Re: YEAR 2000 SOLUTIONS CONFERENCE -- CALL FOR PAPERS (long)

Mark W. McBride, president, SPCS, Inc. wrote: > > Did you hear the news? On Sat, 25 Nov 1995 16:41:14 -0700 (MST), our > ether buddy Roy Hann <rhann@nisku.blackgold.ab.ca> spaketh thusly: > > :)What a totally fatuous idea! I thought this was a laborious practical > :)joke at first, but now I see it's not. An entire conference devoted to > :)the date change?! Any project manager or system architect who didn't > :)account for this in the last 20 years should be sued for malpractice, not > :)sent on a junket a company expense! And those unfortunates who inherited > :)systems from such clowns would be better off working on fixing the mess > :)than attending a conference which apparently has not yet identified > :)enough actual issues or solutions to put together a brochure. > > Hello Roy! > > You probably don't think it's a big deal, but the USDA does - it > recently issued a CBD announcement seeking solutions to its problems - > and so does the USAF. I snagged the following post from > sci.military.moderated - AFNS is the U.S. Air Force's Official News > Service: Your incessant ballyhooing of your own product is really annoying. I'm with Roy--dBASE, the prototypical PC database system that has been around 15+ years handles 4-digit years just fine (i.e. up to the year 9999) and does all the date math for you. If clueless programmers can't manage to make a program that will work past 2000 (and I've seen dBASE programs that wouldn't because they've circumvented our DATE type to save database space) how in the world would your product make any difference? The problem in the clip you attached was that the PC's clocks themselves couldn't handle the correct date. How could your vaunted program possibly fix that problem? -Dan Veditz