*Germany Sets Up Y2K Control Centre, Sees No Bugs* -

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[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

Germany sets up Y2K control centre, sees no bugs

Dec 09, 1999

By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN, Dec 9 (Reuters) - The German government is to set up a central control room to collect and relay information on ``millennium bug'' problems, but is confident the new year will begin without untoward bangs, it said on Thursday.

About 100 officials will staff the specially built control centre on the 10th floor of the Interior Ministry around the clock from early on December 31 until January 3.

``We're hoping it will be a quiet night,'' Brigitte Zypries, a state secretary in the ministry, told a news conference.

"Our aim is to collect as much information as possible from the experiences that other countries reaching midnight before Germany have, and to distribute that knowledge to the relevant agencies in Germany.''

Berlin's embassies in New Zealand, Australia, Japan and other countries to the east that will see the date change up to 12 hours before Germany will report on any problems.

The federal border police will have 10,000 officers on duty on January 1 and the national disaster relief agency Technische Hilfswerke will have 4,000 staffers on hand.

The government spent more than 100,000 marks ($50,000) on special phone lines that will link the central ``bunker'' to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who will celebrate the New Year holiday in his home in Hannover, and other top officials.

BEST-CASE SCENARIO

Zypries declined to say what the worst-case scenario, offering a ``best-case'' vision instead.

``We do not expect any disruption...The best thing would be that we get criticised for all these preparations and spending 100,000 marks on special phones that weren't even needed.''

The Interior Ministry and Economics Ministry have already said they do not expect Germany to face any serious ``Y2K'' problems and are confident of their contingency plans.

The private and public sectors have made massive efforts this year to make their operations immune to the millennium bug, which may arise because many older computers record dates using only the last two digits of the year.

If left uncorrected, systems could read the year 2000 as 1900, generating errors in innumerable kinds of electrical equipment or even major system crashes.

Germany was criticised by international organisations earlier this year for not doing enough to make Europe's biggest economy ``Y2K safe.''

But the Economics Ministry says Germany now ranks among the world's best-prepared countries, and that 98 percent of its 3.3 million companies have made extensive efforts to get their computers ready for 2000.

Nuclear reactors will not be shut down on New Year's Eve because relevant authorities have examined every stage of the process and found them fully ``Y2K-compliant.''

The telecommunications sector has also passed international testing without any sign of millennium problems.

URL: http://infoseek.go.com/Content?arn=a2127LBY859reulb-19991209&qt=%22year+2000%22+bug*+glitch*+y2k&sv=IS&lk=noframes&col=NX&kt=A&ak=news1486

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...(hittin the)...

-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), December 09, 1999

Answers

Yes. Ve haf everysing under kontrol. Ze komputers vill do as zey are told!

-- fatanddumb (fatdumb@nd.happy), December 09, 1999.

Germany sets up Y2K control centre, sees no bugs

...other than the one that damn near torched their money center bank earlier this week...

-- a (a@a.a), December 09, 1999.


Hey, that was no big deal, "a", they simply retracted the upgrade. They have a full ... homina, homina ... 22 days to figure out how to make it work.

No sweatzenstein.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), December 09, 1999.

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