>X-Mailer: fastmail [version 2.4 PL24 PGP6]
>Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1998 11:29:03 +0200
>Reply-To: Irwin Scollar <[log in to unmask]>
>Sender: ArchComp-l <[log in to unmask]>
>From: Irwin Scollar <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Y2K_GPS
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Thanks to Nick Ryan for his very complete and detailed correction of my
>note in which I naively passed on the content of a horror story in one of the
>journals along with mis-stating the coincidence with Y2K. Like one
>British Army brigadier is alleged to have said, "I'm often in error, but
>never in doubt".
>
>A mess it still is for those like David who have purchased receivers whose
>firmware may cause problems with the 10 bit rollover. I suspect that the
>firmware is soldered into place in most receivers, but if it's socketed,
>perhaps the manufactuer can supply an updated PROM or can do the
>change at the factory.
>
>As a further thought on such matters, date rollovers are not as uncommon
>as one might imagine. I think I read someplace that most Unix (Unices
>plural?) sytems roll over sometime in the the fourth decade of the next
>century.
>
>I've been asked by several overly anxious agencies to certify whether or not
>Winbasp is Y2K compliant. Since I make no use of the system date for
>anything that I can think of, I guess it is, rather by default.
>
>If one has a very old BIOS or OS in one's PC, then there may be a problem
>after the millenium change for programs which rely on the system date for
>anything. One easy way to check is simply to set the machine date to 31
>December 1999, set the time to 23:59:50, then wait ten seconds and see
>what happens after entering 'date' at the command line. On my oldest
>machine, a Hewlett-Packard with a 1989 Phoenix BIOS running under
>DOS 6.20, performing this test shows Friday, 31st of December 1999, and
>after the roll over, the date correctly shows as Saturday, the 1st of
January,
>2000. But perhaps I'm lucky.
>
>I was not so lucky with a renewed credit card with a 01/2000 expiration
>date which was refused by the card reader of an airline and which had to
>be exchanged by the credit card company for one dated 01/1999 as a
>stopgap after some very expensive and hectic long-distance telephone calls.
>The Y2K problem isn't just a journalist's playground, I discovered. See my
>letters in Dr. Dobb's Journal in May and in September of 1997 for the gory
>details and the reply by the credit card company's IT manager.
>
>Comments?
>
>I.S.
>
>
********************************
* Mary Ellin D'Agostino *
* [log in to unmask] *
* Department of Anthropology *
* University of California *
* Berkeley, CA 94720-3710 *
********************************
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