Tuesday December 28, 1999 6:20 a.m. EST

No All-Clear for Y2K Bugs After Jan. 1 Passes

NEW YORK (AP) -- Y2K computer worries won't go away this weekend, even if nothing goes wrong. Glitches are likely weeks, even months, into the new year. And a few may linger until 2001 and beyond.

The Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm, estimates only 10 percent of all Y2K failures will occur during the first two weeks of January.

Yet an Associated Press poll taken earlier this month found that only 16 percent of respondents think Y2K problems will last more than two weeks. And the number who think the problems will be confined to less than a few days has increased from 22 percent to 36 percent.

Most Y2K planners are aware that Jan. 1 is no magic date, but they fear a quiet weekend might leave the public with a false sense of security.

``There is too much focus on New Year's weekend,'' said Bruce McConnell, director of the International Y2K Cooperation Center. ``If you think that the only time to worry about the Y2K bug is on Jan. 1, then you're underestimating the problem.''

Besides having new problems appear later in the year, glitches that strike on Jan. 1 might go unnoticed initially, even after employees return to work and restart computers. The full effects might not be felt until smaller glitches compound and disrupt business supply chains.

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), December 28, 1999

Answers

Source: Elec. Telegraph. Free subscription.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000154642417163&rtmo=qsJsqxd9&atmo =qsJsqxd9&pg=/et/home.html

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), December 28, 1999.

As Dale Way put it in his paper, there are three areas of concern with Y2K remediation:

1. Look ahead beyond rollover 2. Rollover 3. Look back before rollover

The above article covers #1 which can be tested (and not all systems had to look ahead at once so lessons-learned could be applied to the later remediation efforts) and we are still having problems.
#2 can only be tested at rollover - either things works or they don't. We'll know in approx. 87 hours.
#3 can't be tested (in a systematic or end-to-end manner) until after rollover and all systems that must look back will be looking back at the same time with no lead time (like we have had for #1) to test the fixes.
Prognosis: since we are already having problems with #1 which we've been able to test, #3 is going to be the real test for all of the remediation efforts that have gone on. I must assume that problems will surface based on all available data.
We are already experiencing BITR. Anyone who says nothing will happen is already wrong! It can only get worse.

NOTE: Dale Way pronounced himself to be an adherent of the bell curve. What he neglected to say was what the shape of the bell curve was. Is it a skewed curve? How many standard deviations from the norm is BITR or TEOTWAWKI? I put the norm to be at 6 with the curve skewed toward BITR.

-- just wondering (what.it.is@about.com), December 28, 1999.