On This Day Pre-Y2K
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March 14, 1999 Permalink
This is what bothers me about the “everything looks fine” reports we get from various industries that say they found few problems with their embedded chips or chip systems. Could they really have checked a majority of the critical systems for possible date errors? Do all of those companies have one of them “super geeks” to thoroughly check the devices? Have any of them said what percentage of embedded chips/systems they checked and the percentage that had problems? How many failures would it take to shut down the whole production system for a lengthy period--one percent or 25%? I think the reports are often sincere but I still doubt that their investigations were as thorough as they probably should be. I don’t see the justification yet for the problems to be considered “vanishingly rare”. I would feel much more comfortable about it if I knew how they went about checking their systems. I assume they “sampled” some percentage of them because they can’t test all of them and from what’s been said before, even if they did test them won’t that process itself potentially create a date-related error where one otherwise wouldn’t have occurred? What kind of real evidence or data should we expect to see before we can be reasonably satisfied that the embedded chip problem will be likely be insignificant in an industry (not just a particular company)? And if one firm in an industry (oil, chemicals, water treatment) reports few embedded chip problems does that me we can assume that essentially all other companies in the industry will have the same low probability of failures?
—bdb, Time Bomb 2000 Forums (LUSENET), 03/14/99
It’s pretty clear at this point that the world as a whole is going to be burnt toast in 2000. The question is, will we just be “well done” here in the U.S., or will we be toast as well.
Getting an idea on how the U.S. situation is going to turn out is very important to those in the process of preparing for Y2K. I don’t have the money to go out and buy everything at once. With me it’s just a little more each week at the grocery and Home Depot.
I believe we’ll find out a lot more between now and August on just how bad things things will turn out in the U.S. I need to know what kind of failures to prepare for so I can adjust my preparations.
I don’t know about you, but I have family members whose welfare I need to consider...
—Kevin, Time Bomb 2000 Forums (LUSENET), 03/14/99
