Hey folks,

I'm in the final stages of preparing a personal Y2K-awareness website for church friends and family (http://www.landsurfing.com/y2k/index.html). Over the past week several of my colleagues have reviewed the material on the site and have offered some very constructive feedback. Here is one in particular from an engineer at Sun Microsystems that might be of interest to this group...

"As far as content, I really appreciated having all of your resources on line. I think it's a valuable collection of pointers for someone who wants to do more research. I do have a suggestion for making it more effective.

Personally, I'm not yet convinced that there will be more than just minor, point failures when the year rolls over. I'm also curious about how problematic it is to fix the problem, once a problem surfaces. What would really help would be following through a real-world, believable example of how the the Y2K problem could ripple into a more systematic failure, and why fixing it might take more than just a couple days. I'm sure there must be an example somewhere in all the pointers of resources, but I couldn't find it in my quick browsing through. It would be very helpful to pick a few illustrative examples and highlight them fairly prominently in your web page hierarchy.

Then, once people are convinced of the plausibility of a serious problem, they'd be more motivated to figure out why they should plan and figure out a response."

Do any of you have a "real-world, believable example of how the Y2K problem could ripple into a more systematic failure, and why fixing it might take more than just a couple days" that I could post to my site? I'd like to post examples of both software and embedded microprocessor failure scenarios.

As you will see when you visit my site, its principal audience is the Christian community. The primary purpose of the site is not to get folks to "flee to the hills," but rather to encourage the community of faith to become aware of potential Y2K problems, stay involved in your community, and prepare adequate resources so that you can SERVE not just SURVIVE.

Thanks in advance for your feedback and assistance!

Brian -----

-- Brian E. Smith (besmith@mail.arc.nasa.gov), January 25, 1999

Answers

try The Cassandra Project. They have a long list, although it lacks links to sources.

http://cassandraproject.org/y2koccur.html

Good luck

-- Lewis (aslanshow@yahoo.com), January 25, 1999.

I hate to spoil your day, Brian, but you might visit the Hamasaki site at http://www.kiyoinc.com/current.html. There you can read the Infomagic series I,II,and III published in Weather Reports WRP100,WRP103, and WRP107 respectively. The views of Infomagic are a little more extreme then those of others, but no one has proved that it can't happen in the way Infomagic describes.

-- dave (wootendave@hotmail.com), January 25, 1999.

Brian,

Here's a few on embeddeds. It would take me longer than forever to go through the software examples. And even this is not a complete list of embedded examples.

Try the Fortune magazine from April 27 for one look at what Y2K can do to manufacturing:

http://pathfinder.com/fortune/1998/980427/imt.html

-------------------------

Here's one about how *one*third* of computer-related hospital/health care equipment in South Australia failed due to Y2K (and largely due to embedded chips/systems). The failure rate is not always that high (in fact, that's the highest I've seen, but I doubt it's all due to embeddeds, though obviously, from the equipment described, at least some of it is):

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/state/4227351.htm

------------------------------

A look at some potential problems for embeddeds in the power grid from EE Times:

http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19981214S0057

-----------------------------

You can also read my interview with Rick Cowles, the top Y2K electricity & power expert, which touches on the embeddeds subject:

http://www.cbn.org/y2k/cowles.htm

---------------------------

Here's more on problems in the power & health care industries:

http://www.businesstoday.com/techpages/y2kdeep101598.htm

---------------------

Still another one on embeddeds & power, from Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0921/6206258a.htm

------------------------------

Two links on how embeddeds can affect drinking water:

http://www.sltrib.com/01181999/utah/75860.htm

http://www.canoe.ca/Year2000Crisis/jan13_warroom.html

---------------------------

Also, check out this page- from the Institution of Electrical Engineers in the UK:

http://www.iee.org.uk/2000risk/

------------------------------- And don't miss this introduction to embeddeds:

http://www.iinet.net.au/~vector/yr2000em.html

-------------------------

In addition, somewhere or other I have an article(s) about the threat embeddeds pose to international shipping (on the big tankers), but I can't find it at the moment.

This is just a quick list; there's more info out there, covering different parts of the economy.

You might want to set up a link to our site for your list of links (or... maybe not ).

-- Drew Parkhill/CBN News (y2k@cbn.org), January 25, 1999.

Ooops- that last line (the "maybe not" was supposed to be a joke- I mean to put a in there, but I'm doing a billion things as usual, so I forgot it. Sorry about that...

-- Drew Parkhill/CBN News (y2k@cbn.org), January 25, 1999.