First of all, is 5% considered just a bump in the road?

What if only 5% of the power is out for an extended period? 5% of the phones down. A 5% shortage in imports, and oil, and ???. 5% of businesses fail. What difference would 5% make? How long before it impacts the other 95%?

What if it's more? What if it's 10%? How long, before that 10% impacts YOU?

What % is important? And more important, will that % be Y2K OK?

Don't we live at 99.9% now, today?????

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

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 24, 1999

Answers

The percentage game can be quite meaningless. 10% failures might be acceptable to one industry (e.g., education), 1% could be disasterous to another (e.g., banking; at least, that is what Alan Greenspan said).

There is an entire ball of thread that has been spun, based on this sector is 99.1% ready, that sector is 98.9% ready, etc., etc., for their so-called "mission critical" systems (the number of which magically decreased with the passing of each failed deadline).

In seven days, that ball will unwind.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), December 24, 1999.

5% random failure would probably slow my business considerably but failure would not be certain. 5% failure in every utility/application would sink the entire ship.

The CFTC required us to have contingency plans by September 30, 1999 but I could never ascertain whether vendors (exchanges, FCM's, banks) were going to break the "link."

In a recent thread, someone pointed out that NYMEX will be closed on Jan 3. Since, crude oil and natural gas trades elsewhere, US traders who need to cut losses or hedge positions in case of high volatility and expected adverse price moves, will be stuck if they can't trade overseas.

-- Sandwich (anon@anon.anon), December 24, 1999.

Sysman:

We have talked before and have no disagreement. 5% now! It is more than that. At present it is being handled. If it goes beyond that [and I have no reason to believe that it will], who knows.

Best wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), December 24, 1999.

Hi Z, and Happy Holidays to you too!

When you say "5% now!" are you following Hoff's theory? Are you saying that fixing the Y2K bug, and all of the other unexpected problems that go with it, is causing a 5% disruption in our "system" now? Are you saying that we live with 5% now, and haven't even noticed?

So let me say this again, at what point does it matter? Will 10% matter? When will we notice, if we ever do? If is the question. If "we" don't notice, then Y2K wasn't a problem. But if "we" do notice...

Here's my short view. We have very few Y2K dates in the "world database" as of today. Yes, "a few programs" do forcasting, so we do have some. But we really haven't started to build a history yet. CURRENT-DATE still says 1999. Most of the "system" as a whole, hasn't seen Y2K. Oh sure, parts have. Parts have been in a time-machine, but not as a WHOLE!

You know, I'm kinda wound up tonight, and could go on for a while. But it's Christmas Eve. Let's continue this discussion next week, when we still some time to talk about Y2K. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 24, 1999.

Ahh, that should be:

when we still HAVE some time to talk about Y2K. ...

Pass the egg-nog please... <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 24, 1999.

Thats 5% in addition to current failures.

Here is an example of 1% Faults:

Source: (1991) InSight, Syncrude Canada Ltd., Communications Division

IF 99% IS GOOD ENOUGH, THEN ...

- 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

- 268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year.

- 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year.

- 811,000 faulty rolls of 35mm film will be loaded this year.

- 14,208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year.

- 2,488,200 books will be shipped in the next 12 months with the wrong cover.

- Two plane landings daily at O' Hare International Airport in Chicago will be unsafe.

- 3,056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.

- 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.

- 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.

- 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strip.

- $761,900 will be spent in the next 12 months on tapes and CDs that will not play.

- 55 malfunctioning automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12 months.

- 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.

- 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.

- 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day today.

- 315 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language will be misspelled.

- $9,690 will be spent every day on defective, often unsafe sporting equipment.

- 2,000,000 documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

- 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.

- Homes would be without electricity, heat, water, and telephone service for 15 minutes every day.

- Every page of the telephone directory would contain four wrong numbers.

-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), December 24, 1999.

Thanks snooze button, that's a keeper! <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 24, 1999.

Aren't we talking apples and oranges here? Surely not even Sysman could find any correlation between estimated completion of remediation and estimated error rates of any given process. These are two entirely different things.

Look, I could take a million-line error-free program, introduce one single bug, and reduce operation to ZERO. I could also probably introduce 1000 errors that nobody would notice for months, if ever. Saying 99% completion equals 1% of erroneous transactions is pure nonsense.

Sysman, surely you realize this. Why do you go along with snooze button's disinformation?

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

Jeez Flint, what are you doing up at this hour? I was looking for you in a few other threads tonight. I figured that you went to bed...

Let's take an X-mas break. I've got this thread on top of my favs. and will get back to it in a day or so. You know, while we've still got some time to discuss Y2K...

Merry Xmas Flint. Hope to see you next year...

<:ho ho ho)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), December 25, 1999.