January 3, 2000 A Cassandra With No Regrets, and Besides, It Is Not Over Yet By JAMES BROOKE SNIP: But he admits -- and a visit to his Web site (www.yourdon.com) confirms -- that some resentment zings around the Internet this weekend. Showing the yards of entries in the Time Bomb 2000 discussion group on Saturday, he said, "There is a lot of that today: 'Boy do I feel stupid, I wish I never listened to you guys, does anyone want to buy tuna fish?' " Time will tell, he counseled, about the value of his prophecy.

"Either there will be a lot of Y2K problems, and I will make a tremendous living as an expert witness in the next year or two," Mr. Yourdon said. "Or, if it turns out, a month from now, that there never were any serious problems, I may have to eat my words, publicly and with great embarrassment."

================================================== http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002Tyw The Dung Beetle of *Sighs* deletes again... greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) Deleted Thread : One Thread -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill, The stooges of Doom here on Chemtrails 2000 are awfully embarrassed about Mr. Yourdon right now and would appreciate it if you not repost this article again. You can be sure however that any article with a sliver of information that can be twisted to reflect Y2K problems wil be reposted by them 10 or 20 times. However, if you have any off topic reports about conpiracy theories, alien abductions, market crashing, gold soaring, UN troops invading oil shortages, comet/earth collisions, major earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, solar storms, chem warfare, NWO stuff, chemtrail conspiracies, population explosion, Sino-Russian collusion, nuclear powerplant accidents, etc, etc. - these would be most welcome... -- Y2K Pro (y2kpro1@hotmail.com), February 03, 2000 Answers The article in question... Here's the whole article of the NYTimes.com about Mr. Yourdon. greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- January 3, 2000 A Cassandra With No Regrets, and Besides, It Is Not Over Yet By JAMES BROOKE AOS, N.M. -- In the beige adobe house nestled against the snow-dusted Sangre de Cristo mountains, the lights are on, the phones have dial tones, the computer is online, and Edward Yourdon is reaching into a stack of cardboard boxes to hand a visitor a free copy of "Time Bomb 2000." "Best wishes, Ed Yourdon 1/1/2000," he inscribes in the flyleaf of a 630-page tome that sold 250,000 copies over the last two years. But the back cover conjures up a darkly different New Year's Day: "Saturday, January 1, 2000: Suddenly, nothing works. Not your phones, not the cash machine, not even your fancy new VCR." Mr. Yourdon, one of the nation's leading Y2K Cassandras, looks a bit sheepish, and admits: "I guess the book's sales prospects are about zero now." For over a decade, Mr. Yourdon, a computer programmer and consultant with a gift for communicating, has warned the world of widespread chaos when computer odometers rolled over to 2000. Friday morning, he staggered out of bed just before 5 a.m., expecting to watch a wave of televised failures roll around the planet. His younger son, David, a family prankster, was up before him. "My son said, 'New Zealand has disappeared -- they have gone dark,' " he recalled. "I said, 'Oh no, really?' " But the breakdowns that were forecast never came. "When we got to Indonesia, to China, all across Asia without any reports of problems -- that was surprising," said the M.I.T. graduate, who has lectured around the globe about the need to reprogram computers before the rollover date. Referring to the unbroken supply of electric power worldwide, he added: "By God, they did do a good job fixing things up." But Mr. Yourdon, a bulky man in blue jeans and wire rim glasses, warned that it was far too early to say that the world's computer-dependent societies were out of the woods. The smoothness following the arrival of the New Year, he said, is due partly to intensive work in such vital areas as power generation, air traffic control and missile stewardship. In addition, he said, many systems, such as ports, pipelines and refineries, were simply turned off, or run manually over the weekend. "There is going to be another opportunity for bugs Monday morning -- everyone is going to come in to their office, and turn on their PC's," the 55-year-old computer programmer said. "It is possible that bugs will manifest themselves in coming days and weeks." While many large companies may have invested in clearing up their Year 2000 defects, he warned that less work has been done by smaller companies, which often use older software. "Surveys show that 30 to 50 percent of small businesses have done nothing," he said. Problems might not appear until later in the week, or later in the month, when companies try to print invoices or print payroll checks. Even among larger companies, the impact of the problems may never be known, he said, because "the normal instinct of any company is to fix it, not to broadcast it." "Over the last year, Y2K has become like a sexually transmitted disease -- no one wants to admit they have it," he continued from his office overlooking a horse pasture here. "Programmers have come under heavy legal pressure: 'don't you dare talk about it.' " He dismissed the string of company "Y2K compliance" reports of recent months as "letting high school seniors grade all their exams," adding, "It was very difficult to get independent verification of what had happened." In the hours after the date rollover, Mr. Yourdon was so fearful of computer viruses that he logged onto the Internet through a backup computer. Now, back on line with his MacIntosh G3 Powerbook, he said that his e-mail had been running "roughly 50-50, between 'thanks' and 'I hate you.' " Looking back, Mr. Yourdon, who was the star of a 50-minute video, "Ed Yourdon's Year 2000 Home Preparation Guide," said he had few regrets about raising the Y2K alarm, prodding companies, individuals, and government agencies to make repairs to avoid future breakdowns or about urging people to prepare for shortages that have not occurred. "My father has diabetes," he said, as a wood fire cracked in a corner fireplace. "If he doesn't get insulin he dies in three days. Now, the government says, 'Don't stockpile medicines.' Well, that's fine for them to say, but for me the stakes are pretty high." He bought his house here two years ago, partly out of Y2K concerns, and has been dividing his time between Taos and a New York apartment. With stocks of tuna fish and rice stored in his sunny kitchen here, he said he saw his home preparedness as an investment. "In my case, rather than getting a generator, and then feeling foolish when nothing happened, I put in solar and wind power," he said on a house tour of a system that has cut his power bills in half. "Rather than getting thousands of gallons of water at the grocery store, I got a well." But he admits -- and a visit to his Web site (www.yourdon.com) confirms -- that some resentment zings around the Internet this weekend. Showing the yards of entries in the Time Bomb 2000 discussion group on Saturday, he said, "There is a lot of that today: 'Boy do I feel stupid, I wish I never listened to you guys, does anyone want to buy tuna fish?' " Time will tell, he counseled, about the value of his prophecy. "Either there will be a lot of Y2K problems, and I will make a tremendous living as an expert witness in the next year or two," Mr. Yourdon said. "Or, if it turns out, a month from now, that there never were any serious problems, I may have to eat my words, publicly and with great embarrassment." -- Y2K Pro (y2kpro1@hotmail.com), February 03, 2000.

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), July 23, 2000

Answers

Cherri? Is that you??

Creeper, are you schizophrenic? Or quadrophenic perhaps?

This post looks an awful lot like the one posted by Cherri, only with a lot more rambling crap in the middle.

Are things getting so desperate for the pollys that we now have copycat trolls? Sheeesh!

-- Hawk (flyin@hi.again), July 24, 2000.

Hawk,

Are you a copycat cunt?

-- is that you Hawk? (cunt@cunt.com), July 24, 2000.

What are you talking about:

http://www.yourdon.com /y2kfan/index.html

I was wrong about Y2K. Not about the magnitude and pervasive nature of the problem, and not about the likely consequences if millions of computer systems and embedded chips around the world had not been repaired or replaced. But I was wrong about the likelihood that enough of the repair/remediation would be finished in order to prevent serious disruptions. Indeed, it has gradually become apparent during the first few weeks and months of 2000 that Y2K has caused a number of moderate-to-serious problems in various parts of the world - - but it has not turned out to be the crisis that some of us had anticipated.

Ed Yourdon - April 3, 2000

-- (stop@spreading.bullshit), July 24, 2000.

GOOD TRY.............NO SALE.

YOUR-DONE-AND-TOAST-Y2KED CAN TRY TO "MODIFY HIS IMAGE" AS AN EXTREMIST IN Y2K BUT THERE IS FAR, FAR TOO MUCH EVIDENCE OUT THERE.........AND BEST OF ALL,,,THE NET SEARCH ENGINES WILL FIND IT ALL.

AS FOR "SPREADING BULLSHIT",,,,,THE CHIEF DISPENSING MACHINE FOR THAT WAS TIME BOMB I THE FORUM OF ONE ED YOURDON, WHERE EVERY EFFORT TO MAGNIFY A COMPUTER PROBLEM INTO A DOOM SCENARIO WAS ENCOURAGED AND ALL ATTEMPTS TO PRESENT A CONTRASTING MODIFYING VIEW WERE ***DERIDED** AND **DENOUNCED** BY YOURDON'S CHOSEN "MODERATORS".

AND NOW, MONTHS AND MONTHS AFTER 1/1/2000,,,,YOURDON'S EFFORT TO "CLEAN UP HIS IMAGE" CONTINUE. YOU HAVE ONE PARAGRAPH TO SHOW YOURDON AS A MODERATE??????

WE HAVE 100S OF 1,000S OF HIS OWN WORDS THAT SHOW HIM AS AN "OFF THE WALL" FELLOW TRAVELLER OF ***KNOWN EXTREMISTS** BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT.

SO WHEN IT COMES TO "BULL SHIT" THE WORDS FROM THE CRITIQUE OF YOURDON BY BRITSER IN COBOL MAG. COME TO MIND: "....IN THE GRAND AMERICAN TRADITION OF THE SNAKE OIL SALESMAN"...

BECAUSE TO THE END BEFORE 1/1/2000,,,YOURDON WAS IMPLYING DIRECTLY "BIG DISASTER COMING". READ "I KNOW WHAT I KNOW" AND THEN ASK YOURSELF, "WHO IS THIS GUY TRYING TO KID, SCARE, BULL SHIT? http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003Xnw

YOURDON GOT Y2K ****WRONG****. FROM THE START (AND HE DIDN'T EVEN ENTER THE "GAME" UNTIL 1997 LONG AFTER THE ISSUE WAS CRESTING),,,,HE INSISTED THAT THE IMPACTS WOULD BE GREATER ***BECAUSE*** :

HIS............"35 YRS OF EXPERTISE" IN SYSTEMS "TOLD" HIM THAT :

1. SOFTWARE PROJECTS DIDN'T COME IN ON TIME (TRUE)

2. Y2K PROJECTS WERE SOFTWARE PROJECTS (TRUE)

3. THE EVIDENCE FROM PEOPLE LIKE CAPERS JONES THAT HE USED WAS FACTUAL (TRUE)

4. THEREFORE................Y2K WOULD BE IN A RANGE OF SERIOUS TO DISASTER. (FALSE).. WHY?

*****BECAUSE IN CONSTRAST TO **YOURDON'S CENTRAL FALLACY** (WHICH I IDENTIFIED IN 1998)........Y2K PROJECTS WERE NOT SUBJECT TO THE METRICS THAT FULL SCALE START FROM SCRATCH SOFTWARE PROJECTS WERE.

AND IT WAS **YOURDON'S CENTRAL FALLACY** THAT CALLS INTO QUESTION ALL OF HIS "EXPERTISE" BECAUSE IF ***HIS "JUDGEMENT" WAS SO WRONG ABOUT Y2K*** (AND TRUST ME THAT CAN BE SHOWN 100 FOLD)....THEN WHAT GOOD IS IS "OPINION" ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE OUTSIDE OF HIS FIELD?

AND ,,,,,,,,,IS THAT A LEGITIMATE QUESTION??

YOU BET IT IS. BECAUSE...IT WAS YOURDON WHO "ANALYZED" THE "IMPACTS" ON:

BANKS

UTILITIES

FOOD SUPPLY

GOVERNMENT

ETC

WHEN HE HAD ******NO EXPERTISE IN THOSE FIELDS OTHER THAN AS A CITIZEN.

HE **IMPLIED** HIS "SPECIAL EXPERTISE" GAVE HIM THE "RIGHT" TO DO SO AS "AN EXPERT". DERIDED OBJECTORS BY CLAIMING THAT Y2K WAS UNIQUE WHEN IN FACT..........IT WAS MERELY A "MAINTENANCE PROJECT" AND NOT SUBJECT TO THE METRICS ....THAT YOURDON ****DEMANDED*** BE USED.

TO COMPOUND THAT............HE THEN :

ENCOURAGED THOSE 300,000 POSTS ON TB I WHICH INCLUDED MANY 100S OF *FACTUAL ERRORS* AND TOTALLY DISTORTED TO THE END.....WHAT **REMEDIATION** HAD ACCOMPLISHED.

AS FOR THE **REMEDIATION**........THE SECOND REAL QUESTION IS IF PETER DE JAGER AND ALAN SIMPSON AND I BEGAN TO MODIFY OUR PESSIMISTIC VIEWS IN LATE 1998 WHY WAS IT A **YEAR LATER** YOURDON WAS WRITING THE SPECIOUS "I KNOW WHAT I KNOW" ONLY **DAYS** BEFORE 1/1/2000????

EITHER HE "KNEW" y2K WOULD NOT BE A BIG DEAL........

IN WHICH CASE,,,,HE WAS DELIBERATELY DISTORTING THE IMPACTS FOR HIS "FOLLOWERS"....OR:

*********HE SIMPLY DID NOT KNOW BECAUSE HE NEVER DID HIS HOMEWORK*****

AND IF YOU READ TB 2000 AS A CRITIC YOU COME TO ONE, SINGLE CONCLUSION (AS MANY CRITICS ON AMAZON AND OTHER PLACES DID): THE WORK WAS ****SHODDY*** AND NOT FACTUAL. I GO FURTHER AND CLAIM IT WAS COPIED FROM A MOVIE SCRIPT SKETCHED OUT FOR YOURDON BY ***GARY NORTH*** AND........I HAVE THE EVIDENCE TO BACK UP THAT STATEMENT.

SAME "ESSAY":

While it's still too early to write the final chapter on the Y2K story, I believe that it's time to at least begin working on a post-mortem of what happened, what went well, what went poorly, what we anticipated correctly, and what we got wrong.  For some, this will seem a pointless exercise.  "Why bother?" the average citizen or business executive might ask.  "It's over.  Move on."  And in today's sound-bite news environment, that seems to be exactly how most are treating Y2K; having declared victory over the troublesome computer problem at 12:01 AM on January 1st, most have moved on to focus on the 2000 political campaign, or the upcoming baseball season, or the Oscar awards.  That's an understandable reaction if one assumes that Y2K was a unique, once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.  But suppose, as the Naval War College seems to believe, that Y2K is just the first of several complex, global, technology-based crises -- to be followed by crises involving cyberwarfare, bio-terrorism, ecological crises, or a non-Y2K collapse of the technology-based utility/telecommunications/banking infrastructure.  In that case, it would be extremely useful to take advantage of what we did well in coping with Y2K, and hopefully avoiding some of the mistakes that we made.

Even without a technology-based crisis, it would be helpful to apply the "lessons" of Y2K to ordinary computer development projects.  One of the reasons that I was personally so concerned about the possibility of Y2K failures was simply because of the track record our industry has developed for the past 40 years -- i.e., a substantial percentage of software projects are late, over budget, and full of bugs.  If the same level of shoddy project behavior had taken place with Y2K -- a phenomenon that I referred to in one of my essays as "deja vu all over again" -- chances are that we would still be trying to figure out how to get our phones, banking systems, and electric utilities to work properly.  But the apparent fact that we did not suffer these problems suggests that we figured out a way to achieve success on a massive scale -- not just on or two Y2K projects, but on an enormous number of them, around the world.  How did we do it?  How can we apply those lessons to "normal" projects, in order to improve our track record?

There are several ways to look at this phenomenon, one of which is underway in a different section of this web site, known as the Humpty Dumpty Y2K project.  That material, which is linked to a lively discussi on forum (participation in which requires registration, and the results of which are not available for browsing by the Internet community at large) asks the question: What did we learn from Y2K? What changes and modifications does it suggest that we should make, as part of the aftermath, in our personal lives and in the lives of our local neighborhood and our global community?  Again, some will shrug and dismiss the entire issue: those who felt Y2K was a non-event from the very beginning are not likely to see it as a catalyst for change.  But for others, the outcome (non-event) of Y2K after January 1st is only a minor part of the educational process that took place during the two or three years prior to the rollover.  Some, for example, have an entirely different opinion about alternative energy, or food stockpiling, or banking relationships, or the responsiveness of their government representatives, than they did three years ago -- and based on that, they're now considering significant changes in their lifestyle.

But the material below is more of a traditional postmortem -- an examination of plans, predictions, and actions from the perspective of someone with 20-20 hindsight.  Unfortunately, that turns out to be a poor metaphor: one of the unfortunate conclusions about Y2K is that there has been very little forthright disclosure from companies and government agencies about the true situation, both before the rollover and afterwards.  There are Y2K glitches, failures, and problems -- but the responsible individuals and organizations don't want to talk about them, just as they don't want to talk about oil spills, toxic chemical leaks, hazardous waste materials, unsafe products, and various other "skeletons" in their respective closets.  Instead of referring to this material as "20-20 hindsight," perhaps I should have called it "Blurred Vision."

Ohttp://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003Xnw

-- cpr (buytexas@swbell.net), July 24, 2000.