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THE GOOD news: the Year 2000 problem won't cause your personal
computer to crash. The bad news: you may not be able to turn it on
because there is no electricity. In the April issue of BugNet, Bruce
Brown looked at the Year 2000 problem, in an article subtitled "Be Still
My Beating Heart." <y2k_debunk.html> As far as the PC industry goes,
Y2K is a minor issue that shouldn't cause too many problems. Yet the
Y2K problem transcends the PC industry and has broad ramifications for
the
economy. For in addition to PCs, it also affects the world of
mainframe programming and, most seriously, devices called embedded
processors or embedded systems. Getting a good estimate for the cost
of fixing Y2K is
difficult since many people doing the estimates, the Y2K consultants,
have a vested interest in making the problem look worse. By far the
most widely reported figure comes from the Gartner Group, an Information
Technology (IT) industry analyst organization. Their rather imprecise
estimate is that it will cost between $300-600 billion worldwide to
fix this problem. At the Federal level, the Office of Management and
Budget
(OMB) is now predicting it will cost $5.4 billion, even though
estimates made by individual agencies sum to a much higher number.
According to
Congressional testimony, General Motors estimates their costs at $565
million, Citicorp plans on $600 million, and MCI thinks their costs
will be $400 million. That number is for the successful fixes. It does
not
count the costs of economic disruption from Y2K errors that don't get
fixed. It also does not count the cost of litigation. Information
Week,in the October 26, 1998 issue, says that estimates of Y2K legal
damages
may run as much as two or three times the cost of the actual fix, as
high as $1 trillion. Check out BugNet's page of Y2K links for more
background information. Fixing the problem in mainframe computers is
slightly more difficult than in PCs, but most indications show that
the private sector is well on its way towards solving the problem. The
large
mainframe government systems may be a different matter. A
Congressional oversight committee
http://www.house.gov/reform/gmit/y2k> has graded
most government agencies with Ds and F's in their compliance efforts.
The real crucial problem, however, may be in embedded systems.
Embedded Systems All the 30-year-old bugs in COBOL programs may get
fixed in
time, and all PCs can be checked for compliance. But it won't mean a
thing if the computer won't turn on because there is no electricity on
January 1, 2000. That is the Doomsday Scenario of a small but
significant group of pessimists who worry most about the problem of
embedded systems. Devices throughout the industrial world often have a
microprocessor system embedded in them, often linked to a controller
that manages some process like fluid flow, temperature, or a machine
tool. The functions of some of these systems are to tell time. As
trivial examples, look at a digital wristwatch or a VCR, which have
embedded processors with time functions. It should be easy to see if
they are Y2K-compliant by setting their clocks ahead to December31,
1999 and seeing what happens at midnight. In many cases, it doesn't
matter,
because the watch or VCR may not track the year. Some of them do, but
only with the last two digits. If this is the case, but you can
independently set the date and the day of the week, it really won't
matter. They will keep on running, not caring whether the 00 stands for
1900 or 2000. And even if it does matter, there is probably a wind-up
watch sitting around that can be used as a substitute, and many VCRs
go their whole lives not showing the correct time. But in electrical
generation plants, nuclear reactors, natural gas pipelines, hospitals
and factories around the world, there are countless embedded systems. No
one is really sure how many there are, where they are, or exactly what
their programming logic is. Many of these systems merely keep track of
elapsed time, and do not consider the year at all. Others use a
four-digit year, and are also safe. That leaves systems that use a
two-digit year. When these controllers suddenly find themselves thrust
back into the past, on 1/1/00, do they keep on running or do they shut
themselves down in confusion? And will that cause a shut down in
whatever process they were controlling? Will the rollover to the new
century will cause a one-time error that can be cured by re-calibration,
or will it permanently disable the system? In some test cases, a
particular system may work correctly as the date changes, but after it
is turned off and then turned back on, it exhibits errors. Another
complicating factor with many of these controls is that they cannot be
reprogrammed. Their particular functions are "burned-in" during
manufacturing. If they are non-compliant, they will have to be replaced,
not repaired or reprogrammed. The focal point of the fears of the
pessimists is the electric utility industry. An electrical generating
plant (conventional as well as nuclear) is an extremely complex system
monitored by computers and controllers. It is connected to an equally
complex electric distribution system that sends power to its own
customers. Even if an individual utility has worked very hard to become
100 percent Y2K compliant, it is still interconnected with other
utilities across North America and is partly at their mercy. This
interconnection is supposed to be a safety factor. If a catastrophe
causes a major loss of power generation in one area, power can be
transmitted in from other areas through the electrical grid. The utility
industry relies on ~systems <http://www.nerc.com/y2k/y2kworkshop.html>
referred to as SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems)
and EMS (Energy Management Systems) for much of the co-ordination, and
the Y2K compliance of SCADA has been debated. Testimony by utility
executives before ~a special U.S. Senate Y2K
<http://www.senate.gov/bennett/pr0612c98.html> committee indicates that
utilities may not be as far along in their testing and remediation for
embedded systems as other industries, saying "...we conclude that while
these utilities are proceeding in the right direction, the pace of
remedial efforts is too slow and the associated milestone dates are so
distant that there is significant cause for concern." There are also
experts who say that while there may be problems with SCADA, the
consequences are exaggerated. For instance, a recent article
<http://y2ktimebomb.com/PP/RC/dmpp.htm> by a leading designer of
software for the electric utility industry, Dick Mills, relates this
anecdote from an engineer who works for a major SCADA and EMS vendor:
"...told me that their systems have always had trouble with daylight
savings time, so on those two evenings per year when daylight savings
changes, they just leave the SCADA and EMS computers turned off for the
night or for the hours near 2 am. No power customers ever noticed that
the computers were off. No blackouts occurred." Another mitigating
factor may be that it won't be a surprise. While no one will say that
utilities will be fully compliant on January 1, 2000, they won't be
unaware. One would imagine that control rooms and repair crews will be
fully staffed and on alert during this time period. Economic Shutdown?
There are a certain number of survivalists who think that the modern
economy has become so complex and so reliant on technology, that the Y2K
problem will be far worse than any earthquake or hurricane. They fear a
supply chain only as strong as its weakest link. "I've always known that
the economy is complex and that we live on the end of a long chain of
ships, planes, and 18-wheelers," one such survivalist told Wired
Magazine <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.08/y2k.html>. Consider
some recent examples of how small events cause big consequences. General
Motors has learned that the closure of just a few key facilities can
cause the almost total shutdown of their manufacturing operations. The
failure of one communications satellite caused a massive disruption in
pager networks, some broadcast news operations, and credit card
verification systems. And complications caused by the merger of two
railroads snarled train traffic in the Southwest for months. Now
multiply these events ten or twenty-fold, mix in disruptions in
utilities, have them all happen at once, and one can see why some people
are stockpiling food in the basement. (While it may be easy to write off
the survivalists as kooks, it is somewhat disconcerting to see that a
number of them are programmers with lots of Y2K experience.) To dispel
some of the doom and gloom that accompanies this topic, it may be
appropriate to end with a story that has been circulating around the
Internet: A COBOL programmer had been putting in tremendous hours
working to solve the Y2K problem. The combination of long hours and the
stress of listening to all the doomsday talk caused a major anxiety
attack. He went to a cryogenics company, and arranged to have himself
frozen for a year, in an expensive and totally automated process. His
last thoughts as he fell asleep were that, when he woke up, he was sure
the problems would be solved. The next thing he knew, he was in a very
modern room filled with excited people and equipment right out of a Star
Trek episode. They were amazed he was still alive. The cryogenics
company he picked, they explained, was not Year 2000 compliant, and
there had been a problem. Instead of being asleep a year, he had been
asleep almost eight thousand years. One of the technicians came forward
with a viewing screen and said that the Prime Minister of Earth wished
to speak to him. The Prime Minister told the programmer not to be
afraid, he was waking in a far better world. There was world peace and
no more hunger. Disease had been eradicated, and space travel a reality.
"That's terrific," said the programmer, "but why are you so interested
in me?" The Prime Minister, who looked very much like Bill Gates,
replied "Well, your files say that you know COBOL, and we've got this
thing called the Year 10,000 bug....."
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