Pulled from Usenet News....

<snip>> 
> I would urge anyone concerned about Y2K problems not to wait until 1999
> to look into them. I suspect that not many people realize that Y2K
> problems are already occurring in a lot of areas.
<snip>

I concur with that, our distribution company has had significant problems
with automated stock holding on perishable items when our warehouse
software has declared 'sell-by' dates after 01-01-00 to be well out of
date, hence stock has been notified for destruction and stock levels
adjusted accordingly.  Manual correction? not possible due to stringent
audit routines.
Our first occurance of the problem was in January this year!

8 responses total.

My bank has a bug in its customers' online banking interface, but after
I pointed it out they said they can't do anything about it now as they
are working on the Y2K problem. 

Yes the end is near! :) It truly is a big problem, I have heard a few reports
of people having problems with credit cards that have Y2K expiration dates
when using them at certain places and even the credit card company having
problems. I haven't been able to find specifics though. I severly doubt the
problems will be fixed by the year 2000 in fact I'd be shocked if there were
few problems, I'd even suspect that companies that thought they were safe from
the bugs would suddenly find things not all in order.

--Paul

I agree that it is big because there will be a lot of places 
experiencing problems. I think most of these problems will be minor, 
though. I don't think it is the end of technology as we know it, as some 
people are making it out to be.

I agree. The only problems will be with small operations for whom it
disn't worthwhile to do anything now since they can just buy new software
when the time comes if they have problems. By then most users will already
be using Y2K compliant software. 

Two points, I guess. The first is a good example of how severe this problem
is - it isn't simply a atter of "buying new software." 
The credit card problem someone mentioned - VISA (I'm pretty sure it was visa)
had to skip over the year 2000 for card expiry dates, because entering 00 for
the expiry date was causing the little machines that stores use to check your
cards to crash. In a way, this was a really good problem, because it happened
now, instead of in the year 2000. If all these machines had fallen over then,
then no-one would have been able to use their cards, but now they're beig
taken care of, and should be ready in time.
As for who will be caught off guard by this problem, there will be some
problems with small companies that simply didn't bother, but most won't have
any problems. This is for a simple reason - their software can be replaced
for a few hundred dollars at a computer store.
The real problem is medium and large companies. These companies are quite
often using software that was custom created for them, and was often produced
in outdated languages that are difficult to repair. (This is why engineers
that were taught COBOL back in the 50s and 60s are all of a sudden in demand.
No-one wants to use COBOL anymore if they can help it, but if something needs
fixing, you have to fix it.)
But my real favorite for Year 2000 bugs are likely the ones that will be
causing the most problems - embedded chips. These things are used for
everything from Nuclear Core monitoring to grid level monitoring on national
power grids, to keeping track of your microwave. And yes, believe it or not,
your appliances (those with clocks) may not be Y2K compliant. This could
include VCRs, TVs, Microwaves, etc.
So what happens if these chips (or some of them, rather) fall over? Check out
the latest edition of Wired - there' an article on some year 2000 bug testers
who have all gotten so freaked out over the situation that they're investing
in farmland out in the middle of nowhere, and stockpiling food, water, and
weapons. 
The way I see it, we're either going to have almost no problems at all, which
I'm hoping for, or we're all actually in quite a lot of trouble.
Just as an end note : The CIA has (allegedly - see that wired article) already
asked its operatives to ensure that they have extra blankets and cash on hand
for the rollover.
Sleep tight!

        Yeah, that damned COBOL.  It almost reads like English, has
verbs you recognize and the code can be understood if written decently.
Better to have more cryptic languages.

No, it reads enough like English to fool some managers into believing
that anyone could write programs in it, so they hire just about anybody.
It also has so many reserved words that programmers tend to use very
cryptic variable names to avoid conflicts, if I heard correctly.

The following short article appears in the 17 December issue of SCIENCE

_Y2K_, by C.J.Cramer and J.T.Roberts

The first paragraph goes as follows:

    "Few subjects in 1999 have received greater press coverage
     than Y2K. It is with some shock that we have found the
     chemical literature to contain no reference to this
     obviously critically important molecule. To alleviate this
     situation, we performed a quantum chemical analysis of
     diyttrium potassium (Y2K) to characterize its likely
     molecular and electronic structure (1) and to better
     address the 'Y2K problem'. [Other key yttrium-containing
     molecules, such as YOY and YNOT [radioactive], also remain
     to be characterized; these may concern future investigators."

The article proceeds to do what it sets out as its objective, and
presents the calculations and results for assumed "T" (YKY) and
"linear" (YYK) molecular structures. However both have low energy
states of -0.64 and -0.62 ev, respectively, so either could be stable
and be in equilibrium. These compounds are weak or moderate charge-transfer
complexes, but have not been observed experimentally. That will occur
in about a week. 

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