I intend to supply the information gathered in this post to my local officials in hope that they will see the big picture. Please contribute. No need to answer individual queries.

Okay, with six months (best case estimate) to go, where do we stand?

1. What percentage of the world's code has been examined, corrected, tested, etc? How many lines of code are out there - total? [Of course, I'm not asking about just mission critical systems which can be so easily "remediated" by reclassification.]

2. What percentage of embedded systems have been examined? I won't even ask about correction and testing here, but chime in if you wish.

3. Of course, the ORIGINAL 100% remediation goal was the end of 1998, but something must have slipped up. What % was actually completed then?

4. In general, how close are we to the NEW 100% goal of July 1, 1999 - leaving a FULL SIX MONTHS for testing?

5. What percentage, at current rate, will be fixed by 1/1/2000?

Please supply links to ongoing studies on these questions.

Also, if you find this page in the archive, go ahead and answer anyway. I'll be notified by email of your response.

-- Zach Anderson (z@figure.8m.com), June 25, 1999

Answers

It might be more useful to concern yourself with what percentage of your preps you have completed. It is very difficult to ascertain the truth nowadays.

-- Mommacares (harringtondesignX@earthlink.net), June 25, 1999.

Hi Zach. In the US and Canada power industry, I'd say we are about 96% complete with embedded system examinations, testing and providing the fixes. (The latest NERC figures, at www.nerc.com, showed 91% completion on average as of May 31.) Contingency plans have been written, so we won't need the six months left for much but to test those plans, and finalize our system posturing and staffing. At the current rate, 100% of the fixes will be complete by 12/31/1999.

-- Dan the Power Man (dgman19938@aol.com), June 25, 1999.

Hey guys, wake up. C'mon WAKE UP !!! (Anita will probably say I'm a bully, right? Well, I'm not, I just live outside the US)

Question for Dan the Power Man, et al: Do you guys live inside a peanut better and jelly sandwich or what?

How about the rest of the world, huh?

Guys: Is the economy globalized or not?

Oh, it is ? What impact does international y2k non-compliance have upon the US economy then?

You haven't really thought about it? I see.

Keep blabbing then.

-- George (jvilches@sminter.com.ar), June 25, 1999.

Wow Dan, that's quite the 'claim'. I only wish I could be looking forward to the results of all that remediation with verified testing. Will you run for President in 2000? (you did say the testing would be verified didn't you...like *this* year, right?)

-- Will continue (farming@home.com), June 25, 1999.

Haven't we beaten this percentage stuff into the ground yet? Every one of these questions is predicated on the assuption that all y2k bugs are created equal. This is a *long* way from reality. Almost surely, if we had fixed exactly the correct 5% of the bugs, we'd sail through with no problems, and suffer calamity by fixing *only* the other 95%.

The entire notion of a critical system is based on the recognition that some bugs are much worse than others. Some systems are much more important than others. Some failures are much more serious than others.

It would be much more useful to know what percentage of functionality has been preserved, than what percentage of bugs have been fixed.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 26, 1999.

"Almost surely, if we had fixed exactly the correct 5% of the bugs, we'd sail through with no problems"

What's going on here Flint? I'm in 100% agreement with you! This can't be right... <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), June 26, 1999.

When you ask what percentage of the world's code has been examined, remediated, and tested, you also need to investigate how many of the system interconnections have been tested. System integration is where the worst problems seem to come to light! That is the area that seems to be the most likely to escape testing.

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), June 26, 1999.

Zach,

See this link for info about the compliance of high-impact federal programs:

http://freedom.house.gov/y2k/news/pr990615.asp

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), June 26, 1999.

Mad Monk:

I think IEEE also spoke to the same point you raise, in saying that organizations can be completely remediated and still suffer y2k problems because of communication difficulties (perhaps arising out of different ways of representing 'remediated' dates).

This struck me as strange. If communication with other organizations is a requirement of business, and you can't communicate, how can you say you are remediated? The problem is, the standards we use have evolved slowly, by trial and error and informally hammering out a large number of proprietary and local conventions. As the old saying goes, the wonderful thing about standards is, we have so many to choose from!

The lack of coordination in the establishment of protocols worries me. Most likely organizations are doing their best to preserve these protocols in their external interfaces, regardless of any internal date representation or handling conventions chosen (windowing, expansion, filtering etc.)

I don't have any feel for the extent to which such communication protocols will become fundamentally ambiguous (at least for the period during which dates in both centuries must be distinguished clearly). Perhaps someone here who works with this part of communications can shed some light on this, and give some illustrations of cases where existing protocols simply won't work.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), June 26, 1999.

To George and others: I apologize for my post, as I mis-read the question. I thought Zach was asking about specific industry remediation percentages, not global. Sorry about that.

-- Dan the Power Man (dgman19938@aol.com), June 26, 1999.