I have been ruminating on two concerns. The first one is 9-9-99. According to the Sunday Times in Britain, July 18, 1999 (the fastest way to read the entire article is to use a North link, www.garynorth.com/y2k/detail_.cfm/5468), the British govn. is recalling, by the end of August, 2,000 special forces in Kosovo. This 2,000 will join another 2,000 military to be deployed to deal with possible 9-9-99 problems (they will remain deployed through March, 2000.) Quoting the article, "Soldiers would also support the emergency services in handling disruptions caused by the failure of electricity, water supplies or telephones." The operation is named, "Operation Surety." Now this operation has been in the planning for 18 months and the plans have been announced to the British public.

If Britain is concerned enough to do this, I would assume our government is concerned enough to do it, or are they? Do we face possible electric outages on 9-9-99? I know electric companies across the country are planning another communications trial on that date. Is our govn. planning to deploy the military prior to this date? We have no notice if that is the case. Maybe we are so confident we don't need to do this? Should we deploy troops? I have no idea - do you? Do you guys think there is no way electricity could be disrupted on 9-9-99?

My other concern is this - the only way to insure your present standard of living is to make your own plans to provide that standard of living. Now, for how long would you need to be independent? Well, that depends on the level of breakdown of the electric grid. To completely insure yourself you have to use the worst scenario and plan for that. What is the worst case scenario? Now we are to the problem and questions:

Worst case is fuel loss, meaning no/less electricity even if OUR electric systems are fine.

How do we experience fuel loss? I have been through the fuel chain before on the forum so I won't go through it again. Worst case fuel loss means there is a break-down in the fuel chain. Presuming we can fix the broken chain in this country (pipelines, refineries, etc.), we now have to go outside this country.

If the broken chain is one/some/all of foreign tankers, insurers of tankers, banks, ports, refineries, pipelines, water systems (causing workers not to show up for work), how do these problems get fixed and how long does it take? Welllll:

With limited fuel our country is down; we will be highly motivated to fix these overseas problems with American expertise:

1. Will the communication system be there to allow us to know where the problems are? (can't find, can't fix)

2. If we can find the breaks in the chain, will countries let us in to fix it? (Read an article today that said some Arab countries think y2k is a "Christian" problem. Huh?

3. Assuming we can find a problem area and are allowed in to fix it, what will it take to fix it? Will the fix be something produced in another country (a product of outsourcing) who can't produce it anymore? Will there literally be tankers at sea without a "y2k rudder?"

4. A big question - how many foreign breakdowns will there be? Downtime gets multiplied by each breakdown in the chain.

To me, these scenarios are not gloom and doom thinking but, instead, are reality thinking. I have absolutely no doubt that the Pentagon and govn. agencies are considering these scenarios. It is the general public that has not educated themselves enough to understand the electricity breakdown possibilities and the difficulties in restoring it.

What we have here is an absolute unknown that has the potential to drastically lower our standard of living. I believe a wise person will not leave his/her standard of living to the unknown, rather, I think he/she will make every effort to preserve his/her lifestyle and well being.

-- Anonymous, July 25, 1999

Answers

Here's my $.02 on your first rumination: There is essentially ZERO chance there will be problems on September 9. I have not heard of a single device having problems on that date, let alone a device used in power systems.

Some folks are nervous because NERC chose that date for the "dress rehearsal" drill. It was chosen rather arbitrarily, because they wanted two major drills in 1999, on April 9 and September 9. There were zero problems on April 9 reported. Because of the utility test, some other entities (like an emergency center) might choose to use the same date for the test. For power companies, there is nothing to worry about, IMO.

Regarding your second question, yes, dependence on foreign commodities could cause problems, but at this point it doesn't appear that it would result in outages. A slightly more possible scenario that could cause immediate problems would be loss of natural gas delivery, which many power plants run on.

-- Anonymous, July 25, 1999

Marcella,

There is almost no chance of 9/9/99 causing any computer related problems at all, and certainly not with any embeded systems.

The reason for this is that some early computer programs did use 9999 as an "end of file" (EOF) marker, but when six digit dates are used the date is read as 090999, or as 990909, depending on the date format chosen by the programmer. Neither of these dates can be confused with 009999.

Malcolm

-- Anonymous, July 25, 1999

Hi Marcella

Ther British troop deployment was extensively discussed on csy2k in the last couple of days with the general conclusion that the story in the Sunday Times was probably a hoax. I agree with this conclusion.

As far as the nines go, I agree with Dan and Malcolm.

-- Anonymous, July 25, 1999

Marcella,

Our own DoD has issued a notice to all bases to be ready for call-out starting Sept. 1, 1999 and continuing until Mar. 31, 2000. It is a rather lengthy notice and has appeared on the web. So, we do have an alert for our military coming up in about 5 weeks. This will be addressed by some other reporters I am told, but I speculate that they could be concerned about the GPS Aug. 22 reset. Also, while there doesn't seem to be too much worry in commercial applications for the 9/9/99 situation, there could be some isolated problems. It all depends on how the original software was coded. Now, as far as this same problem in the military systems, that could be another story. Remember, they have dozens of old codes that were written a long time ago and it's possible that some of these could have a 9's problem. I don't really know. I do know that the military is on alert starting 9/1/1999.

-- Anonymous, July 25, 1999

Dan,

Here is a case study of a real-life 9/9/99 fault.

Remember, NOTHING has a ZERO chance of not happening.

--aj

-- Anonymous, July 26, 1999

I read early last year that 999 was allocated by programmers to stop a program that had gone astray and it was used to indicate "end of file," therefore "stop." Have all the "999s" been found and remediated? Probably not. Marcella, there's more misinformation on the "Nines Problem" than on any other Y2K-related issue of which I am aware. What you have been told is hooey. The Dreaded Nines
More on The Dreaded Nines There will be no significant problems with processing data for September 9, 1999. Forget about it. It's a Y2K Red Herring. "Whoooosh!" That'll be the sound of September 9, 1999, coming and going without significant computer problems related to the date. It's also why NERC chose 9/9/1999 for the second industry-wide drill: to maximize the positive PR possibilities. Oh, it'll be a real drill, but the date was chosen for PR purposes.

-- Anonymous, July 27, 1999

Well, that didn't format as I wanted it to do....

-- Anonymous, July 27, 1999

Lane,

Thanks for the solid statement about the 9's situation. It's better to know these things are minor or nonexistent, rather than follow some "red herring" as you say.

-- Anonymous, July 27, 1999

A.J. Edgar, please re-read my post. I said that there is essentially a zero chance of problems. And Malcom answered your reference to the supposed 9/9/99 problem from the IEE.

Marcella, I have no idea if and why the military will be on alert September 1. If they are, I'm betting it is part of some kind of contingency plan. Many people assume that because a contingency plan is being put in place, that it means someone thinks there will be serious problems. In the power area, many companies have drilled or tested their "black start" ability as part of a contingency plan, but that doesn't mean that they reasonably expect to need to do a black start.

-- Anonymous, July 28, 1999

Dan,

I don't need to reread your post. I am one of those people who reads things once, slowly and carefully. I wish I could read faster. :-)

So, in your opinion, what is the difference in value between essentially zero and zero?

The only point that I have been trying to make, and continue trying to make, is that just because each of us knows of a particular set of tests, or set of fixes, or understands our area of speciality thoroughly does not mean that there are not going to be any problems.

The current high-tech workforce is highly specialized. There are very few systems engineers who understand the inter-relationships of these complex systems from an operational standpoint, let alone the failure modes.

When failures happen they come from unexpected areas. When major failures happen it is because one failure triggers one or more other failures causing a cascading fault. How many times have major power outages been caused by a single faulty relay, a technician failing to remove a safety ground, a tree branch touching a high-tension line, etc. etc.?

These are day-to-day failures that happen all the time. Now we are in the midst of the greatest software and hardware upgrade in the history of modern technology and some people think there are going to be no problems? It is this position that irks me.

Sure, very well run companies may really be on top of it. Sure some 10 or 20 percent will have done a really thorough job. But there is another 60% which are of questionable readiness and another 10 to 20 percent that will not have accomplished anything of value by the end of December.

Perhaps it is only the few people who are really on the ball, really do have their programs under control and really do have faith in their fixes who are posting the good news here?

-- Anonymous, July 29, 1999

Sure, very well run companies may really be on top of it. Sure some 10 or 20 percent will have done a really thorough job. But there is another 60% which are of questionable readiness and another 10 to 20 percent that will not have accomplished anything of value by the end of December.

Good heavens, no! All organizations are the same! They are all equipped with infallible visionary executives! and skillful efficient techies (whether engineers or programmers or whatnot)! and experienced competent managers!

No matter when they began, or how much they have needed to do, or how much they have been allowed to spend, they will all do a great job and will all get done at practically the same time!

Right?

-- Anonymous, July 29, 1999

Many people assume that because a contingency plan is being put in place, that it means someone thinks there will be serious problems.

I agree with Dan. I think it is a mistake to read too much into the existence of contingency plans.

For instance, I read recently that the Nixon Whitehouse had drafted a speech to be delivered by the president in case the first moon landing failed and the astronauts could not have returned to Earth.

The speech was reprinted in, I think, the LA Times. I think.

Anyway, the drafting of such a speech in no way implied that NASA at the time either knew or seriously believed that the astronauts would fail to return from the Moon. It was a contingency, just in case.

Frankly, I think that way too many organization in the USA are preparing for short-term crisis-management situations, like power and telecommunications failures, but failing to plan for long-term commercial and economic consequences of infrastructure failures worldwide. We are foolishly, inexplicably setting ourselves up for unexpected elation at the first of the year, but unexpected depression (perhaps literally) three or six months later. That is what I now think, anyway.

-- Anonymous, July 29, 1999

On contingency plans, it might be more accurate to say, "A contingency plan is put in place because someone thinks there MIGHT be serious problems."

I agree with Lane that many business contingency plans are focused only on the short term possibilities for disruption. Ironically, this goes hand in hand with the type of corporate shortsighted actions which contributed to delays in making Y2K repairs to begin with. There are a few companies which were way ahead of the pack in addressing the Y2K date problem, and I believe these same companies are now positioning themselves with an eye on the long-term viability of their businesses, including the potential take-over of less visionary entities. Unfortunately, any company having both a short term and long term plan, which was actually developed in plenty of time for implementation, is apparently in the minority.

I believe it was Bill Safire who wrote that "in case" speech, Lane. Nixon's "Sea of Tranquillity" congratulatory speech right after the moon landing was also a Safire-inspired one, which was very well received. It might be interesting in future to see if there is a space era analogy to some of the post-Y2K era. It took many years before the public was allowed to know how many problems there actually were, and how close to disaster our space program came on several different occasions. Then again, recoverable failures could be said to fall into the "close only counts in horseshoes" category. They will have a fiscal impact, regardless of outcome, however, which lends credence to your predictions of a serious economic impact.

-- Anonymous, July 29, 1999

Hello again, A.J. Edgar. To answer your question, what I mean by "essentially zero" is that the chances of 9/9/99 power problems are so small as to be statistically insignificant. I'm just saying not to worry about that date. These same discussions came up for the 1/1/99 and 4/9/99 dates. Both dates came and passed without incident.

I am not saying that Y2k won't bring any power problems, but that whatever problems come they will most likely be manageable.

-- Anonymous, July 29, 1999

Dan,

We're going to have to agree to disagree. Besides which, there's no point arguing about it, we only need to wait another month for 8/22/1999, and a couple of weeks after that for 9/9/1999 and less than four months after that for 1/1/2000.

The 1/1/1999 and the 4/9/1999 dates did not pass without incident. But those dates did pass without making the mainstream press.

-- Anonymous, July 29, 1999

A.J. Edgar: I stand firm on my statement that no power problems were experienced with either the 1/1/99 or the 4/9/99 dates. I have never seen anything to this effect.

I challenge you to find documentation of a single actual power outage that can be attributed to those dates.

-- Anonymous, July 30, 1999

This is a fun thread....

To date myself, I started developing systems in Fortran and assembly language in 1971. The 9/9/99 or 9999(not 090999)technique was used in two cases. First: Remember punch cards? Your data deck had to include an "end of file" card to tell your application that the last card had been read. Second: When batch processing from a magnetic tape an "end of file" record was similarly needed. Both of these requirements went away as operating systems got smarter and batch processing gave way to online processing(mid 1970's).

What does this mean for embedded systems? Nothing! Control systems don't batch process from tapes and the vast majority don't even use anytype of mass storage.

This is a non-issue for control systems.

Jim

-- Anonymous, July 30, 1999