"Paraguay phones, water, power at risk from Y2K bug"

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-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), September 19, 1999

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Sunday September 19, 12:46 pm Eastern Time

Paraguay phones, water, power at risk from Y2K bug

ASUNCION, Sept 19 (Reuters) - The year 2000 computer bug could disrupt many parts of Paraguay's economy, including telecommunications, electricity generation, finance and water supplies, a government official said.

The coordinator of the government's drive to eliminate the ``Y2K bug'' from its computers, Walter Schaeffer, said Saturday that work had begun too late in Paraguay, a landlocked South American nation of five million people.

``Many services are going to be affected because we began to work on this very late and there is not enough time,'' Schaeffer told Reuters.

The Y2K bug was caused by computer programmers who saved memory space by using only two digits to represent each year. So computers with old code could mistake the year 2000 for 1900, potentially causing electronic havoc.

The only saving grace for Paraguay, a country with a per capita income of just $2,000, is that computers are not as widely used as in many other countries.

Paraguay's backward economy is centered around farming of soybeans and cotton, as well as income from huge hydroelectric dams which supply Argentina and Brazil.

The country, which has been ruled for a half of century by the Colorado Party including 35 years of dictatorship under Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, is also a major regional smuggling center, according to neighboring governments.

The government recently dissolved a commission it had set up to deal with the Y2K problem because of a lack of funding, cutting the number of staff assigned to grapple with the millennium bug challenge.

Schaeffer said he expected problems in computers controlling the country's water supplies, but that they should be able to function manually without too much difficulty.

But some telecommunications systems could go out of service, he said.

The financial sector has done the most work to combat the problem. Paraguay's Central Bank has prepared 70 percent of its computers, and should be ready for final tests by the second half of November.

The government has been forced to take extreme measures to prevent unexpected failures in the health service. It will remove all non- millennium-compliant equipment from hospitals Dec. 1.

This could cause problems but will eliminate the risk of surprises, Schaeffer said.

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-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), September 19, 1999.


Thanks Linkmeister. One phrase was particularly disturbing:

Paraguay's backward economy is centered around farming of soybeans and cotton, as well as income from huge hydroelectric dams which supply Argentina and Brazil.

A country which exports electricity to the (largest and most populus?) countries in South America is admitting there will be failures ahead. And that they got a late start and that there is not enough time left. That is quite an admission. But don't worry, they say, the banks are ON TRACK.

I would love to finish this post, but I've got to go buy some more coffee. I only have 20lbs.

-- semper paratus (lights_out@everyone.home), September 19, 1999.


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