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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 02/04/00 -- Vol. 18, No. 32
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. George Mac Lachlan has been a long-time club member and in
general my major source on the Y2K problem. I asked him to write a
guest editorial summing up the Y2K problem ans in general why the
disaster never came. Here are his comments.
Y2K Postscript
The century date rollover came and went without a major breakdown
anywhere in the world. All of the concern expressed about power
grids, embedded chips and nuclear reactors appears to have been
unwarranted. Third World countries, small businesses and local
governments that did almost nothing to remediate Y2K problems seem
to have survived with little or no consequences. There was no
release of computer viruses and no terrorist attacks (although I
read about five or six incidents of people being arrested for
possession of explosives or bombs).
Glitches did occur all over the globe. They typically caused
outages for a matter of hours or perhaps days. But they were just
glitches. There were no cascading supply chain breakdowns nor were
there any significant nuclear power incidents. A representative
sampling of incidents include:
- Al Gore's Internet Town Hall Web site was reporting a 19100
date.
- The Air Force lost communication with some of their spy
satellites. The problem was attributed to testing only
segments of the surveillance system, but not testing the
system as a whole.
- Visa and MasterCard warned customers to carefully review their
credit card statements for erroneous duplicate charges.
Although free fixes for the associated problem were made
available, many merchants didn't get them.
- Investors were surprised to see the date Jan 3, 100 on the
Philadelphia Stock Exchange Web site on Monday morning .
- In Sweden, approximately 100,000 people were unable to access
their bank accounts over the Internet because they hadn't
updated their browser software.
There were other problems that may have been Y2K related, but were
not reported as such. On January 6, East Coast airports suffered a
major FAA computer failure. Flights were delayed for hours. But
there was not much coverage of this. Fox News ran a brief report
as its headline. Nowhere in the story was there any mention of
Y2K.
It is estimated that the United States spent around $100 billion on
remediation efforts to deal with the Y2K computer bug. The
consensus seems to be that this was money well spent. John
Koskinen, President Clinton's Y2K czar, cites an experiment
regarding three minor computer systems within the government.
These systems had been replaced as a part of the remediation
effort, but the now outdated systems were permitted to continue
operating on the sidelines through the new year transition. All
three computer systems crashed at the century date change.
According to Koskinen, "All three of the systems failed following
the Y2K rollover and could not be used. The systems simply stopped
and became unusable." Koskinen also admitted that as much as 10%
of the budget spent to solve this problem may have been wasted or
have been used as an excuse to purchase replacement systems.
According to Oliver Rist, "Most IT managers are better off post-Y2K
because the 'crisis' gave them the excuse they needed to upgrade
systems corporate-wide.
In most large organizations, any such move would be hamstrung by
internal politics if you went about it conventionally. [The Y2K]
threat was the perfect motivator to let IT administrators face the
new century with a clean slate..."
The question remains though, why did those sectors of global
business and government that did almost nothing to prepare for this
event, seemingly get by unscathed? The response from several
analysts is that Y2K was not a watershed type of event. It was not
a fix-or-die type of problem, but rather a problem that has the
potential to product side effects over a longer period of time. It
is more corrupting in nature, rather than catastrophic.
A reporter for USA Today summed it up this way (January 5, 2000
issue):
"The Y2K bug's biggest risk was never to power grids, missile
systems or telephone exchanges but rather to the complicated
backroom systems on which the world's corporations and governments
run. And that's why the vast majority of Year 2000 computer
problems won't turn up for days, weeks or even months, information
technology experts say. So forget the somehow widely disseminated
misconception that if planet Earth got past Jan. 1 without any
info-disasters we'd be home free. Think not of Y2K as an
information age earthquake avoided but rather as a steady stream of
gradually more damaging tremors to come."
All of the evidence thus far suggests that we may well be out of
the woods regarding this problem. Although I recall reading that
both Bill Gates and Peter de Jager each said that they wanted to
wait for a few months before they felt confident the problem had
been overcome. In any event, we still have February 29th to look
forward to as a possible candidate for generating some Y2K-related
excitment. [-gfm]
===================================================================
2. LOOKING BACKWARD by Edward Bellamy (Signet, CT339, 1887 [1960],
222+xxii pp, US$0.75) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
I have a special connection with this book, since Edward Bellamy
was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, which was incorporated
into my high school home town of Chicopee. (Chicopee's other claim
to fame is that it is the home of the friction match. It is not,
as Mark sometimes asserts, the home of the self-starting hamster.)
And Bellamy was the editor of the Massachusetts newspaper where my
brother is currently working as a sportswriter.
LOOKING BACKWARD is subtitled "2000-1887," which makes it
especially topical this year. As to its accuracy, or even
plausibility . . . well, we'll see.
Bellamy has a very optimistic view of people and their reaction to
all the rules of this new society. He claims, for example, that
"the fact that the stronger are selected for the leaders is in no
way a reflection on the weaker, but in the interest of the common
weal." But since Bellamy later has Dr. Leete admit, "A man able to
duty, and persistently refusing, is sentenced to solitary
imprisonment on bread and water until he consents," there is
apparently some dissension in this "perfect" society.
There are other imperfections as well, though I suspect Bellamy did
not even realize them. Dr. Leete says, "The great nations of
Europe, as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America,
are now organized industrially like the United States. . . . An
international council regulates . . . their joint policy toward the
more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to
civilized institutions." And no one that Bellamy meets is anything
but white, or Christian. (One wonders if the fact that the
narrator was found entombed on a Friday and fully awoke on a Sunday
has additional meaning.) This easy racism probably went completely
unnoticed in 1887; it is more obvious now.
Throughout the book, there are all sorts of "predictions" which are
off. One obvious one is that people listen to live music by
telephone, but there are no recording devices. On a larger scale,
everything operates smoothly under a planned economy, and we've
seen that that doesn't work that way either. But the interesting
part is how all this is related.
Virginia Postrel's article in the "Wall Street Journal"
(http://interactive.wsj.com/millennium/articles/
SB944517208522468175.htm) sums it up in one sentence: "The future,
in fact, is made of surprise." Futurists, including Bellamy,
"didn't factor in the power of vanity, self-expression, chance,
novelty, or fun." In Bellamy's 2000, nothing is produced unless
people have asked for it, and guaranteed a certian level of
consumption. But, as Postrel notes, "no one fills out a request
for rock music, Jacuzzis, or Vidal Sassoon-style blunt haircuts."
Bellamy's characters can choose between listening to a waltz or
organ music, but there are no Beatles, Philip Glass, or Ice T, nor
are the inhabitants of Bellamy's 2000 likely to wait up one day and
request them. (No one in 1900 was likely to request Van Gogh or
Stravinsky either.)
(I will note that Bellamy has his narrator write on December 26,
2000, "Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth
century," indicating that *he* knew when centuries started and
ended.)
The particular edition I read is no longer available, but this is
available in a bunch of editions, including a "Dover Thrift
Edition" and on-line at http://eserver.org/fiction/bellamy. [-ecl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com