Come on folks, will someone be willing to step up and explain what happened in the last 24 hours?

We just went through the rollover and everyone made it without a hitch, lets not forget, we have countries that were clueless about this issue, and yet they have power/telecomm and apparently other services?

We spent how much $$ on this probem? They (several) late starters spent very little and get the same result?

I have been asking the same questions for the last two years, what is the outcome of unremediated code? What happens with this embedded issue after we roll over into 2000? Most responces were "we don't know"/"We are not sure" from many high level technical types that really did not have a solid answer, just speculation. So we prepare on the possibility, I can deal with that.

PC's do not appear to be a problem, just booted my old 486 running 3.11, another running 95, another running NT 4.0 and now I am going to pull out an old laptop with DOS and see how that works.

I am starting to get the feeling that PC's are going to be a non issue. Perhaps some one can explain that.

For those folks that are going to fix on failure, true we have not seen the impact of JIT/cascadding effect/and other things, what we have seen is truely incredable, it appears that we are going to get through this with very little problems, again we will have to see on a few issues, but otherwise we are looking good.

I think it's important, that Ed, since he's technical and works with this stuff day-in/day-out spend a few moments and give us an idea of what we just witnessed and why we were so far off the mark? Yes, I understand things could get bad over the next few days/weeks/months etc... But I go back to no hitches, worldwide, billions on embedded chips, billions of lines of code, in everything from water/sewage to Cars etc...

Also, this Mr. CEO stuff? What's the story with that? Reported by two sources, Gary and Jim, you have to ask yourself what the??? Not one power problem?

I would appreciate any Technical feedback, forget speculation, we are well beyond that at this point, can you imagine how many people altered their lives because of this? Again, based upon expert opinion.

Good luck to all.

-- LALA (LaLALAND@aol.com), January 01, 2000

Answers

Damage control. Period.....

-- lenny (Chmielecki@worldnet.att.net), January 01, 2000.

Oh Lenny...

You are so on drugs. This "government is failing to tell us the truth" brink of doom stuff is a bit lame don't you think? I agree that we are not out of the woods yet - but you are kind of damaging your credibility with this intense paranoia stuff don't you think?

Watcher

-- watcher (watcher@watcher.com), January 01, 2000.

LALA,

Take it easy now ... there hasn't been but less than 24-hours pass since the rollover (at the most). Date calculations require date RANGES in most cases - there needs to be at least a few days' space here. I'm going to be interested in seeing how business systems deal with this once they are back online and start making calculations involving "today" and "previous dates". Just rolling a computer clock over to 2000 won't necessarily cause a problem until some program decides to calculate a value based on the current year and some previous year. Your PC games won't likely fail, nor will your e- mail. Lets see what happens to all the payroll, order processing and other business type systems when they hit their next calculation interval. That's where we'll start seeing errors.

-- Bruce (broeser@ccgnv.net), January 01, 2000.

Turkey did not crash because they changed their date back to a previously compliant date in the 80s

-- Mwallace (asdf@asdf.com), January 01, 2000.

Power generation is done pretty much the same all over the world. AC power is AC power. Anyone following Y2K remembers when power guys - especially on Rick Cowles site - said "the embeddeds turned out not to be the problem we initially feared they were." Soooooo, guess what folks, THEY WERE'NT LYING TO US!!! Apparently the same is true for telecommunications. The big unknown, may indeed be known - embeddeds in power and telecom turned out NOT to be a threat. ...... At least not at the "rollover". However, A LOT of embedded's are used for monitoring equipment maintenance, and these could trip on dates later in the year. So while it's "OVER" - at least TEOTWAWKI, it's not "over" - there will most likely be "glitches" and sporadic power issues as the year grinds on. Of course most of us hardcore doomers did not prepare for "glitches" - we preapred for TEOTWAWKI. Well it didn't come 1/1/00. Jury is still out on oil and industry in general. WAY to early to declare victory. Don't get rid of your preps just yet ...

-- The Expert (expert@expert.com), January 01, 2000.

I've just refreshed this page so I know that the time-of-post was in the last 5 minutes. Dude, look at your clock, it has been longer than 24 hours now in about 25% of the planet, not "24 hours now (at most). Get off your american-centric view. Italy didn't start preparing for Y2K until a few months ago and they still have power.

Oh, but I forgot, now its a global media conspiracy. Have to keep a very fluid belief system to keep up eh?

G.

-- Ozzie (me@australia.com), January 01, 2000.

Lenny,

I agree with you. Yes we will have problems, some might even cascade and cause companies to go under or produce things we never thought of while we were talking about this. But for people to say "Damage control" right now is goofy.

We all saw the rollover, we all experienced it, we are here right now surfing the web, watching tv, listening to our police scanners and nothing seems to have happened.

In the past it seemed the pollies were in denial. Now it seems some of the doomers are in it. Unlike the pollies back then, there is real evidence that things are going along smoothly right now and denying that as truth shows some people here have got a problem they need to deal with mentally.

-- hamster (hamster@mycage.com), January 01, 2000.

Agree with hamster. Instead of circling the wagons to save face, some folks should be ecstatic about how things have gone thus far. I am. Never expected mass disaster, but the relatively few glitches have been even better than I expected. Lets all hope that the positive trend continues. I don't want disaster to happen just so I can say 'I told you so!'. I think most people agree with me.

-- Sigh of Relief (joe@pepitone.com), January 01, 2000.

The problem I perceive with the media is not so much that someone, somewhere, is trying to deceive or do damage control. The media is about making money. They have people whose sole job it to try to figure out what we want to see at any given moment. During the past 24 hours MOST of the population wanted to see good news. This morning they are interested in 'what else?' The media has spent the past 24 hours and a TON of resources getting the BIG picture out. They are not focused in on a power outage here or telco problems there.

This morning there are little blurbs here and there mixed with the "Whew, we were wrong, ain't it grand?" babble everyone should have expected all along. Little blurbs like, "network congestion... might take a couple of days to clear up...", "minor power outage... not y2k related...", "BP... problems in Egypt..."...

These are little fragments and prove nothing except that we might want to reserve our final evaluation of the effects of the problem for a bit longer, as if nobody knew that... :)

-- Michael Erskine (Osiris@urbanna.net), January 01, 2000.

So if the embeddeds were OK in the power companies/phone compnies, does that mean they're OK in the oil industry too?

-- Nobody (nobody@nobody.com), January 01, 2000.

LALA, I would like to able to give you the exact explanation that you seek, but unfortunately no-one can. Most technical people would not be prepared to stick their neck out pre-rollover and say "Everything will be OK", because those same technical people realize that they don't know everything. However, most technical people (not IT types) are also the ones who have usually been saying that everything should be OK.

If you look back through the archives (under utilities) you will find where I have given detailed descriptions of how power generation works, and also of why it should be immune to Y2K. However I would never try to guarantee that the power would stay on, because I do not know every single power station, substation, transmission system etc in the whole world. I do know, and have said, that all of the types of systems I have worked with would be OK.

Cherri, Flint and other have given very good descriptions of embedded systems and how they work, but similarly they could not guarantee that every embedded system is always programmed in a certain way. Therefore there could be no certainties, but just an overall assurance that everything should be OK.

Unfortunately, many people have read where failures could occur, and treated these statements as meaning that they would occur. Words such as "may, might, could, can, possible" etc would often be traeted as either "definitely will", or worse treated as being "even the experts don't know".

The situation has been further exacerbated by well meaning IT experts showing errors in code and telling everyone that "this piece of code will fail". They were quite correct in that the code will fail, but in a great number of cases the failure just doesn't matter. A bad date being reported back from a PLC to a SCADA doesn't prevent the SCADA from doing its job, its just a nuisance, but one that can be lived with. Engineers understand what an application is to be used for, and what will happen if it fails. IT people usually just know whether or not the particular application is likely to fail.

We had one ammusing episode at our power station during the rollover which demonstrates this aspect quite well. A remote control system that we knew to be non compliant has two servers. One of these servers had its date set back 10 years, and the system had been tested to ensure that it would function with each server on a different date. The controller on duty was supposed to change to the server that was running 10 years behind shortly before the rollover, but he forgot to do it. So we are still running on the non compliant server in the year 19100, and its working just fine.

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), January 01, 2000.