"We do not know or cannot really realistically make an evaluation of what the economic impact is as a consequence of the breakdowns that may occur. We do not know the size. We do not know the contagion and interaction within the system, and we do not know how rapidly we can resolve the problem." Alan Greenspan - Chairman, Federal Reserve Board Excerpted from testimony given on February 25th before Senator Bob Bennett's Subcommittee

I've tried to get the source document, but I can't dig up a URL and I gave my hardcopy to someone. Any help appreciated.

-- Puddintame (achillesg@hotmail.com), April 12, 1999

Answers

not at the fed or y2k.senate.gov site

-- wish I could (sorry@canthelp.com), April 13, 1999.

Greenspan comment

-- Blue Himalayan (bh@k2.y), April 13, 1999.

Found it over at GN's site. This is from the question-and-answer with the Senate following Greenspan's H/H prepared testimony to the Senate on 2/98. This is the stuff they usually lift for the "sound bites" on the nightly news.

Greenspan

-- Nathan (nospam@all.com), April 13, 1999.

Amazing...

-- Wiseguy (got@it.gov), April 13, 1999.

Nowadays, you can "comment" (document) your (programmer's) source code as you write it -- "comment lines" along with the code lines, so you and posterity will have a clue as to what you did.

Back "then" you could't do that -- took too much memory. Nowadays a good language will compile the source code into compiled code, which is the actual operating/running code. And the compiler doesn't put the comments into the compiled code. Whenever you make a change, you change the source code and recompile. But, to get to the point -- programming is still such an "art" rather than a cut and dry mechanical procedure -- EVEN WITH DOCUMENTED/CODE IT IS STILL A BITCH SIX MONTHS, A YEAR ... LATER TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THE HELL IS (SUPPOSED) TO BE HAPPENING

And Greenspan's programming successors got NO documentation. And they may not even have the source code anymore -- or the source code version they can find may not be the version corresponding to what was used to make the compiled version.

Fun, fun.

-- vbProg (vbProg@MicrosoftandIntelSucks.com), April 13, 1999.

bold off

-- vbProg (vbProg@MicrosoftANdIntelSuck.com), April 13, 1999.