Y2K Question

[Rabbit]

Just a quickie for all you experts out there.

A lot of folks like myself never turn off our PC's. So should they be switched OFF for the end of year change or NOT????

Have a nice day.

[DarrenMoore]

Whether your computer is switched on or not will not matter as all computers have a clock built into then that fucntion correctly whether the computer is powered up or not due to a little battery.
Darren

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We are pleased to have some of the best flight attendants in the industry... Unfortunately none of them are on this flight

[What_does_this_button_do?]

Darren you are correct, BUT, by turning your computer off pre midnight, Dec31st will mean that if a problem does arise then your data won't be trashed.

What some people are doing is to power off their machines, look on the Internet on Jan 1st for any problems to arise on their make of machine before comitting to turning back on. If there is a problem by booting from a floppy disk where the forst line in the autoexec.bat is date 1/1/1999 and time 15:00 should fool the PC.

Before you lot shout me down and say "they check on the Internet therefore they use there machine, d'oh!" - they'll probably be logging via their TV or Internet Cafe if they're in the UK...some people in the office log on via their mobile phone - although the speed it runs at I would prefer to watch paint dry.




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Capt IF Snailtrails, gawd bless 'im!
Slurp coffee and fire up PC....PPRUNE time!
Filth/garbage/sex...*post*...*post*...*post*

[Blacksheep]

Y2K Bug? No such thing! Who says so?

Academics and Software Systems Engineers at Universities all over the world. Consider this from a paper by Prof. Anthony Finklestein, Professor of Software Systems Engineering at University College, University of London.

"....the result of irresponsible scaremongering. Worse, they are scares deliberately distributed by consulting firms and others with an interest...... there is very little empirical evidence relating to the prevalence and gravity of the problem. A combination of commercial interest, confidentiality and poor scientific practice taint the evidence that IS available." In other words - its all a con and they are only after our money. The professor goes on to say that date rollover problems have been known about for many years and calculations involving dates in the new millenium have been going on for a long time. Fixes have been implemented continually and gradually as problems are encountered and hardly anything new turns up now. The paper is lengthy, technical and extremely well thought through, (as you may expect from a learned academic.) The point is, he is not alone in his assessment, this point of view is widespread among high level programmers and Systems Engineers. None has found any serious errors in hours of effort to track down and eliminate the Y2K bug.

Forget it all, boot up on New Years Day and surprise, surprise! Nothing happens. OK?

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Noted. Please report further.

[What_does_this_button_do?]

Blacksheep I do hope this in a wind up.

Did you know Windows 95/98 and NT are NOT Y2K in it's current format? - if you use date based calculations in Excel then they WILL be wrong on Jan 1 unless you make a manual adjustment.

I have just finished a £9.75m Y2K project, and I don't think was money wasted because the problem didn't exist. I must admit though seeing 50-65 year old COBAL programmers in 3 piece suits, decent hair cuts, good manners scared the living **** out of our current programming staff who are 20-30 something with zero dress sense and manners you would cringe at.

- head programmer taken to see the head of company about a problem he has. Head of Company carefully explains what his problem is and head programmer responds "you've got a w@nk knowledge of computers" - and LEAVES the room........crikey - why DIDN'T the floor open up????????????????????

In short, there is a problem. As airmanship demands, TRUST your instruments - they won't lie to you......

[This message has been edited by What_does_this_button_do? (edited 28 October 1999).]

[Blacksheep]

OK Buttons, you found me out! But only a bit of a wind up. Prof Finklestein is real enough and so is his paper. I just figured that with all this Y2K angst it was time to remember that there are two sides to every equation.

Actually pilots using Honeywell Flight Management Systems will see Y2K effects over the next 12 months. Those with older 270K Nav Databases will get a screwed up date display from midnight 31 December while those using the 1 Meg Database with "PIP" Operating Software will start getting nuisnace "Nav Data Out of Date" messages at power up from 01 January 2001. There is no fix for the first problem, you've just got to live with it. Honeywell promise a software fix sometime before the end of 2000 for the second. In any case, there are no operational effects, all Honeywell FMCs continue to navigate properly. There are a few other sytems which have Y2K effects, all of them nuisance level with no operational effects. The thing to remember is that you musn't get wound up about computers crashing all over the place. My PC at the office returns to 04 April 1980 at the stroke of midnight and some of the software will screw up, but that's not the same as the utter devastation that a lot of people are expecting. All (almost all) Y2K effects are fixable and should be no more than a nuisance. There are plenty of work around solutions available either for free or quite cheap all over the place.

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Don't Panic Mr. Mainwaring!!!!!