This is under the TB2000 Category: Misc (Re-typed from a handout-- thought it might be of interest.)

Source: (1991) InSight, Syncrude Canada Ltd., Communications Divsion

IF 99% IS GOOD ENOUGH, THEN ...

- 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

- 268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year.

- 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year.

- 811,000 faulty rolls of 35mm film will be loaded this year.

- 14,208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year.

- 2,488,200 books will be shipped in the next 12 months with the wrong cover.

- Two plane landings daily at O' Hare International Airport in Chicago will be unsafe.

- 3,056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.

- 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.

- 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.

- 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strip.

- $761,900 will be spent in the next 12 months on tapes and CDs that will not play.

- 55 malfunctioning automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12 months.

- 20,000 incorrect drug prescription will be written in the next 12 months.

- 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.

- 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day today.

- 315 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictonary of the English Language will be misspelled.

- $9,690 will be spent every day on defective, often unsafe sporting equipment.

- 2,000,000 documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

- 22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.

- Homes would be without electricity, heat, water, and telephone service for 15 minutes every day.

- Every page of the telephone directory would contain four wrong numbers.

-- winter wondering (winterwondring@yahoo.com), September 06, 1999

Answers

Not even good enough for government work...

Divide the numbers by 10 for 99.9% and it still looks bad. But this may be "normal"...

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), September 06, 1999.

BWAHAHAHAHAH!(oh,god,I'm gonna shit myself)HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@yahoo.com), September 06, 1999.

99% looks like such a solid number, yet so much depends on how it's applied. You can apply it facetiously (and get numbers like these) or you can apply it realistically.

One thing I know about -- what is a "defective" personal computers. I can guarantee you that 100% of PCs are shipped with at LEAST 100 BIOS bugs. I know this because that's about how many bugs the BIOS vendors repair each month (which is, unforunately, fewer than the number of new ones they add).

If you read consumer reports, you find that essentially 100% of new automobiles have at least one sample defect, even from the most prestigious marques.

OK, how that 99% is applied at is one important aspect. The other is, are we talking random here? The way software works (in nontrivial programs like applications and systems), the least-exercised 1% of the code is probably *never* exercised. According to studies, the average sophisticated user still uses less than 10% of the features built into a word processor, spreadsheet or database. You could FILL the remaining 90% with bugs and never notice a thing.

So back to this list. What percentage of books published have at least one misspelling? How many pairs of shoes are precisely identical (or what does mismatched mean?). The list goes on and on. Gary North made this point very well -- if 99% of the cars in a race are perfect, you have a good race. If every car in the race is 99% perfect, then you may have no race at all depending on what that 1% is. Definitions are crucial. This list carefully makes the worst-case definitions. As a rhetorical tool, it's fine. As a cause to worry, well...

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 06, 1999.

What I think Zoobie is trying to say is that he just realized he was not wearing any underwear.

-- What is he trying to say? (may@never.know), September 06, 1999.

Winter wondering,

As I see it, as a CPA dealing with the IRS every day, 2 million documents lost is VERY generous...I think they run at about 95% or less, IMHO.

-- Southside Ed (Still@home.fornow), September 06, 1999.

- 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.

Nah, the post office would never mess up our mail.

I think zoobie wears underwear, but feels he's ready not to, for the millenium. zoobie, what will your mom say?

-- Mara Wayne (MaraWayne@aol.com), September 06, 1999.

And we all know that Flint is smarter than Greenspan, so that settles it.

-- (not@now.com), September 06, 1999.

not:

Are you talking about the Greenspan who said "99% is not good enough" two years ago, or the Greenspan who said the financial sector had made adequate progress and the banks were the safest place for your money, two months ago?

I agree with Greeenspan in BOTH cases.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 06, 1999.

1.09 nuclear plants will not successfully correct their Y2K problems.

(even though we all know those redundant safety systems like the ones at Indian Point work flawlessly)

350 miles is minimum distance from a nuke gone bad. Happy New Years to you and yours.

-- Gordon (g_gecko_69@hotmail.com), September 06, 1999.

And this is indeed why SOME industries are MORE sensitive to failure rates than others. Some industries could perhaps take a 20% failure rate and keep on trucking -- the transportation industry, perhaps. A mis-shipped or late delivery can be tolerated, even 20% of them (maybe).

But then there is the banking industry. You know, the one that ALAN GREENSPAN insisted in his testimony under oath to congress, had to be 100% because 99% WAS NOT GOOD ENOUGH??? One screw-up at one bank can easily magnify into more screw-ups at more banks. (Sure wouldn't want MY money in one....)

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.com), September 06, 1999.

-IEEE-

100% not good enough

-- David Butts (dciinc@aol.com), September 06, 1999.

sheesh y'all are such literalists,Iwas just saying that I found the post amusing and I was laughing so hard that I feared I might loose control of my bodily funtions.Jeepers,you sucked the fun out of that one :(

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@yahoo.com), September 06, 1999.

Thankyou for the claification Zoobie. Please not that I am now sitting in the corner with my cyber dunce cap firmly on m head.

-- What is he trying to say? (I@was.wrong), September 06, 1999.

Very good post, winter. This list really makes one stop and think, even if some items do sound like "business as usual".

I don't recall the exact population number of this country. Senior moment. But if 1% has serious disruptions in their lives, I don't want to be in the 1%. That's a very rosy outlook, but I still don't want to be.

Flint, you are so fond of arguing that you missed the point as usual.

-- Scat (sgcatique@webtv.net), September 06, 1999.

The Titanic sank on an ocean that was 99% free of iceburgs.

-- Dennis (djolson@pressenter.com), September 06, 1999.

I don't think that Flint missed the point at all. If my Windows, Unix and, yes, even my Mac programs [I don't want to talk about the mainframe] were this good, I would be estatic. The only problem is where the 1 % sits. I think that is what we are waiting for come January [or earlier]. I wonder how many more patches we will receive before Dec. 31....

Best wishes,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 06, 1999.

Z:

Scat is right. I knew perfectly well that the purpose of winter's post was to emphasize that no matter how close we get to fixed, it's not close enough and we're all DOOMED! HAHAHAHAhahahahaha.

But instead, I chose to misinterpret the post as a serious question as to just how resiliant our systems are, and how high a level of what kinds of errors we can tolerate and still carry on functionally. And the answer to that question is, hey, we have a LOT of slop in our systems, we are NOT on the ragged edge of failure every which way. Reality is easier than high school, where you can pass if you get two right out of three. In business, Robert Townsend (Read "Up The Organization", great book) wrote that a business executive, at best, is no more successful than a professional batter -- a .300 average is very good in terms of correct decisions.

But that's all missing the point, as scat has said. The point isn't whether we'll suffer, the point is to agree that we will and winter has found yet another clever way of saying so. I should have laughed and applauded and agreed -- that's the real point.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 06, 1999.

Good, finally you admit you like to hear yourself spout non-sense.

Flint, why is it that we don't see you post in threads such as this one?

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000y cn

I'm sure this L.A. plant wasn't functioning at 100% bug-free efficiency before they started the y2k test. But those marginal "bugs" and "glitches" weren't y2k bugs either.

You keep coming back to that "error safety margin" which is based on non-y2k related glitches.

-- Chris (%$^&^@pond.com), September 06, 1999.

Flint:

What you are saying is that your responses aren't honest. By-the-way, even George Brett often did better than 0.300. The Pirates once started a team where everyone [even the pitcher (Ken Brett) batted over 0.300]. I think that you too have missed the point [and clearly know little about baseball]. The point is; things aren't perfect now, but we have adjusted to the imperfections. We don't know where they will be in the near future. It will be [pardon the pun after the above] a whole new ball game. We will see how flexible we are. As you have said many times we should be able to work-it-out. Only the future will tell....

Be

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 06, 1999.

Z:

My efforts are to turn dogma into discussion. Otherwise, there'd be little to add except call-and-response chants here like a church. If this is dishonest, I'm sorry. And yes, I knew the "proper" response to this particular incantation. But that's the enemy of thought.

Chris:

I expect many such snafu events around rollover. It's exactly such events that I'm preparing against. Computer code can be expected to wander down untested byways, I know this. But except very locally (and visibly), nobody was really inconvenienced by that particular event. I think you can see that it takes quite a large number of such events, all at once, to affect more than a small minority of everybody.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 06, 1999.

Flint:

And yes, I knew the "proper" response to this particular incantation. But that's the enemy of thought.

Not if it is well done, but I sense that you are getting tired....

Best wishes,,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), September 06, 1999.

winter wondering- This is a real keeper. Thanks for the laugh, uh, I mean WAKE UP call.

-- Gia (laureltree7@hotmail.com), September 06, 1999.

Flint, just to be completely clear on this: You actually admit that you will deliberately mis-interpret a point, or argue against a point, just to get a heated discussion going, regardless of the facts or for that matter what you might personally believe?

Or, to put it another way: that you are, in effect, a troll???????!!!!!!

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.com), September 07, 1999.