The only Y2K Failure was Ed Yourdon

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It seems the only Y2K failure of note is the failure of any of the alarmists' predictions, especially our beloved Ed Yourdon, to come true. Not only were the alarmists wrong. Their predictions were off by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. Rather than millions of failures, we have tens. PERHAPS Ed should have used his beloved SEI process to better analyze the implications of Y2K before publishing an Y2K alarmist text loaded with empty statistics and hypemongering.

Why was Ed worried? I can only surmise it is because his IT background is primarily as an MIS COBOL HACK. Obsolete and unemployed for 20 years, these HACKS (in the worst sense of the word) saw a golden window of opportunity with Y2K. With hero Ed at the helm, they could point at their million line [500 lines copy and pasted 2000 times] COBOL applications and incite panic. The result? $150k salaries for programmers whose primary reuse mechanism is CTRL-V.

Yes, Ed. We admit that MIS COBOL HACKS created terrible software applications. Most of those clowns should never have been allowed to operate a dumb terminal data entry application let alone create the infrastructure for IT systems.

Why then wasn't there a huge failure of the US infrastructure? The reason is fairly simple. The old COBOL IT systems were useless stovepipe hack jobs. Most corporations worth their spit have long since upgraded to modern client/server systems like Peoplesoft or SAP with an Oracle DB on the back end. And, even then, it isn't that hard to brute force your way through old COBOL code and window all the 2 digit dates. The overpaid MIS COBOL HACKS hired to execute this task probably spent 10% of their time doing anything useful. Has there ever been a better excuse to screw around on company time than "reviewing code for Y2K defects".

[1 year and $150k later -- "Good news. I found no problems"]

-- Robert Hebert (rphebert@my-deja.com), January 05, 2000

Answers

Robert,

Don't look now but we're starting to slowly get a string of problems developing within the oil industry. It looks like it has only just begun... and while it won't be TEOTWAWKI, it could be a lot more than a nuisance as you pollies want to think of it as being ... see my posted thread next to this one and then read the newswires... 4 refineries downed or crippled already... 3 here and 1 a Shell unit in Singapore. And we still can't get the full details. Folks remain tightlipped and nervous inside the biz.

Some of us may have been wrong on the actual rollover, but its still way too early for derision against Ed Yourdon. As I remember it he was a "5" or "6" all along...and not a TEOTWAWKI advocate though he like others concluded it might be possible. (I never went that far)

Anyway...stop acting like an idiot and wait patiently and maybe consider saying something in Mid March if there's still nothing more than we have now.

Also.. I think we're no longer BITR...but moving above a 1 slowly headed for a 2 maybe within 10-14 days... headed into a 3 by Feb 1 and then we'll see how the cascades develope into March and April and see how critical they become. You may even not see really hard tangible evidence pointing to Y2K until well after the fact like September or August but I'd be more inclined to at least see tell tale signs of serious "5" level problems surfacing in the next 4 weeks.

-- RC (racambab@mailcity.com), January 05, 2000.


Hi Bob. You seem awfully bitter. Care to share your background? Did you make $150k last year? If not, why not, if it was that easy? :)

Care to quote the part when Ed said "millions of failures in the first five days"?

As I recall, Ed pointed at silent data corruption as the Big Nasty and talked about weeks and months. But what do I know, if I didn't expect a 0, then I must be a raving TEOTWAWKI fanatic, right?

Right?

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.


Robert: Do you blame the librarian for the books she has guided you to? From your post, I am inclined to think you do.

If you truly feel that someone should take the blame for Y2K over reaction, how about starting here, at these agencies that delivered the original, alarm raising reports: The UN,World Bank,IMF, FED, FEMA, CIA, FBI, Navy, National Guard, U.S. Senate, Gartner Group, Society of Electrical Engineers, Virtually every major corporation and Bank in the World, and dozens of countries...as a partial list. These organizations all put together in depth, reports that indicated that Y2K could pose serious infrastructure problems particularly in less developed nations. How is it that the thousands of people representing some of the greatest expertise in infrastructure, national security, engineering of embedded systems and computer software, not to mention myriad other topics... came to the same conclusions?

Perhaps your petty, insulting blame is aimed in the wrong direction. Or, perhaps you are premature in thinking that Y2K is a thing of the past.

We are only days into the new millennium and already problems have been reported at 12 airports; radar screens are blacking out. The FAA is being called to task for hiring foreign nationals to repair their computer code (without doing back ground checks). Frankly, I think they are all looking for a nice foriegn looking scape goat. I have a good friend who has worked with the FAA for over 30 years. This person told me "The FAA is the most screwed up organization I have ever worked with." Bearing in mind that they declared themselves "compliant"...three separate times, I must say, I had very little faith that they would pull this size a job off.

Also, we have reports on eight US power plants with Y2K glitches. Some plants have been taken off line since the roll over. Japan has had problems on three of their Nuclear Plants and Spain has announced problems on two of theirs. Frankly, if the power plants and corporations had not been able to draw upon excellent contingency plans, the roll over would have provided us with several sizeable blackouts. Remember three Nuclear Plants were taken off line that weekend for.....causes unknown.

Fighting is still going on over the false alarms that went off at the Utillma Chemical Storage Plant. Residence in three countries were warned of a chemical spill. Terrified, they were told to stay indoors and wait for instructions. This being the largest Chemical Storage Plant in the US; it was a cause for great alarm. Some authorities are trying to blame it on a single employee making a non- Y2K mistake, but the man she works for said "no way"; it was something else. Gee, I wonder what.

Oak Ridge Nuclear Weapons Plant is now inventorying and tracking their nuclear weapons manually. That's not a very comforting thought.

Banks in Denmark, Sweden and the Chicago FED have all admitted to having Y2K problems that caused major monetary errors. The Danish Bank actually had a small section of a payment system completely erased. The FED had a 770,000.00 error in a taxing system.

Driver's License Bureaus in three states are reporting errors; some serious enough to halt their entire systems.

The ATF's Licensing Program is suspended until they can get the Y2K bugs out (the estimate 5 days) Mean time, they can issue no licenses and the FBI cannot do dealer checks. They'll have to go to manual...says the White House.

Countries throughout the world are reporting problems with medical devices: defibulators, dialysis machines etc.

And, as the medium and small business' around the country get into full swing we are already hearing reports trickle in about payroll system errors and inventory systems down.

Furthermore, in reviewing the country reports from all over the world, it occurred to me, exactly what country would publicly admit to the U.S. (the might of NATO) that it's infrastructure is experiencing severe problems? Do you think, Iran would? Or Columbia, Pakistan or Russia? The reports themselves are utterly ludicrious.

So............I think you may be just a little premature in you evaluation.



-- meg davis (meg9999@aol.com), January 05, 2000.


Not to mention the reports, still undergoing validation, which suggest one of the major Auto manufacturers MIGHT just have a LEETLE BEETY problem in its order EDI systems.

More on that may be available today.

Chuck

For validation, try the GICC site here on Greenspun.

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), January 05, 2000.


Robert,

You seem to be a little too caught up in the past and present. Why do you not think it reasonable to wait a little while to see what possible problems that chinks in the global supply chains could bring?

I've brought this point up many times to the newbies, but it never seems to get a response. Perhaps you could be the first to respond?

-- eve (123@4567.com), January 05, 2000.



"Little people discuss personalities. Bigger people discuss events. Mature people discuss ideas."

-- R. Watt (rkwatt@hotmail.com), January 05, 2000.

I can see it now; the Y2K alarmists are now going to introduce a "conspiracy theory" that the world is actually falling apart SLOWLY. What once become a 01/01/2000 calamity shall now become a slow erosion that occurs over "months". When everything still works in a few months, you will change your rhetoric to "years".

Big men admit they were wrong. Little men crawl into a corner and cry that they were right even though every available shred of hard evidence suggests otherwise.

-- Robert Hebert (rpbebert@my-deja.com), January 05, 2000.


I am going to copy/paste that, R.Watt, and print it out in big type for my bulletin board of great statements....

it expresses what I think exactly. I try to avoid all those who fall into the first two categories. They are a waste of the short period of time we have on this lovely planet.

Let's hope the first two categories go elsewhere soon. And onlhy the third remains.

Just a housemouse.......

-- housemouse (inlittlehole@nevermind.now), January 05, 2000.


Robert, I don't think the cascading failures were ever predicted to occur within the first five days of January. Given that a lot of companies stockpiled, it may be possible that the failures get fixed before the stockpile runs out. Maybe, maybe not. We won't get a good feel until the end of February. By the end of January, we should know who isn't getting paychecks, etc. You Pollys just need a little more patience.

-- Amy Leone (leoneamy@aol.com), January 05, 2000.

Speaking of "copying and pasting" OLD OBSOLETE COBOL HACKS, Bobby: Have you ever used a computer that doesn't have a mouse attached? Could you? (And as for "modern client/server systems like SAP," there's a company in Hershey, Pennsylvania who would like to talk to someone with your obvious depth of experience.)

-- I'm Here, I'm There (I'm Everywhere@so.beware), January 05, 2000.


Robert,

In a way, your avoidance of my point says more about you than a direct response would have.

Thank you,

-- eve (123@4567.com), January 05, 2000.


Hi Robert,

It occurs to me that those MIS COBOL HACKS you so readily malign created the relatively stable software infrastructure that allowed us to develop fairly robust business systems. Systems that provided the foundations for the past decade of tremendous growth. Maybe those systems didn't have 19 inch color monitors and pretty GUI interfaces, but they go the job done. Long term stable employees knew their way around the software and kept it up and running (or crawling by todays standards). But it got the job done!

However, I have yet to see shrink wrapped a client server application anywhere that has the stability of those old 'HACKED' systems. If we use Microsoft 'quality' products as an indicator of today's 'QUALITY' products, then I respectfully suggest it is time for a reality check. Think about it, how many of errors were they in 98, and how many remained in the new improved 98 second edition. Care to wager on how many 2000 will have?

Software is written by programmers and most programmers are not engineers. With the exception of old time NASA stuff, I've heard of nothing that is written using strict design standards - its considered prohibitively expensive (besides, I not sure the talent is there). NASA's new stuff however isn't doing so great - could it be they started realing on new generation "HACKS"?

A lot of people (worldwide) worked long and hard trying to help insure major problems would be avoided - maybe, just maybe, they got the job done.

Here's a cut and paste from from a post to a Y2K contingency planning forum which I subscribe to:

>>> begin paste >>> Yesterday afternoon, one of my colleagues greeted me by saying, "Congratulations on a job well done! Nothing Happened!" It felt great that "someone got it!" <<< end paste <<<

Good Luck, may no Y2K problems affect your personal affairs. jh

-- john hebert (jt_hebert@hotmail.com), January 05, 2000.


Eve,

You claim that we should give the Y2K bug more time to manifest itself. This is OK if you and the other Y2K alarmists can cite a specific date. As I said in my other post, however, I suspect that we will here the same empty rhetoric month after month and year after year; "Y2K problems will occur.. just wait!" along with a myriad of second hand UNVERIFIED reports that the conspiring media who, oddly, seemed quite Y2K alarmist prior to the conversion date seems to conveniently ignore.

-- Robert Hebert (rphebert@my-deja.com), January 05, 2000.


John,

If the old HACKED MIS COBOL systems were so good, why was there a perceived Y2K crises with these systems? I am running Windows95 at home, unpatched, and the date rollover worked with no problems.

-- Robert Hebert (rphebert@my-deja.com), January 05, 2000.


"Big men admit they were wrong. Little men crawl into a corner and cry that they were right even though every available shred of hard evidence suggests otherwise."

Okay, little man, admit that you were WRONG. Your supposed "obsolete and unemployed" statement barely deserves a response. Who do you think probably pulled your butt out of the fire and the rest of the world?

You are rude and crude and barely literate. You are probably of the younger generation that has no sense at all of the history of application development. I suspect you program (if at all) with a canned application developer package that does all your code generation for you. You probably have no idea how to write a major software application from scratch, line by line, month by month into a viable, working system encompassing hundreds of systems and spanning vast networks.

What the hell do you know about code generation? Did you spend decades in the trenches, developing applications from scratch with the best tools currently then available? I did and I resent the fact that you and your comeuppance attitude think that you could have done a better job then we did. Bullshit, I was there, you weren't and you have no idea what the hell your talking about.

What you and your ilk continually fail to understand is many of us pointed out the two digit date problem long ago - but coding standards of that day accommodated the bean counters who refused to upgrade memory and hardware due to budget restraints. We did what we were paid to do. The result was the millenium problem and a huge "fix it" bill.

You also forget that you and your kind rest on a huge history and tradition of billions of lines of code development by "hacks" as you call them. Without them, you wouldn't have nothing in this modern techno-world today. As in any developing technology, improvements in approach, design and implementation are made in sucessive generations. It doesn't just happen by whiz-bang techno children such as yourself.

You sound like you think you could have solved it all by yourself. Well, then smartass, why didn't you? Your nothing but an ignorant smartass and deserving of no respect.

Sysops, delete this asshole before somebody punches his timeclock for him.

-- Truth (lifeofliberty@yahoo.com), January 05, 2000.



Robert:

Please provide your credentials. Else shut up. You have no idea what you are talking about with respect to Cobol, etc. Think about this for just 1 minuite:

You say that all these thousands cobol programmers need to be brought out of retirement to fix these systems. That implies two things, there are thousands of critical cobol programs out there. The nuveau programmers haven't got a clue about how to fix them according to you (and you are correct).

Now I ask you would any organization let their critical applications and systems run without anybody to maintain or change them as business needs change?

Secondly isn't odd that practically every major system is still a cobol program (I dare say that almost all of the *core* banking apps in the *major* banks are cobol -- I know I've been a CIO at a bank). Now all these apps have been running so well prior to rollover (lets not worry what happened after rollover) that world takes them as much for granted as water and electricity.

Now that to me seems that professionals wrote those apps. And I'd gladly pay them $150k per year to do such fine work to make such solid apps that are used by millions of users (via the ATMs and card readers at the retailers). Micro$oft and all the nuveau programmers can't program worth a dime. I mean they have only to make an app work with just one user and they can't. My machine crashes at least once or twice a day.

-- Interested Spectator (is@the_ring.side), January 05, 2000.


Robert,

Why do you require a specific date, and not a specific hour, specific month, etc.? In other words, why can't you see that we have not necessarily resolved all or even most of the uncertainty and accept that for now?

I'm simply trying to address facts -- the facts that many small and medium-sized businesses did relatively little remediation (according to surveys), that they constitute large chunks of supply chains, that supply chains exist and that the links do affect each other.

I'm not able to cite a date, but how can that possibly mean that it was necessarily all over on 1/1/00?

-- eve (123@4567.com), January 05, 2000.


Hey Robert!

If what you have posted is so obvious, et cetra, why did you wait so long? Why didn't you post it on 1/3/00? Or perhaps 1/1/00? OR..... why didn't you post this same stuff on, oh say, 12/23/99? hhmm??

-- Ken Seger (kenseger@earthlink.net), January 05, 2000.


Since you obviously missed my post of 1-5-00 I'll repeat.

Hey Robert!

If what you have posted is so obvious, et cetra, why did you wait so long? Why didn't you post it on 1/3/00? Or perhaps 1/1/00? OR..... why didn't you post this same stuff on, oh say, 12/23/99? hhmm??

-- Ken Seger (kenseger@earthlink.net), January 08, 2000.


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