Your customers are benefiting from your knowledge of Y2K issues, but how about the rest of the community? Sharing this knowledge with local officials to help dispel "sky is falling" myths for them, identify areas of real concern, and focus their organizations on effective, constructive solutions. You'll not only be making the place you live better, you'll generate publicity that can lead to new business! Find out how to take the initiative and get the resources to start athttp://www.microsoft.com/directaccess/rdr/0512/y2k.asp

-- Stephen M. Poole, CET (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), May 16, 1999

Answers

Coming from a company with MANY known unsolved y2k bugs, this is pretty rich.

However, the thoughts there I guess.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), May 16, 1999.

Microsoft would do better to getting its own house in order and simplifying means for programmers to easily determine what problems are and to easily remediate them. INCLUDING free and easily located upgrades and patches to the non-compliant crap they have foisted on the PC community.

-- vbProg (vbProg@MicrosoftAndIntel.Suck), May 16, 1999.

Wouldn't hurt Microsoft's image any either, if they seriously addressed the inherent instability of the Windows operating system(s).

How is it that Linux-based systems almost never hang up, but Win** systems on identical platforms hang up on a daily basis?

(There I go again, tilting at windmills....)

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), May 16, 1999.

There imay be a silver lining to the Microsoft cloud -- I have a son who was temping at Redmond for several years. Now that the class action suit to provide stock options to the "temps" on a basis comparable to regular employees has taken another giant step toward success, he and his friends from that period have estimated (given final resolution in their favor) some of them may be due for options which would net upwards of $200,000 individually at present value.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), May 17, 1999.

So are you getting the beers in then Tom :)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), May 17, 1999.

Microsoft has released a free Y2K Product analyzer which is pretty slick and very easy to use. It scans your PC, identifies all the MS apps, then generates an HTML page showing the compliance of each app, with a hotlink to any required upgrades or service packs. This is really handy because MSOffice and NT service packs are a bear to keep track of.

In an effort to conserve bandwidth, I will stipulate that linking to MS after scanning you PC may bring out the Fear of Bill in some. I see no evidence that this is a privacy risk.

Whatever.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/year2k/pca/pca.htm

-- Lewis (aslanshow@yahoo.com), May 17, 1999.

Now, if only MS could get it right and stop all this "service pack" stuff for NT.

I dread installing SP 4, for some apps can't even run on it. Now they have SP 5. I called the affected companies to determine if they'll run on SP 5 or have patches available, and I'm told that the release date is undetermined at this point in time.

So, with SP 5 installed, I supposedly have a "Y2k compliant platform", yet half the shelfware apps I'm using won't work. Kewl, but the users want their apps, so I'm back to SP 3.

As Diane would say: :::sigh:::

Linux is starting to look better every day....

-- Tim (pixmo@pixelquest.com), May 17, 1999.

Actually, SP 4 was good for my work machine. Haven't seen the Blue Screen of Death since I got it (so much for the rumor that NT is "crash-proof"- mine went down not infrequently, at least prior to SP 4). Of course, maybe I haven't had it long enough- the Blue Screen may yet visit me again.

I do think Microsoft does make itself look silly by its repeated Y2K failures (though I don't know how many, if any, could be called catastrophic or serious), while all the time blathering about No Problem.

Incidentally, on an OT note, though: I was one of those "pay to play" Win95 beta testers, and never had the slightest problem with the thing, even though I was running it on my (now) humble 486-33 w/ 8 meg of RAM. And I personally reallllllllly like Win98. NT strikes me as a resource hog.

I may put Linux on one of my home machines at some point just for the fun of it- to play around, learn a new environment, etc. Don't know if I'd go K or Gnome, though. I tend to prefer K from what I've seen, but it seems Gnome might have momentum... wow, talk about off- topic... I wonder how Linux will react to IA-64 architecture? Questions, questions... does all this mean there's a life outside Y2K?... naw... :)

-- Drew Parkhill/CBN News (y2k@cbn.org), May 17, 1999.