interesting to run his audio statements through it! --zog not trust king, nope...

-- zog (zzoggy@yahoo.com), November 11, 1999.

he also said something to the effect that "this is the biggest management problem since WWII";

that could be inside-the-beltway jargon for :

"whatever Roosevelt got away with 50 years ago [i.e. martial law, wage and price controls, travel restrictions, rationing, etc...], we can surely do now"

- or something like that...???

-- Perry Arnett (pjarnett@pdqnet.net), November 11, 1999.


For all you history buffs---

What other historical leader would you deem more worthy of reaping what may come in a mere month or so.

I think of Chamberlain after visiting Herr Hitler waiving the peace document or maybe to a more severe note Caligula!!!

-- David Butts (dciinc@aol.com), November 11, 1999.


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