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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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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
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
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..
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
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.''
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
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.
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."
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
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
(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.