There Have Been Already

Maybe ThereHaveBeenAlready problems caused by Y2K. Many may have already been fixed. Please list any you know about here.

I thought I'd heard about goods lost because of confusion over "best before" dates. I tried to hunt down some refs to the examples I've head about. I Don't know these off the top of my head because (and this is the point), it happened about a year ago. But I can't find them. -- KeithBraithwaite

I saw a thing on tv about a man, born in 1901, who was denied his Social Security benefits (for a while) because the computer, having been recently upgraded to Y2K, decided he was born in 2001. It was significant to the man, at least, and the tv stations got some significance out of it. It was, however, fixable by hand. -- Alistair

I had the impression that Keith was talking about whole warehouses of goods thrown away because of a useBefore: date. Wanted an example so I could sell stock in a company where the humans pay so little attention ... -- rj (I think you'll find this described in the archives for comp.risks. -- mbp.)

Problems in Putting and Getting

FWIW I haven't heard of this one either except as a StrawMan. The warehouse worry I've heard is to do with JIT delivery of goods. In the old days, most large stores were shopfronts with warehouses behind them; nowadays we manufacture things JIT to minimize investment in the stock on the shelves. Behind a big store these days there's no warehouse, just a loading dock. So there's no physical way most stores can prepare for manufacturing disruptions, even if they anticipate them; there's no place to put the stock. -- PeterMerel

How about small, run-on-a-shoestring magazines going out of business because their subscription database goes south? A friend subscribed to a miniature doll-house magazine that recently went under, blaming their inability to straighten out their billing.

I suspect that there is a lot more of this going on than we're hearing about. Years back, someone helped a friend set up billing on an Apple II with PFS:File, and the tiny endevour chugged along on technical momentum until the billing went haywire. Faced with both obtaining newer hardware and finding some way of converting data from antique software, some folks will decide to pack it in.

Shortsighted models and bad business practices

Prodigy listed Y2K costs as a reason to not continue their proprietary network along with their move onto the Web. Getting the proprietary stuff Y2K ready, the story was, would have costed more than it was worth. Salt, etc.

I wonder whether some of these cases are really Y2K. It seems possible that Y2K itself can be a scapegoat for bad business practices. -- MichaelFeathers

Next big problem to solve

Root causes for many of the problems on this page have to do with shortsightedness and the lack of robust planning concerning extents and scope. The shortcomings concerning dates has been fixed, at least in most systems, but the ThereHaveBeenAlready problem in other programming concerns remain . The questions at the base levels of operating systems and locational processes which are about putting massive amounts of informational objects where they can be recovered easily by human agency is the next big problem to solve. -- DonaldNoyes