IMPT : Has New Zealand (NZ) been hit by the 9/9/99 problem already???

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Hi

I need to know ... cos i'm in Singapore, just 4 hours earlier than NZ! Anybody with any information now?

Regards,

-- Dennis (oblivion@pacific.net.sg), September 08, 1999

Answers

Good question. It's tomorrow, today, in the global village.

-- Spidey (in@jam.whatever), September 08, 1999.

Yep. The programmers are lined up around the block to talk to reporters about it. Companies are going to go bankrupt by the end of the day. Famine is expected by weekend. Stay tuned for more breaking news....

;-)

-- Lane Core Jr. (elcore@sgi.net), September 08, 1999.


Well? Any news? Any meltdowns?...Or like Public Enemy said "Don't believe th' HYPE!!"

-- Billy-Boy (Rakkasn@Yahoo.com), September 08, 1999.

Good Grief

Don't expect ANYTHING much at all to come of the 99999 thing except more spin ammo for the spinboys to shout from the rooftops,"See, we told you nothing is wrong"

People, come'on.....logically think about this.

How are dates written? 090999, riiiiight?

Now is that 999999?NoooooO.

Only extremely old, screwed up systems will have any 99999 problems or glitches, if any then.



-- karen (karen@karen.karen), September 08, 1999.

Karen is right. 09/09/99 should not be a problem at all and has NOTHING to do with 01/01/00 anyway!

-- Porphyry (paladin456999@yahoo.com), September 08, 1999.


Karen, I just posted on another thread about 9/9/99 about a system I used to work with that stored dates in text fields so the date 9/9/99 is 9999 and that was NOT an old system just stupid management and government related as well.

I also do not think we will hear anything about any problems that might arise just like we didn't really hear much about the states rolling over to fiscal year 2000. Of course in my state of Iowa, one of the 3 that is ready, they couldn't send out any pension checks to retired government employees for over 6 weeks, but that wasn't newsworthy.

-- Beckie (sunshine_horses@yahoo.com), September 08, 1999.


Love this 9/9/99 quote...

``It's not hype, because there have been a lot of systems where we found this problem, such as military and government systems,''

Diane

It's Not Y2K, But 9/9/99 May Hit PCs
Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 8, 1999
)1999 San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/09/08/BU25634.DTL

[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

Banks, airlines, electric utilities and corporations will be keeping a close eye on their computer systems tonight as the calendar date rolls over to ``9/9/99,'' a combination of four nines that could trigger software problems.

In a glitch similar to the Y2K problem, some fear that computers may read Sept. 9, 1999, as a ``9999'' stop-program command. But most experts think that tomorrow should just be another day at the office.

Still, many programmers are keeping a close eye out for potential malfunctions. Officials from San Francisco's PG&E, for example, will be up late testing backup communications as part of a nationwide Year 2000 computer problem drill for the electric utility industry. The drill was timed to coincide with the potential ``9999'' computer problem.

And the Coast Guard last night went into a special 48-hour alert mode to be prepared for computer-related malfunctions with maritime traffic in San Francisco Bay.

Fears about a computer meltdown due to the 9/9/99 date are ``all hype,'' said Herbert M. Gottlieb, founder, president and CEO of Attest Systems Inc., a Novato company that makes software to track down potential Year 2000 problems.

``Someone got it into their craw there was going to be a problem and I've been laughing at that for months,'' Gottlieb said.

Decades ago, when computer data was punched into paper data cards, programmers used a string of ``9s'' to signal the end of a program. That led to fears that computers reading the date tomorrow might shut down. The Year 2000 problem is similar because computer systems that were programmed to read only the last two digits of a year may misread the year 2000 as the year 1900.

But Gottlieb and other computer experts say the danger of the 9999 problem is overstated since most modern software no longer uses that coding. And even if ``9999'' were a problem, computers will read the date as ``090999,'' which wouldn't trigger anything.

Similar fears were raised about the date April 9, 1999 -- the 99th day of the 99th year -- but that date passed uneventfully.

Robert Martin, coordinator of Y2K consulting work for Mitre Corp. of Bedford, Mass., said there were legitimate worries about 9999 at the start of the year. Mitre, which does Y2K consulting for government organizations and private companies, last year even issued a list of upcoming critical Y2K dates to watch, including tomorrow.

But the work done this year to stamp out potential Y2K problems has also helped eradicate most if not all 9999 problems, Martin said.

``It's not hype, because there have been a lot of systems where we found this problem, such as military and government systems,'' Martin said. ``Most organizations have been treating this very seriously and it will be a nonevent because they have.''

Summit Bank President Mike Ziemann said his Oakland institution has completed testing of its computer systems. The bank tested its systems by setting the date forward to September 9 and didn't find any problems. Ziemann, though, personally plans to keep a watch on computer systemreports tonight and tomorrow.

``We aren't anticipating any problems, I say with my fingers crossed,'' Ziemann said.

)1999 San Francisco Chronicle

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), September 08, 1999.


The spin in our newspapers is that 9/9/99 will be a y2k "test" and that if all goes well, as they expect it will, it means we can all relax as y2k will be a nothing......

-- farmer (hillsidefarm@drbs.net), September 08, 1999.

Yep, same here. See, the govt. and Go-skin-em' new they had a wild card to play with here. Many press releases from top officials went out a few days ago and all wires got the press releases alerting people to this "real litmus test" of what we can expect from Y2K.

They know darn well most everything will function without incident. Sure, there will be a "few", but for the most part, all we'll hear is the thunderous applause and hopping up and down from Washington and Press Releases touting how successful everyone's work has been in remediations since nothing blew up or fell apart.

It wasn't going to anyway.

This whole scenario makes me nauseous.

-- karen (karen@karen.karen), September 08, 1999.


The programmers all know that nothing will happen unless these numbers are typed in exactly one format and one format only: 9999 (No spaces, slashes, or dashes). It has nothing to do with a date - those numbers could have been typed for any sort of data entry but it is very rare. In addition, this was coded into older mainframes and most of them are not even operating any longer.

What the media is trying to get the public to believe is that this is somehow indicative of what will happen with the double zeros. Those are two horses of a totally different color. This is like comparing the size of a grain of sand to the size of the entire universe.

So it will be all over the news that nothing happened and people will continue to go on their happy way convinced that Y2K is a joke. We need a highly visible and reputable news source to make this differentiation very clear. But I doubt they will. We could really use Ed Yourdon at a time like this to pass this message to the media.

-- @ (@@@.@), September 08, 1999.



Also see this thread about the non-importance of September 9th and about groups that will nevertheless be monitoring it:

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001Mjr

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), September 08, 1999.


At least CNN is doing some "de-hyping" of the 999999.

snip

No call for Y2K complacency

Andy Kyte, another Gartner Group analyst, worries that the string of non-events related to other date-bugs may induce a fatal degree of complacency ahead of a very real problem at midnight on December 31.

"This (9999 bug) is not going to cause a significant number of failures or breakdowns. But it may well reinforce the complacency of those that currently should be acting to deal with the real year 2000 issues," Kyte said. As for Thursday, Mitul Mehta, senior European research manager at technology consultant Frost & Sullivan, said there would be isolated, small-scale problems. He expects many big corporations to use September 9 as an opportunity to test their systems against the Y2K threat.

Link to Article

Half-decent article, by the way. karen

-- karen (karen@karen.karen), September 08, 1999.


Dang it.

Link to Article



-- karen (karen@karen.karen), September 08, 1999.

Thanks Karen,

Glad to see someone mention it, but instead of the bottom of the page this should be the headline:

No call for Y2K complacency

It says:

"He expects many big corporations to use September 9 as an opportunity to test their systems against the Y2K threat."

Got that right - if any of the Y2K tests crash they'll just say that it was because of the nines and we don't need to worry about it.

-- @ (@@@.@), September 08, 1999.


Just over the wire.....

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese companies and financial markets reported no computer-related problems Thursday with the arrival of 9/9/99, a date that some experts had said could be a mini pre-cursor to the Y2K worries at the end of the year. Some of the oldest computer programmes still operating use ''9999'' as a command to shut down, and while problems were seen as unlikely, there were some minor ripples ahead of the event.

The Bank of Japan said it had to pump fresh funds into the banking system Wednesday as some banks scrambled to get extra funds in case there were any problems in the computer-dependent financial markets.

The rest of the article is pretty standard blah, blah, blah, but here's the link

Jap anese Firms Report No Y2K Problems



-- karen (karen@karen.karen), September 08, 1999.


"It wasn't going to anyway.

This whole scenario makes me nauseous. "

Gee, just like the much touted JAE. What a coinkidink

-- hehehehehe (ro@fl.com), September 09, 1999.


hey, karen, glad to see you back.

stayed home a little late to catch the 9 hooplah - it was, indeed, engineered as a sedative. Ingenious.

Gallup poll from August says 11% expect big trouble, 64% expect minor. But, interestingly, when they asked the pollees what they were doing to prepare, they didn't present multiple choice answers, but rather had the pollees tell them their plans. 21% are going to stockpile food, 15% water, and 10% are gonna take all their money out'da bank.

-- lisa (lisa@work.now), September 09, 1999.


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