After a year and a half of doing serious research about y2k and pouring over 10s of thousands of documents on the subject and having 20 + years electronics T/S to component level experience in R & D. I am firmly convinced that y2k will not be just a bump in the road or business as usual. I believe that the y2k event will be like a falling set of dominos. While the possibility of our power and phones remaining operational are fair, There is a stronger possibility that we will see cascading failures. The reason I believe this is that many of the utilities which are privately owned (Telcom,Electic,Gas,oil,banking,etc etc) will follow the bottom line to quartly profits right down to the end, in favor of believing that fix on failure will solve all y2k problems quickly. This management style is prevasive in all the sectors needing extensive custom y2k repairs. Y2k is expensive, and doing the inergration testing required to ensure reliable operation would mean having to derail their 24 hour a day money train with little or no dollars returned on such a heavy investment. If the machine breaks in y2k they expect to be able to call out the heavy hitter T/S (tech troubleshooters)people funded by disaster relief money provided by the Taxpayer to get these services back up and running asap. They will get a free ride to fix on failure and modernize at the cost of our inconvience and risk to our life safety. These utilities are now run by huge transnational corporations that don't care how they hurt people,they are shield by the best attorneys money can buy. They have bought every politician in Washington to pass new y2k legislation that makes them untouchable and unreachable no matter how many people get killed by their profit motivated decisions. There will be no fines or penality for them. They are the new world order, they are above the law, they tax us with fees,with no real avenue for redress of serious grevances. We will have to suffer next year so these power brokers can eliminate there competition. Remember the monopoly game board. They want to control all the spaces. Y2k will be a strategic game to see who will control the world after the kick over of the table. So it will not be business as usual. Disruptions will be great. While the electricity may stay on in some places,many will lose their jobs because of the coming scarcity of oil and strategic materials from non y2k ready countries. Food scaricities will affect the big cities first than migrate out to the rural areas next. Just in time inventories will not be replenished because of upstream vendor failures. What this means is that local cities that fail to aggressively iniate a diligent serious comunity/city partnership contingency proactive response plan in advance of the opening days of the y2k, will find that they will have unmanageable social unrest. problems. Expect at the very minimum that you might not be able to work for the first 6 months in the year 2000. At the other end of the scale be ready with a bug out plan to move to higher ground If the phones and power completely tank here for more than 20 days after the new years unset. Famine, war, terrorism, contagions could result if y2k goes worst case senario. Either way it will not be business as usual. Expect it and prepare diligently for it, you won't be sorry you did. Youll be sorry if you don't. Get and keep your options open and flexable to respond to the y2k as it unfolds. If you have the option of taking an early retirement from your job doit and proactively move rural if you can afford to doit. If y2k passes with it being successfully managed than you can always move back. Same with selling that inner city condo. Take the money now, get cash,gold and food supplies heavy now. Dont wait or you will miss out creating the best options available.

-- y2k aware mike (y2k aware mike @ Conservation . com), June 06, 1999

Answers

Agree with you 100% Mike, that's what I have done, everything apart from going rural - I'm single so I am taking a chance (knowing what will probably happen), however I'm not downtown, I'm in the burbs and will have armed backup. Very well said Mike.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), June 06, 1999.

Yo, mikey. In another thread, you said that you had worked on actual embedded systems that could cause all sorts of Y2K problems. I asked you to give me a make and model number. Did you forget me? :)

-- Stephen M. Poole, CET (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), June 06, 1999.

20 + years electronics T/S to component level experience in R & D. Only in R & D?

The reason I believe this is that many of the utilities which are privately owned (Telcom,Electic,Gas,oil,banking,etc etc) will follow the bottom line to quartly profits right down to the end, in favor of believing that fix on failure will solve all y2k problems quickly.

Where do you get the idea that they are not working at fixing the problem now? There is no information out there to back up what you just said.

This management style is prevasive in all the sectors needing extensive custom y2k repairs.

No it is not. The overwhelming work being to "fix" the Y2K problem shows that your opinion is incorrect. Perhaps all of the reading you have done has been on information that had been out of date and proven wrong oe just not updates as the work was getting done.

Y2k is expensive, and doing the inergration testing required to ensure reliable operation would mean having to derail their 24 hour a day money train with little or no dollars returned on such a heavy investment

A lot of testing can and has been done without "derailing" the normal operation of the operation. And you seem to have some sort of resentment of businesses making money. You act like they would put profit ahead of lives, if anything they would see that as bad for business

If the machine breaks in y2k they expect to be able to call out the heavy hitter T/S (tech troubleshooters)people

How is an electronic tech going to fix a software problem?

funded by disaster relief money provided by the Taxpayer to get these services back up and running asap. These utilities are now run by huge transnational corporations that don't care how they hurt people,they are shield by the best attorneys money can buy. They have bought every politician in Washington to pass new y2k legislation that makes them untouchable and unreachable no matter how many people get killed by their profit motivated decisions.

Oh I see now, your background has nothing to do with what you are saying, you've been off of your prozac again. You do not make much sense with what ever misinformation you are ponticating.Youv'e lost half of your full wave rectifier.

-- Cherri (sans@brigadoon.com), June 06, 1999.

bold off

-- Anonymous99 (Anonymous99@Anonymous99.xxx), June 06, 1999.

Cherry smoked her selenium long time ago.

Hey anyone here remember the stink?

The good old germanium and selenium rectifiers had such a nice stink

once they burned up.

Cherry's postings always remind me of that stink.

Cherry's postings remind me always of that.

-- Rickjohn (rickjohn1@yahoo.com), June 06, 1999.

Mr. Stephen M. Poole:

"www.willitwork.com"

will surely clear up your doubts concerning faulty embedded systems. There are literally thousands pieces of non-compliant equipment mentioned by brand, model#, etc. Motorola, Intel, Bentley-Nevada , Fisher-Rosemont,Foxboro, Honeywell, etc., etc. web pages will surely help also to improve your focus on this subject.

-- George (jvilches@sminter.com.ar), June 06, 1999.

George:

While I didn't do an exhaustive search at that site, I couldn't find one single identified piece of equipment mentioned. All I found was contacts to question about compliance. This is a valuable resource for anyone, certainly. But it's not a list of noncompliances. It is good to know that thousands of manufacturers of equipment are making their status readily available. This should speed up the process of remediation.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 06, 1999.

Cherri

(1) "Follow the bottom line to quarterly profits... has been the pervasive management style in the US... (in the past decades, we might add)", as y2k aware Mike has stated above, is a self-evident fact that requires no proof, otherwise Y2K would never have been alive and kickin' by late 1999 in the first place, right? Check this out with any manager or executive from the business trenches and you will convince yourself in a matter of minutes Cherri.

"Don't fix it if it ain't broken" plus no bottom line short-term incentive to fix Y2K has been the real root cause of this otherwise unbelievable problem that should have never occurred if management and politicians had had truly responsible attitudes and leadership.

(2) As far as your statements on the "lots of testing" that has (supposedly) already been done, quite frankly I'm not sure you really know what you are saying. Maybe this explains your lack of understanding of why electronic tech people will be needed come 2000 (among other types) to fix unsolved Y2K problems, NOT by fixing software on failure (which will be almost impossible under Y2K circumstances of systemic, massive, simultaneous and parallel flaws), but rather by ackward, messy, un-articulate and chaotic workaround "solutions".

-- George (jvilches@sminter.com.ar), June 06, 1999.

Flint

Thanks for your input Flint, but quite frankly are we on "the same page"?

Because "www.willitwork.com" obviously IS a list of non-compliances, whereby you or anybody in this world can find literally thousands of "partially compliant" (whatever that means!) or fully "non-compliant" pieces of equipment by brand/model#, etc.

If for some unknown reason you can't sort this out (I can't believe you can't) I'll be more than happy to help you or anybody else out. But it is as easy as it comes to find out from major OEMs what their y2k non-compliance status is.

-- George (jvilches@sminter.com.ar), June 06, 1999.

George:

My mistake. This is a clearing-house site for information from major device manufacturers. It's valuable. The manufacturers indeed tell you which devices have compliance issues and what those issues are. Resources like this can be a tremendous time saver, and even a life- saver. You can use it to reduce your testing effort, to set priorities on fixes based on severity of bug, and to speed up the task of finding bugs later.

It also shows that a large amount of time and effort has been spent making these determinations. Someone has been busy collecting essential data, and making it available to those who need it.

I'd just as soon skip the debate as to whether this information should be interpreted as "Oh my Gawd, look at all these problems, we're doomed" or "Hey, we've done our homework and things will be OK." To me, what we have here is solid evidence that there are real problems, which are really being addressed. It does *not* address the issue of how pervasive these problems are, nor how well they're being addressed. It's a useful tool. Let's hope it's being put to use.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 06, 1999.

And a note to y2ik aware Mike: please don't request email responses to a fake address. It's annoying.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 06, 1999.

Flint

We agree 101%. Your comments are most pertinent and enlightened. Y2K is such a difficult mess that even those of us who have studied it to death still need outside help to sort things out.

You certainly have helped all of us Flint with your analysis, and I also agree that any non-compliance clearing house needs thoughtfull, additional interpretation, just as you say.

Because... Flint, guys & gals, what are we looking at, exactly??? What is it we've got in front of us??

(1) a monster? (maybe)

(2) a dead monster ? (I don't think so, but I'm open-minded if anyone can prove his/her case. Mr. Poole, Mr. Decker, and Peter de Jager will have to do better than what they've shown so far though)

(3) a half-injured monster with a bullet in its left arm and heavy shot impacts in its right leg? (probably!)

(4) How dangerous is this for the world economy? (and its subsequent impact upon the US economy)

What should we all do then?? Just keep shooting at this monster through remediation completion attempts? Is it already (June 1999) too late? Should we start "running", meaning contingency plans?

By the way, and just to enrich the original line of thought, "www.willitwork.com" is by no means complete!!

The whole world (see point 4 above) is literally flooded with non- compliant pieces of equipment and y2k faulty electronic gadgets, PLCs, etc., etc., that can't be found in any of these "clearing houses" for many reasons (bankruptcy, obsolete versions, not being part of OEM non-compliance listings,etc.). Mr. Poole et al please help out... if you can. Otherwise, please accept how serious y2k is and act accordingly.

This will affect the "haves" as well as the "have-nots". Whatever happens, y2k will surely produce an unexpected transference of wealth, First, by redefining wealth, and second, by redefining power.

Flint, as you are far better than many of us at this, why don't you massage through all of these loose ideas and think about starting a new thread ? Many will input constructive thoughts I believe, including y2k aware Mike whose original thread started it all. Of course, I agree with you again in that y2k aware mike should NOT give us false e-mail addresses.

-- George (jvilches@sminter.com.ar), June 06, 1999.

George:

First, I have no problem with y2k aware Mike using a false address, only with his requesting that all of our responses bounce.

Second, I know that resources like this are not a substitute for testing, just an aid to testing. But it isn't the only aid out there. I know my company has been notified of possible problems without having to do any research for those particular problems. On the other hand, many of these devices are implementation-dependent. So the manufacturer can say, OK, there's a 2-digit year in this thing. NOW, if you don't use the year, you're probably fine. If you *do* use it, but use it properly, you're fine. If you do use it, and use it wrong, everything depends on exactly what you chose to *do* with that date. Just be aware that it's there, and the rest is up to you.

I don't have any useful information on things like lead-times for replacements, or patterns of typical applications. But no information means I just don't know. I won't draw any conclusions based mostly on the fact that I'm ignorant. Much of this is confidential anyway. Most vendors don't want to be held liable (for either breakdowns or nondisclosure of issues), but neither do they want to sully their reputations due to wide publicity of their problems. Nondisclosure agreements are rampant. And so, the whole mess remains as impenetrable as ever.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 06, 1999.