Opinnion: We are not going to see problems in high profile systems in the united states -- the real threat all along has been/is the enormous back office/corporate/administrative/financial and process(not real time) management systems in. They have always been by far the most vulnerable. And Companies and gov't and the media(GE owns NBC, CNBC and GE & MS owns MSNBC, et. al.)are going to go to heroic efforts to protect that info.

Theory: There are 2 ways to get an early warning...

1. The SP Cash & Futures discount leaked info. in advance 2. Reliable contacts at companies/gov't in low places

Wave

-- Wave (eades1@flashcom.net), January 02, 2000

Answers

Wave,

Don't kid yourself. This thing isn't a problem, never was except in the financial and planning sectors. I have 25 UNIX systems and 1o PCs. I employed FOF because I had no money or time to do otherwise. My business was decimated in 99 because of fear of y2k. I had more customers say "y2k freeze" than any other excuse I have ever had. Moreover, there were motivated customers but the y2k NAZIs held them in check which choked me.

As far as I am concerned, fire all the hypsters as soon as the mask is off .

My systems are all fine. The only thing I remediated was QuickBooks (I now have 99 after they told me 98 wasn't compliant).

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 02, 2000.

I'm afraid that I know first hand for a fact that the IBM mainframe OS/3XX systems which run all this stuff are very much at risk -- sold software and services to Fort 1000 over the last 15 years. In last 2 years I have been in 100's of meetings with CIO's and VP's and believe me these guys were as close to freaking out as they ever would. More importantly, they spent gobs of money with (Compuware) to ensure they had the tools and people to attempt compliance -- it was an unprecedented boom for Compuware -- check their 10K's(Edgar.com)

Wave

-- Wave (eades1@flashcom.net), January 02, 2000.

Wave,

I don't have much respect for vendors such as CA, Compuware and BMC tomention a few. They sell a lot of weak software with lots of marketing bucks. I don't know what level in the heirarchy you are at but unfortunately CIOs tend to let vendor's do the thinking for them. Not the people that they hired. So when you make such a statement you simply reinforce my suspicion that this was SERIOUS HYPE designed to benefit big companies like Cware.

CIOs are easilly swayed by the vendors and always have been. Did anyone ever run a real simulation to see what would happen? No, not until they had bought tons of remediation products and employed them. Now what is Compuware, CA and everyone else selling for e-business? Lots of products for stressing your code prior to e-business deployment. Seems the reverse of what you imply.

-- Wiliam R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 02, 2000.

Yes they did run simulations and they discovered that the problems of data corruption in databases(DB2, IMS), flat files(VSAM), and system files were VERY real. There isn't a CIO in world who would spend money to fix things rather than attempt to deliver new functions and capabilities. And, since all expenditures at the levels I'm refering to were approved by CFO's, and since CFO's demand a high probability of return on investment, the probability that they were spending this money because a vendor was particularly pusuasive just doesn't follow. Please understand that I lived with our consultants and techs who lived with their techs and developers/testers -- it is VERY, VERY REAL. The remaining question is, what will the likely impact really be when the systems are operating under real loads and being exercised in real world complexity.

Wave

-- Wave (eades1@flashcom.net), January 02, 2000.

Wave,

What simulations? I was working as a UNIX consultant at one of the GSE's that process our mortgages (there are 3) in summer '97. They were simply transferring their DB2 implementation from VMS to SP (RS6000 systems). IBM tries to sell OS390 as the solution to everything, they keep trying to sell that big iron junk (CMOS Sysplexes) as web servers.

I have customers that are converting 2 digit databases to 4 digit ones by simply running some canned SQL from old data base to the new database. I have always had difficulty with seeing this as a huge problem. It has screwed me all year and now it is making me look foolish because I caved and prepared for the worst. I AM upset about what I see as unproductive hype.

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 02, 2000.

oops...typo/fredian slip meant MVS not VMS

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 02, 2000.

Don't know where you get your data -- check with Gartner, IDC, Meta, Yankee, or companies themselves -- DB2 & IMS are by far the largest dtat stores on the planet. And, you describe 1 technique for the actual code change process and that implies that finding, fixing and testing all date processing errors has been handled. That's like saying that you use a hamer to drive nails but it doesn't describe the status building the house.

Wave

-- Wave (eades1@flashcom.net), January 02, 2000.

Wave,

What is the fastest grwoing disk manufacturer in the world? It isn't IBM anymore...It is EMC and they sell more for UNIX than anything else.

What is the DB for this site?????(hint it isn't DB2 and it isn't heirarchichal or any other access method)

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 02, 2000.

Agreed...but the Y2K problem is about existing systems and Databases.

Wave

-- Wave (eades1@flashcom.net), January 02, 2000.

Well, guys, I guess we will find out real soon now just how Y2K will fare in the world of business and commerce. Like starting tomorrow (Monday).

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), January 02, 2000.