Has anyone thought Just HOW all this work got done in time?

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

To allllllllll th bekies of the world;

Had it not been for all the moaning and bitching and digging and questioning the "doomers" of the world did, the pressure put on business and .gov by the public to get this job done, would have NEVER happened. If the only words they would have heard was the polly mantra of no big deal, the lights would be out and you would not be reading this now. So ENOUGH! Yes you may post this on debunky. Most of the posts from this forum end up there anyway.

-- Scotty (blehman202@aol.com), January 03, 2000

Answers

I heard on Art Bell that Clinton and Greenspan made a deal with the Aliens to fix everything. They gave us the stuff in the first place and it was still under warranty. In exchange they can snag a few more of us this year. So if you find yourself being probed in that 'special place' later this year, remember, it's for the good of all of us!

-- Biff (biff@canthappen here.com), January 03, 2000.

scotty,

your answer? they didn't fix it all. they did whatever it took to hold it together.

and it's starting to come apart as we speak...

keep watching everyone...

-- mike (just@begun.now.com), January 03, 2000.


OUCH!

-- Capt. Edward Smith HMS Titanic (waydown@thebottom.com), January 03, 2000.

Mike has it right, I suspect.

Instead of fixing the gaping hole in the hull, they put a bucket in each free hand and started bailing water.

Remember -- "going manual" *is* considered "Y2K Ready".

It's the contingencies, stupid. (to paraphrase A Famous Ruler)

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), January 03, 2000.


Mike you are so right. Around 0400 Tuesday is a good example.

That's when those clocks that kept counting up on Dec 31 1999 are going to hit the wall at 99:59:59. Do they keep going without further incrementing the counters, go into hexidecimal numbers, reset to all zeroes, stop cold or do something else unexpected? I've gotta admit the that the time continuing to run on Dec 31 was not something I and some others I know even considered.

We'll find out what types of systems those devices still at Dec 31 1999 are attached to if things that worked well today don't tomorrow.

Koskinen just declared "the Y2K bug officially squashed" on the evening news. Meanwhile, Dec 31 1999 is soon to be one hundred hours old according to some systems. What follows and what are the impacts going to be?

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), January 03, 2000.



it's the lawyers stupid! if it hadn't been for the legions of y2k lawyers sending out notices of potential liability assessment about 18 months ago, believe me, a lot less work would have occurred. The only really visible manifestation of this occurred when municipal and state/ provincial governments across North America tried to (invisibly) squeak through liability exemption legislation -- which was largely defeated - - did they 'catch the bug'.

-- michael maser (mmaser@uniserve.com), January 03, 2000.

Biff, ROTFLMAO!

-- Hokie (Hokie_@hotmail.com), January 03, 2000.

Aha! For my next project, I'll just threaten to sue the project staff if they don't finish on time! A wonderful solution...

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), January 03, 2000.

Bull. The doomers are about as responsible for remediation being done as the weatherman is responsible for sunshine. Nearly every significant remediation project was well under way before the doomers were even aware of a problem. Corporations don't allocate big funds simply because a lunatic fringe starts entertaining visions of the end of a world they can't cope with.

I agree with Mike that we've done (in many cases) just enough to hold it together, and we have a lot more date bugs to fix. A few of them might even be newsworthy. But as for things coming apart, this is simply a case of Mike wishing real real hard. It's damn near impossible for some people to admit they were wrong.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 03, 2000.


Monk,

Good point.

If the bug is in fact fixed, I'm gonna have a LOT higher standard for new software products from now on. A big part of my Y2K apprehension was based upon just how glitchy new software products are. I extrapolated from this that there would be lots of failed remediation, that would lead to lots of problems.

If something as massive as Y2K was fixed, then "Windows 2001", or whatever the next generation is, had better be a totally flawless product, or there WILL be major hell to pay.

-- Bokonon (Bok)non@my-Deja.com), January 03, 2000.



He who laughs last laughs the loudest.

-- Notforlong (Fsur439@aol.com), January 03, 2000.

Here's an example of how WE not YOU got the remediation done - I discovered this problem. I told my friend who worked at TDK and is in a very key department - he knew very little. He then researched, got the local branches of TDK to start remediating and checking with vendors. He then traveled to other countries who were vendors and partners and got them to wake up (it wasn't easy) but he told me stories along the way. He told his family who told others who told others.

I held meetings in the community and business people came who then looked at their companies and businesses who then talked to vendors and customers and on and on. Its very simple

-- Of course (wedid@com.com), January 03, 2000.


Bok, Monk,

There were hardly any bugs in the first place. This is why Japan is doing fine and Europe didn't crash. You do know that it was widely announced that Europe didn't even start on y2k prior to this Jan. didn't you?

This whole thing was overblown to make bigger budgets for CIOs

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 03, 2000.


My thought are this: It hasn't been fixed in most cases, however, it has been worked around.

1. Windowing in financial and other database oriented systems.

2. Systems controlling our infrastructure were rolled back to December 1995. They successfully rolled to 1996. This allowed four more years to remediate.

Or...Clinton and Greenspan are really aliens.

-- Uncle Bob (UNCLB0B@AOL.COM), January 03, 2000.


MISTER Sullivan,

Having been one of those software guys in the early 1980's who said (or had said to) Don't worry about the embedded date edits, this program is going to be long replaced by 2000, and besides, neither of US will be here, I can only suggest that you are VERY unaware of how software got done THEN.

NOW nobody wants to look at the old, solid systems, which was part of the remediation problem.

Chuck

BTW I DID turn out a compliant system in 1980, and 2 NON-compliant ones in 1981-1983 as a Systems Analyst/Designer.

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), January 03, 2000.



Chuck,

BA Major C.S. University of Texas at Austin, 1979 University of Texas Center for Electro Mechanics Research Eng. Assoc 1 Sep 1978 - Dec 1979 Programmed Nova 1200 with RTOS and IMLAC Vector Computer Used Cross Assembler for NOVA on CDC 6600 Nova Had 32k core saved programs to paper tape, listings to 110 baud teletype

Only had dates on my tape library from data from then until 1996 I never put a date in any code. Always had 50 bytes BSS after every routine so I could insert patches. Can still read octal, used front panel for debugging.

BSEE University of Texas at Austin, 1981 T.I. Microprocessor Division 1981-1984 Designed in circuit emulators for TI microprocessors namely 99000, 9995, TMS32010 (DSP chip) Wrote lots of assembly for the controller of the in circuit emulater (product called XDS) No dates there but I sure did care about bytes.

Tracor AirCraft CounterMeasures Division 1984-1988 Lead Engineer for several projects relating to F-15,F-16,C-130 and some classified stuff. Designed hardware and developed code for Intel 8051, M6800, M6809, F9450, Intel 8086. Not a date in sight, still cared about bytes. These were very much real-time embedded systems with RTC hard ware inthem. The clocks were all count-down.

Triton Technologies 1988-1989 (Passed an offer from Dell to take this one and I still don't regret it) Designed and Developed a 20 bit A-D Sigma-Delta technology.

MS Eng University of Texas at Austin Major in System Theory (Control Systems and Coding Systems) Did the masters after work

1989-1991 Subcontractor for IBM on RS6000/AIX projects. Lots of RS6000 assembly, AIX kernel but no dates still.

1992-present Founder and President of WHAM Engineering & Software

Worked on DCE from 92-93 for Transarc on a contract to IBM. This is where I have seen some real bad date stuff. In Feb 1992 the leap year caused all of our DCE cells to have to be completely rebuilt whereupon if we hadn't fixed the bug they would have crashed again. There is a lot of time synchronization in DCE and if time ever goes backwards the DCE Directory Services database will be irreprably corrupted. This experience served as one of my biases about y2k

We have been doing performance software at WHAM since 1996 and we have a product which actually incorporates dates. We use time() the mktime() routine etc, and haven't had any problems. This is the first time in 20 years that I have made use of dates in my code except for the BASIC 4k thing way back at CEM. Those dates were BASIC strings and were just for archival purposes.

I am still waiting for all the CIO guys to give me the list of severity 1 bugs that were fixed. I really don't believe there were any.

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 03, 2000.


Wm R Sullivan,

Wow, what a CV. I have seen no one on either board who seems so qualified. If you were posting anywhere in 1999, I missed it. Dang, I think your posts would have reassured me.

Still, the 3rd to last paragraph in your post above sounds a little scary. Could you elaborate? Is there something here that could yet bite us?

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), January 03, 2000.


Lars,

The DCE stuff is passe, hardly anyone uses it and the data base corruption problem is well known these days. No one allows the DCE Directory server to have an automatic adustment of time that would set the clock.

As far as I have ever seen, no one really posts their resume, I just was answering a challenge.

I have recently formed this opinion. I have been in a lot of organizations that were busily preparing for y2k over the last three years. I am always in there on a UNIX context and not MVS so I get a lot of second hand info but sometimes I talked to the MVS guys. They seemed not to be too worried just resigned to having to search and destroy the bugs.

Due to this and my own experience with dates, I never considered y2k a big deal until this summer. I started reading Gary Norths site and found a post from Kraft where they said that PLCs had failed at a higher than expected rate. This caused me to prepare more seriously but even at that I only bought 60 gallons of water in 2.5 gal containers, extra propane and a lot of rice and canned goods. Other than that I didn't make any big preparations. I have to admit to bugging my wife to allow me to buy a 12 guage pump with 9 shots, she refused to allow it. We have 5 kids 1 in college 1 a senior in HS one in middle school, one in elementary and one in preschool. She worried about having a gun and I always had prior to this. I think this forum caused me to worry more than I normally would have, particularly the Mr. CEO stuff. I didn't post a lot last year because I only started visiting in around October and then not even regularly. I spent a lot of time at the beginning of last year on the NY Times Forum dealing with the Prez and Monica. I have been posting more since the end of 99 and the beginning of this year.

The other thing about me is that for my business, I got killed by people putting off new work because of y2k. My business sells performance software for e-business and does consulting and training. So far this year things are really looking up and so I am glad we got a BITR. I didn't expect that and I am trying to understand why, that is the reason for my challenge here about the number of severity 1 type bugs. I am going to be looking for that answer for a while.

This is the only large scale project that I ever saw completed on time, on budget and succesfully. They say that you can have fast, cheap and good software (pick two). happened to be challenged on a post. You also seem doubtful of my credentials are you?

-- William R. Sullivan (wrs@wham.com), January 04, 2000.


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