The curse of a long drive to work each day is the extra time that it leaves for thinking about Y2K contingency planning issues. In the past I had always thought that us "East Coasters" would be able to provide an early warning for those less fortunate "West Coasters" out there. I realized one afternoon that while time zones travel at a speed of 1042 miles per hour, electrons travel(or don't) at a speed of 186,000 miles per SECOND! DUH! You West Coasters are gonna get the news at about the same time that we do.

Jim

-- Anonymous, December 09, 1998

Answers

Jim, it all depends on whether the system and/or components and subsystems are using local time or UTC (or a mix).

See my PLC examples from the thread in the "Embedded Controls" topic: "Are power plants (and others) testing applications or the embedded chips themselves for y2k problems?"

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000G3V

So you're right. We will see some problems at midnight UTC (19:00 EST and 16:00 PST), and then more problems as faults cascade, then a burst of problems at midnight local time and then more delayed problems in the hours, days and weeks following midnight 1/1/2000.

Remember also that some systems may experience problems on and after 1/1/1999 as many business systems use a Julian calendar that looks ahead 365 days. 1/1/1999 will be one of the "canaries in the coal mine". Other canaries will be the start of state and national fiscal years on 4/1/1999, 7/1/1999 and 10/1/1999.

--AJ

-- Anonymous, December 09, 1998