Re: Y2K: Canada status?

[nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)]

Jean-Francois Avon wrote: 
> Please reply to my personnal address, I am not on CPunks.
> 
> Is there anybody who knows about the Y2K situation in Canada?
> 
> Should we infer that the situation will be the same here or were any preparation steps
> taken by out govt that will postpone our contry's alledged fall by 2 microseconds (time for
> any major economic catastrophy in the US to reach us here)

Canadians have the additional problem of having a lot of software which
is customized to convert differing MM/DD/YY formats back and forth. More
so than many other countries, because of the close working relationship
of many small to medium companies with American customers and vendors.

Many Canadian companies do not seem to realize that their software 
works with their 'Joe America' software package only because the guy 
who left the company six years ago did some obscure customization. 
I have seen problems that appeared only when Canadian companies 
updated their 'Joe America' software, and that was _without_ date-code 
changes.
Many companies that run Canadian versions of software are also unaware
of the customizations made to it by vendors in order to 'make' it
work with US versions as it was advertised to do out of the box.

As well, even Canadian companies who are ready and willing to tackle
the Y2K problem are sometimes unable to do so until those who their
software needs to interact with do so. It is sometimes very difficult
for them to fix the 'Canadian' parts of the code without adjusting
the 'American' parts of the code, with no assurance that once their
American counterparts do their changes, all of their work/money goes
out the window.

During the decimal/metric changeover in Canada, I had more than one
car which required me to have tools for 'both' systems, to do even
the smallest of mechanical tasks on it.

Now might be a great time to invest in companies who resisted the
move to computerization, and who still have bookeepers and the
like on staff.

CanuckMonger