DC Y2K Weather Report
May 18, 1999 - 227 days to go. WRP119
http://www.kiyoinc.com/current.htmlFinal $5.00 Cover Price.
(c) 1998, 1999 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and reproduce this newsletter as long as this entire document is reproduced in its entirety. You may optionally quote an individual article but you should include this header down to the tearline or provide a link to the header. I do not grant permission to a commercial publisher to reprint this in print media. This entire document is a Year 2000 Information Disclosure as defined in the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act, S2392.
--------------------tearline -----------------
In this issue
1. Defending the Pollyanna
2. Rick Cowles on ABB
3. Project Electric Candle
4. CCCC
-- Pollyanna --
Defending the Pollyanna Viewpoint
by Arnold Trembley
http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/tmr.htm
Cory asked for an article from anyone with big-iron enterprise-scale computing experience who could defend the pollyanna point of view. Sorry, my powers can only be used for good, not evil.
I have 20 years experience as an applications programmer, primarily in COBOL for financial and manufacturing systems, primarily in IBM mainframe environments. I've dabbled with older database technology, a little S/370 assembler, IBM Series/1 RPS and EDX, and even spent a year as a system programmer supporting VM/CMS, VSE, and CICS. I've written my share of Y2k bugs and stared a few of them in the face. In December 1992 I spent a week fighting a devastating leap year bug in an assembler date subprogram that we learned would fail completely in the year 2000. I've written general-purpose date routines, tested them from 1600 AD to 2400 AD. I've seen CICS 3.3 regions that went into an infinite loop when started with a year 2000 date. I have personally analyzed and fixed year 2000 bugs.
I've worked on Year 2000 problems for over three years. I think I've paid my big-iron dues, but I've been in denial. My name is Arnold, and I am a pollyanna.
The extreme pollyanna viewpoint is not defensible. We know there are year 2000 problems happening right now. We cannot say that nothing unusual will happen come Saturday, January 1st, 2000. That doesn't pass the laugh test.
The extreme pollyanna viewpoint says that Y2k is just hype, that the doombrood TEOTWAWKI crowd is playing on our fears to scare us into hiring expensive contractors, to buy survival supplies, weapons, generators, MRE's, water barrels, 50 pound sacks of beans and rice, or even investment newsletters for 300 bucks a year (minimum two-year subscription). Sure, the Year 2000 problem has been over-hyped by some people who stand to gain from your business, but that doesn't prove there are no problems.
The extreme pollyanna viewpoint says: since nothing unusual is going to happen, there's no need to prepare for any kind of catastrophe. Even the United States Federal Government says that storing up two or three days of food should be sufficient to deal with Y2k. In contrast, "infomagic" wrote in 1998 that we would have no electricity for 300 years. The pollyannas say that only panic is our enemy, that a bank run can bring down a bank that is financially sound. The doombrood says no bank is sound to begin with.
As I write this it is now mid-May, 1999, and the single most important fact is that none of the catastrophic Y2k predictions have come true. Regular readers of comp.software.year-2000 have seen predictions of stock market meltdowns starting in 1998. Even I made one of these, and I was wrong. It was confidently predicted in c.s.y2k that "Jo Anne Effect" accounting systems errors would have fortune 500 companies in bankruptcy by April 1999, that gold would begin its inexorable climb to $1000 per ounce, and that food riots would begin in the first half of this year. Instead, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average closed above 11,100 in early May of 1999, gold is below $290 an ounce, food supplies are still plentiful, and we haven't had any bank runs yet.
Now, it's certainly possible that it could all go to hell in a handbasket starting now, but it just hasn't happened yet. We're still hearing stories of companies or municipal governments just starting their Y2k work. What we're not hearing, thanks to the trail lawyers, is the stories of companies that have fixed their systems. The Pollyanna case is not proved yet. But by the same token, the doombrood case has not been proved, and all of their predictions for early failures have been wrong.
The actual year 2000 problems reported to date have been minor. No company has yet gone bankrupt due to a Y2k problem. The power is still on, the phones still have dial tone, and there aren't any significant shortages of vital supplies, with the possible exception of 4000-watt generators and white resin lawn chairs.
My best guess is that there may be thousands of big-iron mainframe shops in the USA alone that are running Year 2000 Time Machines. If you read bit.listserv.ibm-main regularly, you will see that Year 2000 testing issues have been discussed many times in the last two years. Cory Hamasaki says the work is not getting done. Even Cory will agree that there are places where the work is getting done. What we don't know, what we can't know yet, is where the problems will occur and what they will look like.
I believe the actual effects of the datequake rollover on Saturday, January 1st, 2000, will be minor, that any interruptions of electricity or telephone service will be very localized and short lived. I cannot prove this, so I cannot defend the Pollyanna viewpoint.
There are sound arguments that our economy is overextended, that a recession is possible in the near future without making any reference to Y2k issues. I believe the effects of year 2000 problems are most likely to be trailing event failures. Therefore, a recession is possible as early as October, 1999, but more likely to occur in mid-2000 to mid-2001.
If you're worried, and you're stocking up a month's worth of food, water, batteries, cash, and medical supplies, you're going to be better prepared than 99% of the world. You are probably over prepared, but I could be wrong. If you're bugging out to the boonies, going off the power grid, stocking up a year's worth of supplies, well, you don't need my blessing. You are far more prepared than I am.
The best possible outcome is for the systems to stay up. So the programmers should keep doing their jobs. When that long anticipated midnight comes, I will most probably be sitting at a terminal, making sure that my little piece of the infrastructure is still working. And I won't be the only one.
(c) 1999 Arnold Trembly
This article is published as part of Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report and may be reproduced under the same terms and conditions. All other rights reserved to the author.
-- Shocking Email--
From: rcowles@waterw.com (Rick Cowles)
To: kiyoinc@ibm.net
Subject: Re: ABB-From Inside the Electrical Industry
Date: Sun, 16 May 1999 11:32:26 -0400
Cory,
Here's one for discussion in a future WRP. This is as an important an article as I have seen - and it comes from perhaps the major player in the utilities business.
Rick
http://www2.abb.ch/GLOBAL/CHIBM/CHIBM007.NSF/Y2K/F1
Rick Cowles (Public PGP key on request)
www.euy2k.com : Electric Utilities and Y2k
Toll Free 1-877-503-2323
"ZAPPED" : A Household Video Primer for Dealing with Long Power Outages RealPlayer(tm) clip at: www.euy2k.com/video.htm
-----
ABB and the Year 2000
Author: Dr. Klaus Ragaller, ABB Year 2000 Task Force
Prints are available, please mail your requests to werner.latal@abbzh.mail.abb.com
The Year 2000 threat to the electrical grid
"...Such an event, namely the loss of a critical system component, can trigger cascading effects in the system. The history of brownouts and blackouts shows the root cause in most cases to be a combination of incidents that leads to a cascaded sequence of events...."
ABB sounds the warning. Read the whole thing. I'm buying more batteries.
-- Project Electric Candle --
I've got a double handful of White LEDs right here, they're mine, all mine. These things are better than gold. I'm howling like a wolf. Check out "Realgoods.com", they have a bunch of LED lights including a $100 white LED lightbulb.
LEDs are very efficient light sources. They produce a useful amount of light, not enough to knock owls out of trees or slice off an arm in a Mos Eisley bar but useful. Art has run an LED light on AA cells for 212 hours. This extrapolates to 1000+ hours on Alkaline D-cells.
The trick is to match the current drain to the battery voltage. You need the discharge curves, LED specs, and Ohms law to do this. I have a spreadsheet that does the calculation but in general, a 47 ohm resistor is the right value for the Radio Shack Jumbo Ultra-bright LED and a 3 volt power source. If you leave the resistor off, the Radio Shack LEDs will burn out on 3.0 volts.
Hook them up in series. Battery, resistor, LED, form a loop. LEDs conduct current only one way, the long lead should point to the battery's + terminal.
The white LEDs have different specs from the Radio Shack Jumbo's. The whites will run on two cells, 3.0 volts without a resistor. However, if you look at the discharge curves, http://www.eveready.com, the LED will extinguish while the batteries still have some current left in them. Hank and I feel that a good compromise is to use a 3 cell flashlight, 4.5 V, and a dropping resistor.
Hank has built LEDs into standard flashlight bulb sockets. Just break out the glass, pick out the cement, solder- suck the wires out, and solder the LED and resistor in. It's a little tight but once Hank explained it to me, I was able to do it with my sausage-like fingers, aka clammy paws (according to some geekettes.)
We'll be running different experiments and will send out an LED experimenter's kit in June. The kits will include instructions, resistors, wire, diagrams, LEDs, but probably not the white LED. I didn't get as many as I should have, so rather then send a white LED to everyone and have some languish on a shelf, I'll be sending a coupon. If you want a white LED, you just send the coupon back with a self-addressed envelope and we'll send the white LED to complete the kit.
I'll have information on sources of LEDs and other kits. I've been corresponding with a couple vendors who are working on low and high tech, affordable LED kits and parts. You can buy these things ready-made at camping and web-stores but there're pretty expensive. Once you've made an LED light, you can knock a couple dozen out in an afternoon, give em to your friends, sell them too.
The $2.99 and $3.99 Radio Shack yellow and orange Ultra-Bright Jumbos are a good compromise. I like the yellow better than the orange or red. The whites are much more expensive, they're running $8.00 and up, single quantity. If you buy a thousand, the price falls dramaticly but that's the difference between retail and wholesale.
Hank says that the white looks like a blue with a little yellow to balance the color.
As I said, I've got a double handful of whites and will be giving them away to WRP members.
--CCCC--
News, news, checkout http://www.washingtonpost.com, search for Paris, Maryland, and Y2K and you'll find another paradox. The governor of Maryland says that alls Y2K-well with the state. Ho-Kay, so why are you ordering up the National Guard in December, HAH? HAH! Explain what the multi-million dollar contract to do Y2K work awarded last month was for? HAH?
Cognitive Dissonance, cluelessness, or big time FIBBING!
I can't make this stuff up. It's too weird.
On one hand, the denialists say that the power will be on. Clueless that I am, I have no argument.
Then Rick Cowles and ABB, a big name in power generation (they also make a terrific kitchen dishwasher and electric locomotive.) go, like woooOOOoooo I am the Christmas ghost of blackouts and brownouts past. OooooOOOO, I forged these chains, link by 2 digit year, beware---ooOOOooo.
OOOooooOO, I just ate two huge plates of tuna and some egg noodles and Campbell's soup. I ate too much. But hey, the tuna was prime Albacore for 69 cents at Giant and I used a half can. This monster dinner cost me, maybe 50 cents. It was yummy.
Arnold's defense of the Pollyanna viewpoint is the first of two Pollyanna articles. Unlike the wishful thinking and clueless commentaries by lightweights, Arnold is a true Enterprise Systems programmer. I'll have another non-Doomster viewpoint in the next WRP. More accurately, Arnold's piece and the next are middle of the road articles. Hopeful, cautious, perhaps too optimistic but written from a credible technical perspective.
Beware, the world ends in 227 days.
-cory
WRP -- Members Only --
We have reprinted the 1919 book on gardening and will be mailing copies to new subscribers again.
We worked from the original 1919 publication. The paper is in poor condition but that is understandable given that it is 80 years old.
We've contracted for a book on sanitation, infection prevention, and sterilization for Y2K. The next "free" item is a kit for making LED lights. I still owe some new members items. I have a folder to work on this weekend.
-- Ads --
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--Fuzzy's supplies -- http://home.att.net/~ofuzzy1/barter.htm
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