Re: tlug: Y2K

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Let's take this to -advocacy ....

>>>>> "Chris" == Chris Sekiya <chris@example.com> writes:

    Chris> On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, Eric S. Standlee wrote:
    >> I need to get my ahands on some good information about the Y2K
    >> problem and of course how it relates to Linux

    Chris> linux is y2k compliant.  Various userland programs may have
    Chris> problems, however.

You mean like XFree86 and inetd and find?  Userland is everything that
isn't the kernel or a kernel module desu ne?

XEmacs is y2k compliant, for what it's worth, as long as the OS it's
running on is.  See http://www.xemacs.org/year2000.html.

    >> I have two young'uns I would like to know if I should plan a
    >> personal holiday to America during the chaos???

    Chris> Assuming a worst-case scenario, I would think that Japan
    Chris> would be safer than the states.  I'm not hearing good
    Chris> things about stateside y2k readiness.

Which is _good news_.  Somebody cares.

(1) In Japan, as a general principle no news is bad news.  The
earliest casualty estimates in both the Loma Prieta and Northridge
quakes in the US were _high_; in the Hanshin fiasco, nobody made any
public estimate until the deaths were already in the thousands, and
they were consistently low.

(2) FWIW, a buddy of mine who is really paranoid about Y2K has sent me
a couple of articles suggesting it could get really really cold here;
Japan does not have huge military stockpiles of oil like the US does.
Japanese companies supplied a fair amount of software to OPEC state
oil companies; evidently nobody in the industry has any idea how it
will stand up to y2k, nor is anybody even thinking about taking
responsibility for it.  "Y2K preparedness" means "how can I avoid
taking responsiblity for it" even more so in Japan than in the US....

I will try to get around to putting them up on my web site; I'll
announce on -advocacy if and when.

My gut feeling is that there will be disruptions in physical services,
but nothing big enough that Nostradamus would have bothered to
report.  Financial services are another matter.

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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