Dec 15. 1998 - With a little more then one year left, on average, only 36% percent of the major airlines' estimated Y2K budget has been spent, as revealed today by Proma Creative Solutions Ltd. following its comprehensive review of financial filings.

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Again, follow the money. The Airlines have not spent it.

No Airlines, economy in the toilet. And that is just OUR Airlines.

http://actor.actcom.co.il:8080/ows-wis/pr31.htm Paul Milne If you live within five miles of a 7-11, you're toast.

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-- Paul Milne (fedinfo@halifax.com), January 22, 1999

Answers

Paul, I think all of these industries had a "V-8 moment" and felt quite foolish when they learned that Italy was going to solve its recently recognized y2k problem by attacking it, sooner or later, with a "burst of activity". Why go through all that work and worry when you can just pull an all-nighter on December 31. Computer guys are good at pulling all-nighters.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), January 22, 1999.

We certainly are/were but this time it's more like an "all yearer' and it simply ain't gonna git it!

Chuck, been there, done that, got the T-shirt, it covers most of the scars .........and is part of the reason I drive

-- Chuck, night driver (rienzoo@en.com), January 22, 1999.

I worked for the technology subsidiary of an major US airline for 11 years.

The one I worked for started Y2K in 1996. Massive budget. In fact, the technology subsidiary that I worked for acquired all the computer operations of another airline because the other airline "knew" in 1997 that they weren't going to make it (mainly because they didn't archive their source code).

Fortunately for my former company, the DID archive every bit of their code (in fact they were quite ANAL about it) and they've had a chance to look at most of their systems. They're already through most of the code remediation (in 1997 and 1998) and some testing is already complete.

One nice fact about the reservations system I worked on was that most dates were in a form that did not contain a year. The system would only compute reservations 333 days into the future, and two days into the past with no concept of a "year".

So I'm confident that my former airline will flying, provided the FAA can get their systems remediated.

The code I worked on had no dates. Only measurements of elapsed seconds. This was used for communications timeouts and such. I suspect most respectable software developers used the same techniques, avoiding using mm,dd,yy dates where possible. Basically, I call the function at the start of a function to get the seconds, then at the end, then do the subtraction to get elapsed seconds. A lot of code is written like this.

A lot of other code simply puts date/time stamps on transactions and log files. As long as there date/time stamps aren't used in calculations, most of those items can be ignored.

Like Yourdon says, what you have to fix usually isn't that much. Its finding what you have to fix (out of your billion lines of code) thats the problem.

In fact, I think this company will probably be purchasing the assets of other companies after the Y2K bomb goes off. And at a massive discount. Who knows, maybe they'll be "contracted" to run the computers at the FAA, also?

-- Glen Austin (gdaustin@aol.com), January 22, 1999.