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US & UK Issue Y2k Travel Warnings
In a coordinated release, both the UK and US have issued their worldfwide Y2k preparedness reports. No real suprises here - Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and the heartland of China. The strongest warnings were given in reference to the Ukraine, which the US State Department has recommended not traveling to around the end of 1999. More interesting was the UK's warning about the US, citing potential failures in "limited disruption to the water supply; to internal travel using
small airports; and to small health facilities" as an ongoing concern.
Probrably the same place that the CNet report got it's country names.. Ehter and speculation.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
http://www.fco.gov.uk/travel/dynpage.asp?Page=144
This is where Hemos may have read the list of countries.
SMART RELIGIOUS EXTREMISTS
Thank you for your participation. ^_^
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
In developed countries there is very high reliance on computers to fly the plane. The flight plan is generated by a computer, the air-traffic control is managed by computer. The pilot doesn't really make a lot of decisions.
In addition, newer aircraft are "fly-by-wire" - there is no direct connection between the pilot controls and the control surfaces. If the plane's electronics go you fall out of the sky.
Contrast this with the small airport I landed at in rural India. The smallish jet actually did a VISUAL landing. The airport didn't have an instrument landing system even though it was actually quite busy.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Sorry about that...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
You mean the media takes things out of context and then reports them as facts? Whoa, I bet that's never happened before.......
I have a friend who works for the WaterWorks in this city ("the best in the nation"). They, of course, run everything on NT and wrote it in VB. They are terribly buggy, and know it. However, three years ago, they looked at the sitiation and decided not to fix it. They will be going "manual" (and doubling their staff) in December. This means they will have hundreds of people in trucks running around the city turning on/off valves and checking gauges in closets all over the place.
It is sickening that the government can get away with saying that this is "Y2K Preparedness" (which the city does) while every business has to provide real proof to their financial backers (you know, the banks) in order to keep their credit.
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
These aren't meant to be global status reports... They're "consular information summaries", i.e. reports for the information of Americans abroad, like those in the Foreign Service. Which is why they don't mention domestic problems.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
I was surprised a little to see Malaysia there. When I checked the actually report I found only a good mention:
"Malaysia is reliant on computerized systems. Awareness in Malaysia of the Y2K problem is high in all sectors of the economy and among senior leaders of the national government. The Government has established a Y2K steering committee to oversee public and private sector progress.
Malaysia appears to be prepared to deal with the Y2K problem. It appears that there is a low risk of potential Y2K disruptions in the banking and finance, health, telecommunications, transportation, utilities and electric power sectors."
I was recently in M'sia, and they seem to be ready, especially with airlines like Singapore and MAS. I would not be the least concerned about travel there.
Err, except for the US http://travel.state.gov/travel_warning s.html
The world's going to end, but everything's OK.
Timebomb 2000 forum. Where most of the doomers and conspiracy theorists hang out. Tim ebomb 2000 garynorth.com - the lead doomer of them all. But he has over 6000 articles about y2k on his site www.garynorth.com On the Usenet comp.software.year-2000
Yes. The HP-UX version of sccs failed on me on january 1, 1999 at 00:13 because for some insane reason it uses (used?) a date 1 year into the future when checking in a modification. The Solaris sccs was fine, though, and the HP-UX problem was fixed within hours by installing a patch that had been out for nearly half a year. But still...
PS: Moderate this as funny if you like, but it really happened as described. The good thing about this was that it made a few people listen to my requests not to wait till now to update things.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
I think I've heard a rumor that the chinese government has ordered all the executives of the airlines that they must be in the air when the clock ticks over to the next millenium. This I suppose makes for a rather strong motivation to make sure that the airplanes will be functioning correctly.
Crap, I did that as well.
Put your imagination caps on. Suppose Y2K shuts down electricy, causes stock market crashes arround the world, planes fall out of the air, rebels topple faililng governments, yadda, yadda, yadda ...
In all this chaos, I think the worst thing about this scenario is that humans allowed themselvs to be dominated and controled by machines that we couldn't recover from the Y2K miscalculations. Nothing so dramatic as Hollywood created, but perhaps more sinister because we turned out lives over to computers slowly, silently and freely.
As long as we still control the machines, Y2K will be nothing more than a blip in the steady noise of BSOD's, crashes, bugs, transfer errors, lost backups, curruptions, failures, etc that happen in our computerized lives every day.
This is a boring sig
I agree. Also, I don't limit that fear of extremist to Christian religions. No matter which religion an extremist worships, they are dangerous to the general public...
There is no mention of India in the CNN article. But the Slashdot blurb mentions India...
And the Y2K section on India @ http://travel.state.gov/india.html seems to be pretty tame...
Maybe Hemos just wanted add a few coutries of his own...
But the issue for people travelling to these countries (whom the releases are aimed at) is whether the infrastructure will collapse. This could effect rural areas that don't themselves use IT as emergency relief procedures that use the Telecom systems are required. For travellers its important to know that the country you are flying to has an Air Traffic Control system that will work. The report notes that for many parts of the Indian infrastructure Y2K isn't an issue (the FO notes that many power stations are analogue). India does have an IT Industry of some note, with many European and US companies having bases in India to take advantage of the reduced costs, its important for them to know what will happen as the New Year roles around.
Todays India Fact: For people in the UK, turn an analogue watch upside down to get the time in India.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Then the other day, I got a leaflet posted through the door, aimed at private individuals, claiming that everything's under control, and that it's all been blown up out of proportion, and that Y2K will not actually affect very much anyway.
So which is it, then? Is everything OK, or is the world going to end? Enquiring minds want to know!
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Power outages.. big deal, Trains not working.. Who cares. I really don't think that computers will be responsible for the majority of Y2K problems. It's far more likely that public paranoia driven by our wonderful sensationalistic media will create artificial panic. People pulling out money from cash machines the night before Y2K driving the economy into chaos. I see that as a far more likely scenario.
I mean think about it. The media got burned once with the "9/9/99 will be the death of us" stories. But man were they all waiting for something "BIG" to fail. I watched the evening news on the 8th and they were just itching for it, predicting all sorts of problems. Something tells me that they are going to do even better on the 31st.
Ex-Nt-User
In an event like this, what's to stop pilots from just turning on thier radios and just start talking to eachother? It'd be less efficiant. but since there wouldn't be any planes taking off there would be twice as much room to land right?
Actually i think hemos missed the boat on this a bit. Specifically Malaysia.
For those of you that dont know it, Malaysia has the newest airport in the world, KLIA. 'm not from there, nor am i malaysian, but it may be the most sophisticated airport in terms of its systems. Although it had a few initial glitches on its opening last year, it now operates extremely efficiently, (far better than any airport in the us).
When they built KLIA they really did pull out all the stops. the KLIA Official website shows it in its splendor
AS for its airline, Malaysian Airlines, it has always shown itself of the highest safety records, as well as offering amenities that no US airlines offer at any price.
"the difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad" -Salvadore Dali
The US State Department is WAY paranoid. They make it sound like if a US citizen has ever been a victim at a certain place, you're doomed if you go there.
what I've heard on NPR is these guidelines are
rather biased. Apparently in terms of Y2K,
Italy is as just unprepared as Ukraine, but
since italy is US' ally (for god sake), the
guidlines say something like 'Italy could have
done more work', whereas Ukraine is simply rated
as 'unsafe'.
Grunt. Oink, oink.
None of the countries HAVE a full blown advisory against travel. READ before you point.. ;-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
http://news.excite.com/news/r/990915/17/millennium -canada
I had a payroll system running on an old dos 286, which was hardware compliant, but when we tried to set up the database for this fiscal year, the software crashed, and the upgrade only ran on Win95/98. So were were forced to upgrade, and then I had to spend weeks teaching the new system to book keeper, who would have been happy to stick to her dos program... :)
it that a REAL problem? was for me
I post links to stuff here
Has anyone out there run in to any real problems while doing Y2K testing?
Did anyone fail at the April 9th date?
What about at 9/9/99 (barring the tandy(?))?
There is more to fear from people than there is from the computers...
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
http://www.citu.gov.uk/2000/p ress_rel/fco/003-99.html
Does anyone have a link or some insight as to what failed w.r.t. a Tandy on 9/9/99...
I'm currious especially as my old TRS-80 didn't have a clock to suffer date problems on....
No problems at all on Sep 9 at our side. We took the whole exercise as a full dress rehearsal for New Year's eve...complete with champaign ;-)
Found out today that my district council isn't certified Y2K ready yet.
Not sure which I'd prefer -- not being billed for my council tax (and rubbish colletion etc not happening, cos they can't pay the workers), or being billed twice...
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I suppose it's nice that the US and the UK have checked the globe for us, warning travellers about potential dangers. However, wouldn't it be a little more productive to stay focused on your own country first? For all of the "We're prepared!" strutting the US does, there is still work to be done. There are over 6000 small Electricity providers in this country, mainly in rural areas, that are not yet compliant. Instead of worrying about the Ukraine, shouldn't the US be worrying more about it's own backyard? Perhaps this is just another diversion in order to make the general public feel safe.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not preaching Armageddon at New Year's. My biggest fear is the religious extremists deciding to go out with a bang. As stated, even the UK's report pointed some fingers at the US...
This report is WAY out of taken WAY out of context. I happened to watch the press conference on CSPAN last night. No one beside's the UK issued ANY WARNINGS about travel to other contries.
Overall, I think that their research is flawed and based on poorly used factors, but the press should at least report it as it was presented..
The italy thing was a reporter taking a question by another reporter and mangling it.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
It might have been a coincidence, but on 9/9/99 some trains couldn't enter the Schiphol (.nl's primary airport) station. The driver(s) cited unspecified computer problems as the cause. You won't see me anywhere near a train at 31/12 and 01/01...
When I had a look at it in 96 it listed Scots as being the biggest "ethnic minority" in the United Kingdom.
;)
I figure this is kind off stretching the definition of "ethnic minority" a bit far even for the CIA
There are going to be price wars come December.
Because of hysteria and stupidity, people who don't know any better are avoiding planes like the plague around 01/01/2000. The result of this is that airlines aren't selling a whole lot of tickets. To make up for it, they drop prices in order to sell more tickets.
If last-minute tickets to Mexico drop below $100, you can bet your boots that I'll be going, (clueless) government warning be damned! Bernoulli's principle still applies, even after the apocalypse. Besides, even if air traffic control systems go down, pilots are trained in how to set the plane down safely.
So if Y2K *is* a problem (and it isn't, really), I'm still pretty safe, and I have a neat story to tell my family. If Y2K isn't an issue, I'm in Mexico. It's a win-win situation.
Anybody wanna join me in Mexico?
As for the September 9th issue, this looks like it was largely an issue of incompetent journalists noticing that there are a whole lot of "9"'s together in 9/9/99.
They failed to grasp that in order for this to actually represent days and months, which can number higher than 9, the representation actually needs to be like 09/09/99.
There is a rumor that the Chinese stock exchange, running some six-year-old IBM AS/400 systems, ran into problems Sept 9 and is now down; I saw this in a news report reported on at work, which I would have hoped to be accurate. I have not found any independent verification, so this has to be considered mere rumor and not reality...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
``It should be illegal to yell `Y2K' in a crowded economy.''
I would personally doubt the "flamebait" rating for this post. It is an insight. And actually a very bright one, because there are hardly any mission critical systems running on computers in the targeted countries/regions. There, even the water bills are still done by hand.
Do not understand me wrong. I am not saying that these countries are computer retarted. But their municipal systems and other stuff mentioned in the report is. And it actually _is_ retarded to the point of not using computers. So no Y2K there.
Overall the only reasonable note on Y2K in the entire report is the "small airports" stuff. As few of the readers may know Gabriel (the airline booking systems) used to run on X25. And most of the X25 stuff is not Y2k compliant. And in some of the remote areas around the world it still uses X25.
I would rather worry about countries with idiotic schemes for selecting the local analogue of SSN. For example bulgaria uses SSNs with 2 digit numbers. And they are used everywhere - financial sofwtare, municipal software, etc. And there will be quite a lot of Y2K fun there (though it will actually start quite after new year).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I'm inclined to agree with this. Last year I was doing operating system upgrades in Portugal. Whilst I was there, I got talking to an American pilot who flies for an air cargo company. He suggested that places like the Southern States of the USA would be bad to fly in on the Big Day as the system there has come to rely on computers and he thought that some of those computers would fail. In contrast, he thought that sub-Saharan Africa really wouldn't be that much of an issue because they just don't trust the machinery implicitly.
Who would believe in penguins,unless he had seen them? Conor O Brien - Across Three Oceans
Admittedly, the nuts are likely to be more of a problem than the computers where *I* live, but I'm not sure that holds true everywhere. In any case, I'm spending New Year's Eve with my SCA friends. That way, just in *case* something goes wrong, I know I'm around people with the brains and resources to deal with the situation appropriately.
To sum up: Yes, silly people panicking and doing stupid things is a more pressing problem than the computer problem itself, but there are legit computer problems. And the legit problems and the panic feed off of each other in ways that are very not-good.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I predict that at some point in 2000 a snow storm will delay flights in the medwest, a hurricane will delay flights in the southeast, a Win NT box will crash, and widespread car crashes will cause traffic jams on highways. Instead of just focusing on January 1 we should be focusing on the entire year of problems this Y2K bug is going to cause.
The Y2K glitch could prevent some computers from distinguishing 2000 from 1900 because of an old shortcut that recorded the year with two digits only. Unless fixed, this could wreak havoc on everything from air travel to health care to automatic teller machines.
IMO, that kind of statement is irresponsible journalism and and basically sensationalism (suprise). The statement implies that the unrediness described is the current state of all computerized institutions and that nothing has been done about it.
Like the first poster said, the biggest threat of Y2K is the potential for panic by the paranoid. I guess media statements like that are a big part of the problem.
On a final note, the obviously flawed book The Millenium Bug predicted the financial meltdown of Japan in April 1999 because that is when they close their fiscal year. I don't even recall Japan being a blip on the news in April. Add it the pile along with 9/9/99 and the other April prediction, I guess.
That's my $0.02, probably redundant by now.
on New Years, just me, my Linux box, some mp3s, and a good ol' bottle of Chimay.
c7five
>If you look at it carefully, 2000 is not the beginning of a new millennium, but merely the last year of one.
YES!
I think of 1999 as the "penultimate year of the millenium" rather than "last year of the millenium." Not only is it correct, but it also sounds cooler.
Available here
...."
It seems to me that they're being very sensible. Some might call it FUD, but one person's FUD is another's reasonable, pragmatic reaction to an unclear future. Unless your crystal ball is functioning 100% error-free, there's no way you can tell me that Y2K will not be a problem in some way to someone somewhere.
The chances are that most large organisations will escape scot-free, but it only takes a small cog to fail for the whole system to come down. "But for a nail, the shoe was lost
FUD is not always a bad thing, but you have to receive it with an open mind.
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
The Slashdot headlines mention Indonesia, Malaysia and India but I could not find any reference to them in the CNet news report. The countries that were mentioned are Pakistan, Italy and Japan. From where did Hemos get the name of these countries?
I do not think that this info would come anywhere near Fear, Uncertantiy and Doubt, at least not in the manner that we usually use this term. The information presented in the article is an attempt to inform the citizens of a country, who are traveling abroad what they might expect, there is no malice involved. Why would you not want this information made public ?
I was in rural India in March. Scheduled rotating blackouts were normal (due to power shortages). We heated water with a little wood stove. The motor-rickshaws are not computerized. The planes are the old-fashioned kind flown by people, not computers. Exactly how is the Y2K bug going to hurt you there?
The reality is that people in remote areas are used to living without a high-tech infrastructure. If the rest of the world self-destructs they'll be the ones left to pick up the pieces.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
That link doesn't seem to work, I'm afraid
Have a look at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office's breakdown by country at http://www.fco.gov.uk/travel/dynpag e.asp?Page=144
The problem isn't pilot skill. The problem is that it takes several minutes of lining up and preparing to land, at a busy airport that may see planes taking off or landing at a rate of more then 1 a minute thing will get awfully ugly and disorganized, or if navigation fails (you don't have street maps in most aircraft) The fears about y2k flight is that the system used to coordinate and direct air traffic will fail, not that the pilot will throw his hands up and and scream "oh no its the year 200, we're all gonna die"
I like the reference in the article to it as the 2000 challenge. I've gotten pretty dang sick of constantly hearing Y2K over the past months.
Personally, I'm going to Germany in October, and I'm not concerned about problems, because if there's one thing the Germans can do it's make the trains run on time (more or less)
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
It's about their corporate billing systems, not about Tandy computers.
It's hard to believe that this is true... I mean someone took the pain to create all these... including "How to build a rabbit trap"!
Didn't they decide Christ was born in 3-4 AD so the millenium won't be coming for a few more years?
Well to the desk jockies is Washington, I say, Fuck you sirs. I've prepared and have set myself up to function as independantantly without relying on anyone or anything beyone my direct control. That way, disaster or no, I will be ready for anything.
Now will some gov't spook please do their real job and moderate my words out existance?
The really interesting part here is that the actual report on the U.S. doesn't really say any of the things that the CNET article attributes to it. So it's closer to journalist FUD (an all-to-common phenomenon) than government FUD... but FUD nonetheless.
Waiting to be moderated down...
My Blog. Sela Ward can sell me long distanc
While the company I work for is fine (ain't unix grand?) there are many which truly aren't.
:)
My father is in charge of for a large (read multi-billion dollar profit/year) chemical company. Fortunately, companies like this also have the resources to do GOOD y2k testing, but they found a lot of little snafu's. Things like control devices which died after y2k. This is likely to affect smaller companies harder as they don't have the time to test every widget in a complicated system. The effect of one of these failures actually wouldn't have been particularly nasty, except for the fact that an affected plant would shut down before y2k, attempt to start after y2k, and it would fail to start for mysterious reasons. This would mean lost revenue... etc etc.
Personally, I'm going to be out of town for New Year's, and just in case there's a problem with something, I'll have a case of wine, and maybe some crackers. I'll be fine
OK. Now some m... has modified the rating to be off topic. Unfortunately it is right on.
The most important thing about Y2K is that everyone is using it as a scarecrow. The problem is not in the bugs in some badly written OSes, languages, etc, but in the massive panic. And of course in the fact that some people use it to raise political or financial dividends.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
(Ask yourself why Arthur C. Clarke named the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" if you're not sure of this...)
People will hold "new millennium" parties, "new millennium riots," release "new millennium" models of both automobiles and soft drinks, because they were looking for an excuse to do so.
This is true whether they're religious extremists, political extremists, marketing droids, or people that just want to party.
The juxtaposition of a Whole Lot of Zeroes happens to provide a cover for there being an excuse.
Take it further than that and you'll get dumb results.
Whether you're concerned about Y2K from a technical perspective, or have religious concerns about Y2K.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.