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Senate to release Y2K study
CNN has a story about a Senate
study into Y2K. It also involves the Justice Department and
restrictions on Y2K lawsuits. I never thought I'd see members of the
government try to help out writers of buggy software, but it seems
to be the case.
We're all gonna die!!!
Justice Dept told senators yesterday it was OPPOSING the proposed legislation that would limit the ability of regular folks like us to sue software/hardware cos for y2k problems...
Um, so the govt. *isn't* helping writers of buggy software. It wants to *remove* limits on Y2K lawsuits, not limit the lawsuits themselves.
1. When consumers owe the banks money and they
screw up, they still have to pay. But if the
corporations screw up like Y2k, then they're
exempt?
2. If a taxpayer screws up, he's penalized by
the IRS. But if it's the IRS that screws up
(see Monday's news) and can't balance its
books, what happens?
Just because a piece of software has a bug doesn't mean the company that wrote it should go out of business. All code has bugs. As the russians say, toughsky shitsky.
-doodieboy
"The Clinton Administration opposes the bill on the grounds it would limit consumers' rights to sue..."
And we all know how much these funny Americans love to sue.
I sue you! I sue you! I sue you! I fart in your generally direction!
So it must be true and accurate. Would zdnet FUD something as serious as bug in Sky v1.0?
It's the lawyers that like to sue. Or, to be more precise, to defend against lawsuits. The defendant's lawyers always get paid well. The Clinton administration cannot take the chance of choking off a major revenue opportunity for its biggest supporters.
Whatever, you commy
> And we all know how much these funny Americans love to sue.
Sue me!
I expected them to take inspiration from the Daylight Savings Time legislation, and set the calendar back to 1998.
Of course, most of the big-$ lawsuits are going to be one corporation suing another, not end-users suing corporations.
> A dialysis machine has no business knowing what year it is anyway.
tell that to the patient who's dialysis machine's just crashed...
Rebooting won't fix it :)
:(
Reboot it with a hammer. That will fix the problem by getting a new machine that will work. I have actually seen a case where someone got so mad at Windows, he beat the shit out of the monitor. He missed the important box, though.
Not always, and certainly not always here in the U.S. Individuals frequently -- really, most of the time -- avoid talking for fear of lawsuits. Read this. Okay, it's in Dutch. The point of the article is this: BILLIONS have been lost since the start of the year due to the Euro conversion. One bank in the Netherlands has 350 people working on correcting problems, and they can't keep up. Haven't heard this in the U.S. papers? Hmmm. How strange. I thought they were so reliable... So what makes you think you'd hear about y2k problems? Have you heard that one major retailer has scrapped an SAP project, after funnelling tens of millions of dollars into it, and are starting their y2k repairs from scratch? That this took place in December (I actually work for this corporation)? You HAVEN'T? Gosh, what are those silly media doing? Where are all those people who will gab about the problems their employers are having?!? (No, I won't name the corporation: you see, I value their privacy and MY employment). That you have heard nothing about many y2k problems amounts to exactly that: NOTHING. The fact that Unix doesn't necessarily have this problem says nothing about mainframes and it says nothing about the code running on any platform. You *nix boys had better wake up.
I think it's a bit ignorant or inexperienced to group all Y2K problems
as committed by "writers of buggy software". I find it difficult to fault
70's era programmers for not anticipating that their management would
not be willing to invest in rewriting their software. 80's and especially
90's era, well that's a different story...
Issues in the 70's, such as space and all the stuff we all know, were
very legitimate concerns. If anyone has seen real honest to goodness
in production in an enterprise environment 70's code, it's a
scary sight to behold. *But*, it is largely a management decision
to "hold off" rewriting code...
Don't know if this affects medical systems, but the database engine we use failed to recognize "02/29/00" as a valid date - even when we had set the environment variable to treat 2 digit years as "Closest Century".
The program that bombed did not take into account that the database engine's date algorithm would puke on an otherwise legal value. That is developer mistake number 2.
Hence, the program cored. If you will recall, when a program cores, it is no longer running. Whatever result you expected from that program is NOT going to happen. Put that program in a life-critical area, and you have a disruption. I want my doctors and nurses diagnosing my problems, not the machine's problems.
I say fix it now and prove its fixed! Screw the limits on liability. It would only help MicroSpit and other mediocre software developers hide bad code behind legal blockades. And I thought those were the demons we in the Linux/Open Source community want to defeat.
Y2K - the problem created by too many talented but young programmers who let incompotent managers overrule their judgement with money-saving shortcuts.
That way, the DOJ wouldn't need to spend more money during the appeals, people could get their money (as 90% of PC's run MS software, and who's seen a business without a few PC's?), and the world would be rid of a horrible monster. Even MS would have a hard time fighting off every single one of those lawsuits.
Saying "that company deserves to just die" is all well and good, but
think about this: Company XYZ has tested their software and is 100%
Y2K compliant. Their software is just one piece of a larger
product/project for a major company. One other piece of that same
product is *not* Y2K compliant. You are naive to think that
Company XYZ will not be caught up in the eventual litigation.
Did Company XYZ deserve to die, when their legal budget went out
the roof and they went bankrupt? I think not. The whole issue of Y2K
is ugly, and the fact that it will likely be treated differently than
any *ordinary* bug is ludicrous... (IMO)
Hear, hear. I once worked for a software company which made a database. Their internal date format would accomodate anything from 01/01/1900 to something in 2072, but the I/O could only handle 2-digit years. It would have been a small matter to include the century data, but this was the early 80's and it Just Wasn't Important.
They're long since out of business, but it makes me smile to think that one big chunk of that application is shortly to be useless, sunk by the management's unwillingness to look forward. Can't even pretend that year 20xx is the same as 19xx, because 1900 was not a leap year and 2000 is. It's Dead, Jim.
I have worked in several large wall street
firms over the past year as a consultant
doing unix sysadmin work. Unfortunalty out
of the three I worked at only 1 has a chance
of being ready in time. The other ones are
never gonna make it. I for one will be pulling
my money out of the market this month and
putting it in the safe deposit box as cash.
I look at it this way. It only takes one or two
big companies not to be ready and have problems and the whole market will run scared with them.
I would rather lose 9 months worth of growth
then lose the whole shebang. This is the biggest
threat I see from y2k. The economy going nuts
and the market driving us into a recession or worse.
But if the economy tanks, who's going to buy your land? Are you going to go to the store with a clod of dirt in your hand and try to pay for groceries?
uhh, I disagree with that.. had a look at their compliance pages ?
No, that's just passing the buck to the boss (sounds like a management tactic). I think the programmers were incompetent. I work with more than a few idiots myself.
...so YOU look it up.
But don't expect any confirmation from me.
See, it's kinda like this: Chevron has admitted in their SEC filings that they will not finish their y2k project. They've admitted it!!! They admit that they have no idea what the effect of this failure will be on them.
So why hasn't this been trumpeted from the rooftops?
Moral: stuff in SEC filings basically disappears. Just because the information could be available there doesn't mean anyone will actually see or read it (or care, once read).
Does that mean I can eat your flesh when the shit hits the fan? Okay, thanks.
slashdot broke my sig
"The year 2000 will eventually arrive."
This country is insane. Petty lawsuits damage our economy more than most realize. These legal issues are not unique to this Y2K problem - they are indicative of our entire Judicial system. Limiting Y2K liability is like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound. Nothing short of full fledged tort reform will help.
America would be a really nice country if it wasn't for the lawyer added tax on everything. Of course the justice department opposes limits on litigation - they're all lawyers. The only long term beneficiaries of litigation are lawyers.
Eventually it will be uneconomic to be anything except a lawyer in America. You won't be able to afford to drive because insurance will be so high with everyone suing everyone - you'll need to work as a lawyer to pay for it.
The founding fathers were mostly lawyers, your politicians all mostly lawyers eventually you'll all be lawyers...
America - government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.
...
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
My company sells indemnity insurance to it's developers to protect them from their own board of directors. :-)
BTW, I've been hanging around c.s.y2k for a while.
Yesterday (March 1) was the start of fiscal 2000, which was supposed to bring on a whole slew of so-called "Jo-Anne Effect" bugs from the 9-month look-aheads. So far I haven't seen anything.
Hm.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Rebooting won't fix it :)
Like the old AD&D rule: If your character dies of poison, cure the poison *before* ressurecting him or he will just die of poison again.
Yeesh, AD&D analogies. How geeky is that.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
The record of your ownership will likely be maintained in a database somewhere.
:-)
Buy precious metals, you can carry them with you.
Hurry though, the US Mint has already run out of silver
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
That's fine for the long-term, assuming the records survive. What do you do in the interim? Can't use cash, can't eat dirt...
You could grow stuff on it, that would be something anyhow.
--
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
when we have buggy software from Redmond, people should be used to computers and bank machines crashing now. They know the routine. Hit the little button in front.
Seems like politicians are getting lobbied and taxpayers are getting scammed by irresponsible businesses that hire and buy incomp programmers. They want to be bailed out with all these studies.
tell that to the patient who's dialysis machine's just crashed...
A dialysis machine has no business knowing what year it is anyway. All devices should be kept simple, rather than adding every possible feature and bug.
A lot of these devices use off-the-shelf general-purpose contrillers that may or may not be aware of the date, and that may or may not crash because of it, depending on the chip.
Are these chips microcontrollers? Where is this list? Or is this those old famous bios clock cards that were in 8088 computers that can no longer run Microsoft software? Who is this senator and does this list show actual part numbers, ie: 68HC11E2?
I still think this is a scam blown up to sensational proportions. A better use of our money may be spent on fixing current bugs, like in NT. We know the company who should be responsible for those damages. Would you like to know NT is being used in production lines now? Want to know how much scrap can be produced due to one malfunction or crash?
Methinks its a little unreasonable to place the blame squarely on the programmers' shoulders. In normal conversation, people tend to use two digits for a date, so it isn't surprising that programmers opted for this abbreviation (limited memory or no).
As far as lawsuits go, it needs to be balanced with how much of a good-faith effort the vendor made to correct the software, the nature of the warrantee provided with the software, and just how much the bug hurt the customer.
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
um whoops. darn -is there any way I can remove my own messages?
---
When some of these cases do go to court "expert witnesses" are going to be able to make a nice living getting paid to testify as the lawyers try to sort out whether the fault lay in the hardware (which part?) or the software (operating system or application ?)or in the combination and which company is what per cent of liable. Final case--last appeal should be settled just in time for y10K.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Quoting CNN directly:
The bill, sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), sets a 90-day "problem-solving" period during which companies can fix problems before lawsuits can be filed; encourages mediation; caps punitive damages at $250,000; puts some restrictions on class-action lawsuits; makes it easier for judges to dismiss Y2K lawsuits by setting higher standards for claims; and limits the personal liability of corporate officers and directors to $100,000 in many cases.
OK, so let me get this straight...
Let's suppose that a bank, for whatever stupid reason, is using WinNT to handle their systems. Y2k comes and the bank's systems crash. Microsoft now has a 90 day period to come up with a bug fix. Meanwhile the bank is still up the creek, as are the bank's customers, and the businesses that depend on those customers, and so on. In the space of 90 days a whole town can go bankrupt. The town residents file a class action lawsuit, they recover actual damages plus a maximum of $250k?? What's wrong here? Who the hell are these politicians listening to?
Finding God in a Dog
the LAWYERS! I heard one news story suggesting that lawyers were "salivating" over the opportunities for litigation associated with Y2K. I don't doubt it for a minute.
well, if you get in too deep you can always file
for bankruptcy -- this is sort of analogous...mind you not that I support it, but the logic behind it, preventing many software
companies from going under, makes a certain amount of sense..it would be better if they legislated
mandatory free patches/fixes/etc (since many of the problems are hardware and firmware, as well
as software)
but yeah, corporate welfare in any form sucks
rark
It's 1985 and you're told to write a piece of software. It's design life is given to you as 5-6 years. So are you going to make it Y2K compliant? Of COURSE NOT, since that increases cost/time to deployment. You get fired that way.
Then the beancounters decide NOT to replace it as planned but to keep it for 250% the original planned lifespan to save a buck. And then it's 1999 and suddenly this is a BUG?
Get wise.
Personally, I don't much like broad limits on liability. If a company blew it, they should be responsible for the results. I'd prefer:
You heard it here first Y2K is going to be the biggest non event since Heroldo Rivera had a prime time show about the contents of Al Capones vault.
January 1, 2000 will arrive and everyone will have the same look on there face when they were about to behold the great treasure of Al Capones vault. The hype applied by Heroldo for 2+hrs led to a large nothing...sound similar...wait and see.
Brian E...
Ah, Nirvana.
What I wouldn't give for a scenario like this to
unfold...
--C
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!