I appreciate the answers to my query about ACM. Talk about giving the ivory tower a bad name!

Regarding the other professional organizations I was invoved with back in my IBM mainframe days:

It's hard to tell, from their sites, if either GUIDE or SHARE is bringing much to the party. Are they?

And then there is DPMA. I can't get a home page for that organization. (Incidentally, I tried www.dpma.org and got a Delta pilots' association). Are they still viable, and if so, are they doing anything useful on Y2K?

-- Peter Errington (petere@ricochet.net), March 27, 1999

Answers

DPMA doesn't exist any more. It has morphed itself into some other organizational entity, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't remember its name. But I don't think it has much influence or awareness in the computing industry these days.

But IEEE is still fairly significant, so the lack of Y2K activity in that organization is just about as depressing as that of the ACM.

While we're at it, it should also be pointed out that the overwhelming number of universities throughout the U.S. have shown ZERO interest in Y2K. That goes for MIT, Harvard, Yales, Princeton, Berkelely, UCLA, Carnegie-Mellon, etc etc etc etc.

Ed

-- Ed Yourdon (ed@yourdon.com), March 27, 1999.

Re: U.S. universities showing interest in Y2K

Stanford University has had a Year 2000 at Stanford section at http://www.stanford.edu/group/itss/year2000/ for at least a couple of years. [Note: the basic Stanford URL changed recently -- used to be www-leland.stanford.edu]

Its "What You Can Do" page includes a bit at the bottom about "Ensuring your home life is Y2K ready..." that has links to preparation recommendations by the Gartner Group and Red Cross.

-- No Spam Please (No_Spam_Please@anon_ymous.com), March 27, 1999.

Just for everyone's information, DPMA is alive and well, we have just changed our name... We are now called AITP (Association of Information Technology Professionals). You can find us at WWW.AITP.ORG or by doing a search on AITP. By doing a search you will find some of the chapters across the country.

-- Carlie Scott (carlie_scott@yahoo.com), March 29, 1999.

Ed, you said:

"While we're at it, it should also be pointed out that the overwhelming number of universities throughout the U.S. have shown ZERO interest in Y2K."

Sad though it may be, my experience with academics is that, in general they show very little interest in the practical applications of their subject areas. A friend of mine is the chair of the CS department at a college in Buffalo, and I have heard him say more than once that he often forgets that people actually use computers for purposes other than intellectual stimulation. He is but one of many examples of ivory-tower isolationism I have encountered over the years.

I have come to believe that while we can look to higher education institutions for grand ideas and research, practical application of those ideas comes largely from outside academia. If you look to higher education for leadership in solving real-world problems you are setting yourself up for a mighty dissapointment.

There are, of course, exceptions such as Howard Rubin, but even he is doing much of his "real world" work outside the confines of Hunter College.

-- Paul Neuhardt (neuhardt@ultranet.com), March 30, 1999.