Frank discussion about STRATCOM's Y2K progress.

http://detnews.com/1999/technology/9901/13/01130222.htm

Troll Maria

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), January 13, 1999

Answers

Good link. Thanks for the post.

Being a programmer and having often seen the argument that 'newer systems should be OK' the following line caught my eye:

A Year 2000 glitch in the Java Script programming language driving the clock triggered the collapse.

For those not aware, Java is a very new programming language. The article did not elaborate as to whether the error was in the the actual script or in the Java runtime engine. (If you're not familiar with these terms - don't be concerned. It's technical and probably not a distinction that a non-programmer/reporter would make.)

Either way, I think we'll find thousands of these as we go foward. While I believe the vast majority of these will be, in and of themselves, of little consequence, there may be a few more serious. There is also the DTC issue (death of a thousand cuts) - meaning no single failure is catastrophic but that several things going wrong at once can be overwhelming.

As was said in an earlier thread here and made clearer by this article, the 'unknown unknowns' (unk-unks) will be a factor.

-- Arnie Rimmer (arnie_rimmer@usa.net), January 13, 1999.

There are also problems with some C, C++ programs on certain kinds of date calls. Won't go into detail here. Cory H has commented on this and considers it a hidden problem in many of the newer programs.

-- RD. ->H (drherr@erols.com), January 13, 1999.

I recently downloaded a Y2K fix for Win 98 from Micro$oft. I didn't think that I had to worry about my new OS being non-complient but...

-- d (d@dgi.com), January 13, 1999.

From the article:

"I think we'll be lucky if on Jan. 1 ... the system just
doesn't come on, because then we'll know we have a problem,"
Hamre told a Senate committee in June. "Our bigger fear is
going to be that it seems to work fine but the data is
unreliable."

This points out what a lot of people miss about the Y2K problem: Computers may very well work, but will be completely unreliable and therefore untrustworthy.

-- Jack (jsprat@eld.net), January 14, 1999.