PGW puts callers, bills, pipes on hold

Sixty percent of customer phone calls abandoned.

Cooking the books to impress Wall Street.

Repairing/replacing leaking gas lines at half the rate the company itself deems appropriate.

Zero percent collection rate of deadbeat customers.

But, hey, I'm sure they're Y2K AOK.

(Now is the time for the engineers to pipe up about how I am terrifying the uninitiated with selective information. Or whatever diversionary tactic they choose to employ this hour.)

-- Anonymous, October 07, 1999

Answers

Lane,

One hundred and twenty-three days ago I posted this:

"I've mentioned previously that more than 4 billion microprocessors/microcontrollers (MPUs/MCUs) ship each year, but it isn't often you come across the aggregate figure in the press. Usually it's broken down into personal computers, cell phone DSPs, 8-bit MCUs, etc.

But here's a quote from a recent San Jose Mercury News article:

"Tom Starnes, an analyst at Dataquest, a San Jose market research company, said that the number of embedded processors sold in 1998 was 4.8 billion and that only about 120 million of them, about 2.5 percent, had been intended for personal computers."

(orig. New York Times; ref: http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/business/docs/hiddenchip06.htm)

4.8 billion MCUs in 1998. Another 5 billion in 1999.

Remember these aren't just dumb chips. These are real honest to goodness CPUs. 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit microcomputer controllers. Each and every one of them with some sort of control program or kernel, application code and possible time/date code.

1% of 4.8 billion is 48 million. 0.1% is 4.8 million.

I ask the same question as Bonnie, what is the number that you put on "it's not as bad as we had thought?"

I don't expect an answer, but I'm comfortable with my own off-the-cuff analysis: 1 billion of those chips are 4-bit and 2 billion are 8-bit.

It's probable that none of the 4-bit chips and half of the 8-bit chips do no time/date processing at all. That gets rid of 2 billion MCUs (I just cut the problem by more than two thirds, wasn't that generous of me? ;-)

Of the remaining 2.8 billion MCUs let's say that only 10% of the designs use time/date functions: 280 million MCUs with potential Y2K problems shipped last year.

Let's say only 5% of them actually had Y2K issues: 14 million MCUs with problems shipped in 1998. At least 10% of designs will never be corrected as it is not economically feasible to do so (I honestly expect this to be more like 30% but history will tell): 1.4 million MCUs shipped in 1998 with known Y2K problems. I expect the pattern for 1999 to not be much different.

So let's round it down to 1.2 million and call it 100 thousand MCUs with known Y2K problems ship each and every month, right up to December 1999 and on into 2000.

Let's say I'm off by an order of magnitude (a factor of 10) in this little back of the napkin analysis. That would bring the number down to 10 thousand units per month best case.

Conclusion: in December 1999 companies around the world will ship a quantity of products containing at least 10 thousand embedded MCUs with known (or ignored) Y2K problems.

This is being done knowingly because it is simply not economically feasible to upgrade, replace and/or repair all the billions and billions of little computer brains out there.

Maybe all the problems will be benign. Maybe they won't. History will tell.

"207 days and counting" (in the voice of the announcer on the off-shore oil rig from the James Bond movie "Diamonds are Forever" :-)

-- A. J. Edgar (ajedgar@centigram.com), June 07, 1999."

FactFinder replied with:

"AJ, As usual I find your analysis extremely interesting and challenging. I like your logic, math, but disagree with the sources that provide the basis for the assumptions and numbers you use. I do not have time to do the additional research needed to discuss this at length, but hope to over the next few weeks. You have done your homework, and I need to do mine to do the topic justice.

Regards, -- FactFinder (FactFinder@home.com), June 10, 1999."

It is now, "84 days and counting..."

From 01/01/1999 to 12/31/1999 over 5 billion microcontrollers and microprocessors will ship world-wide. Here are a few questions:

If only 1% of those use time/date how many is that?

If only 1% of those have unremediated Y2K problems, home many is that?

How many unremediated Y2K systems will ship in 1999?

How many unremediated Y2K systems shipped in 1998? And will they all be upgraded?

How many unremediated Y2K systems shipped in 1997? And will they all be upgraded?

1996? 1995? 1994? 1993? 1992? 1991? 1990? 1989? 1988? 1987? 1986? 1985? 1984?

How many unremediated Y2K systems will ship in January 2000?

Remember the original Intel 80286 based IBM AT first shipped in 1984, that was fifteen years ago. There are still plenty of systems out there running on 286 based IBM AT's and clones. None of them are Y2K compliant, and I doubt many of them have been replaced or upgraded.

Only twelve more weeks until we begin to see the reality, one way or another.

Regards,

-- Anonymous, October 08, 1999

In conjunction with A.J.'s concepts, I will reiterate again for any readers who have recently purchased a new computer or software: Just because it is new does NOT mean it is Y2K ready or compliant!

I know several consultants and personal friends who are incredibly frustrated because they are STILL constantly hearing this from business managers they talk with, in a professional capacity or out of it: "No, we haven't checked our PCs. None of our computers are more than two or three years old, so they're fine." Sometimes these people have been convinced to do some random PC tests, and to date at least one third of the "new" computers needed Y2K work done, not counting the business software applications.

I'll throw this in for good measure, too. One of my daughters is secretary to a judge in a state branch Social Security Hearings and Appeals Office. Earlier this year they got a shipment of replacement computers in as part of the Y2K upgrade process. My daughter saw the manifest for this shipment. The computers had been purchased by the government in 1997 and were all 1997 models. Yes, they were "new" because they'd never been out of the box, having been stored in a warehouse. Their office has one person who handles the computer tech side. To date he has not done a check of these PCs. Why? Because they're new, of course! And he is the only one authorized to do any technical work; the users are not permitted.

The reports I hear from people in the trenches often relate that there are overlooks and gaps in nearly every business Y2K project, of those which have a project. Not all do. (Note I'm not necessarily talking about utilities, here, but various infrastructure areas.) Will these overlooks and gaping holes engender serious problems? I couldn't say. But they are definitely there, and as A.J. said, we'll find out soon enough.

Meanwhile this weekend my husband is going to test a friend's computer. She just bought it recently. She didn't inquire about the Y2K status, even though we'd told her to. Why? You've guessed it. "Well, I...I thought if it was new it had to be okay."

-- Anonymous, October 08, 1999

Ah, yes. The "I'll get back to you" diversionary tactic: an oldie but goodie.

-- Anonymous, October 09, 1999

I hesitate to post the following because it is both OT and falls into the unverifiable anecdotal type of information, it does help explain though some of my personal level of concern with other industries such as electricity and seconds the notion brought out in the above article that many organizations are in worse shape than they are letting on. A couple months ago I was able to spend a few weeks working in a tumor registry. A tumor registry is what I would describe as a non-mission critical but still essential hospital function. Tumor registries have the important task of cataloging all new cancer cases and following up periodically with these patients to ensure that patients aren't lost to follow-up and for research purposes. Nonetheless, day to day care of the patient is not coordinated by the registry. The staff in this division were all diligent, bright and pleasant people to work with. There were, however, some glaring problems which it seemed no one was able to face head-on as it were. Let me first lay out the organization of this computerized registry in order to begin to understand the problems. The registry is a subset of patients eligible for care. In this case eligibile patients are enrolled in the DEERs system, (Defense Elibibility and Enrollement?). Some of the fields for a cancer patient's abstract would already be present in DEERs and an internet interface was used for querying and downloading info from DEERS. Problem 1) Since an upgrade earlier in the year an indeterminate number of DEERs entries (my guess 1-3%) had birthdates changed to Feb. 11, 1911. DEERs is a mammoth database upwards of a million records responsible for among other things military payroll. Like Y2K prevalence, I don't know the prevalence of this bad data in the database (or for certain if it was Y2K related - There is a saying in medicine regarding diagnosing patients "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... its probabaly a duck in this case we have an inadverdent change to a date field during a software upgrade while government istitutions are enegaged in Y2K software remediation). I can attest that it exists and is a current problem at least for the tumor registry. As they were frequent difficulties with getting the printers to function as desired I had the opportunity to meet two of the programmers, employed by EDS, who were reponsible for maintaining the tumor registry database, called ACTUR which is as mentioned earlier a subset of the DEERs dataset with specialzed fields describing the patient's diagnosis. The following interesting findings came to light over a number of conversations. First the programmer who designed ACTUR no longer works for EDS or is not in same division. He was described as very bright, intrested in his ACTUR project almost to a fault, and eccentric. As one of programmers said "I would see him coming into work as I was leaving". It was a big task to update ACTUR from a DOS based system to a windows environment. One of the things that struck me from day one at the tumor registry was that all the computers were running Windows 95. As the supervisor of this registry oversees a number of military registries, I mentioned offhand that they might want to upgrade to Windows 98. I was told that a multisite upgrade to NT was planned for the future. From speaking with the programmers, as it unfolds, unfortunately, ACTUR does not run reliably if at all on Windows 98 or NT, only on Windows 95 ... Ba da Bing. The programmers had just obtained a copy of Visual Basic and expected to have an NT compliant ACTUR in 6 months to a year. I have run this over in my mind some times and can not figure out for the life of me what I am missing. As I understand it, Windows 95 is not expected to be compliant. The current version of ACTUR is most likely not compliant and a replacement is months away. The tumor registry cannot upgrade to Windows 98 or NT as ACTUR currently doesn't run on these. In 3 months they will be dead in the water for anything other than paper and pen work and they will be luck to be up and running again in three months let alone three days. Thank God the tumor registry is not central to the hospital's functioning, but this was only the part of the elephant that I saw. Could DEERs be facing similar type problems?

-- Anonymous, October 09, 1999

I can hear it now.

"We thought this was okay...."

"We didn't think about that...."

"We didn't realize how this would affect that...."

I think there are going to be lots of "DEERs", of many kinds, staring into the headlights a few months from now.

Unfortunately, I think we have to put a lot of stock into anecdotal information like this. Why? Because most of the good news we get is rolled up averages of rolled up averages, massaged for presentation to the government or to the public by people whose livelihood is making a situation sound good especially when it isn't.

Don't worry, though. The sun will still shine and the birds will still sing. (Might as well beat them to their diversionary tactics.)

-- Anonymous, October 10, 1999