The AP article posted earlier is excellent...Y2k is a process, not an event.....its a chronic condition, a gradual degradation of systems, not a one time systemic failure.....y2k has passed the test with systems of low risk and high repairability (i.e, public utilities and other basic infrastructures), but now we must see how y2k affects systems of high risk and low repairability (i.e., small businessess which have a a *fix on failure* policy regarding y2k). This is my summary of this article, and i would love to hear from others regarding their thoughts on this...i would submit that Yourdon's book, TIME BOMB 2000, was a reasoned, insightful, non-alarmist book, which addresses THESE aspects of y2k quite well, especially in the final chapters, even if the book did seem to exaggerate the *main event* problems (although who can say if THESE would not have occurred in a catastrophic way, if the money had NOT been spent on y2k....)

-- Justin Sturz (cjustin31@yahoo.com), January 04, 2000

Answers

What's interesting to me is that the midground consensus right now is that there's going to be some sort of grinding worry, but that there are wildly differing takes on the end result. You've got people from all sides offering up all sorts of evidence either way, and claiming that they've got it nailed. It's this type of fragmentation which makes interpretation of events so difficult. Are the reported Y2K problems a tip of an iceberg or sporadic hoohah? Is stock market activity reflective of independent economic shifts in the wind or remediation problems causing problems? And so forth. Like it or not, I really don't think anybody can honestly claim to have the answer, but there are many people pretending otherwise and sticking to their claims with gusto. I know *I* don't, so I won't.

Sounds like to me the best advice given so far is the one saying wait a couple of weeks to see.

-- Ned Raggett (ned@kuci.org), January 04, 2000.

Justin, be honest here, Y2K is BOTH. It WAS and event and it IS and on-going process. To deny the former is to fly in the face of two years worth of posts.

It waits to be seen how much Y2K will affect us through its process. Thus far, the event seems to have had little or no effect (thank goodness!).

I am keeping my preps and waiting and watching. I am a stickler for verification however. We have a lot of information now, we just need to sort through it and verify the ones that we can.

-- Ynott (Ynott@incorruptible.com), January 04, 2000.

Thanks Justin.

Ned, I agree. I want this to be over but I still feel like I'm in the crows nest watching the berg taking out rivets in ssslllloooowwww motion.

Right now I'm trying to stay balanced and question whether this is all imagined or real. I say give it a couple of weeks as well. I don't think anything will be really know for quite awhile.

The most likely scenario for me was always "death by a thousand cuts", degradation of the systems, etc.

Mike

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-- Mike Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), January 04, 2000.

Two weeks from now we'll have seen a fair cross section of real news, some in mainstream media, some here. By March or so we'll see the initial results, which might be a wave of bankruptcies or might be stories of heroic efforts keeping SMEs running. By June we'll be able to estimate pretty well what the total cost of Y2k failures will be.

Y2k took 30 years to build into our systems, and we've been working to fix it since about 1993. Small breaks started showing up in early 1999 (my first personal sighting was January 2), and breaks are predicted at LEAST to the end of 2000. It's ludicrous to expect a complete understanding by today, the second working day of 2000.

The ship is scraping on the iceberg now.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), January 04, 2000.

Yes the ship is scraping the iceberg because it is all happening in very slow motion, the crash dosen't happen over a few days, it takes some time but as you can see, the glitching is increasing it's like being in slow-motion.

-- Brent Nichols (b-nichol@ihug.co.nz), January 04, 2000.