Y2K is one of the best opportunities for bilking which has ever been
offered to FBN. To top off what should be some minor programming
and system modifications is the need for many members of western society
to doubt the security of their lifestyle. Add in the right-wing
wackos which have been watching the horizon for any signs of Armageddon
and you have a boom in the survivalist business and in the computer
systems business. We at FBN fully intend to sow FUD and use this
opportunity to maximize billings and the havoc we wreak on the
marketplace.
The first suggestion is always to
purchase new systems. We have this test software which fails
everything, even new Compaq and Dell servers. Little does the
customer realize that some systems will do Y2K dates okay, they just
will not roll-over into January 1,2000 automatically. Set the BIOS
date manually and reboot and they work fine.
FBN has sold customers replacement
systems and charged a recycling fee for taking away old systems which
the customer was led to believe were not Y2K compliant. These
systems were then sold at a premium price to other customers as being
Y2K compliant. If only we could get away with these types of
stunts forever!
The FUD is taking such a toll
customers are persuaded to replace systems which in normal operation
have no date awareness. Customers can be persuaded to replace PCs
used only for word processing where the operators are so clueless they
don't even use the date code functions in documents. Most of the
time the system date is set to 198? And no one notices the
difference.
FBN will never advise customers,
while some 486 systems will never retain a Y2K date after a reboot, the
system can be made fully useable by manually entering a Y2K date at
boot-up. Customers are never advised adding time and date lines to
the Autoexec.bat file will allow the operating system to run with a Y2K
date. And, do Y2K transactions properly too!
If only this could go on
forever. Y2K almost makes it too easy to scam customers.
Unfortunately January 1, 2000 is going to be the start of a massive
hangover where those who threw money at perceived Y2K problems will
wonder, "What was I thinking?".
To help sow the FUD a number of
standard terms and phases are used to further baffle and confuse the
customer. We call it "Classic Y2K Paranoia Speak". Some of
the better examples follow: "unexpected conjunction of improbable
events", "emergent failure", "failure of intrinsic network
components", "internetwork connectivity infrastructure interconnection
failure", "the mathematical difficulty of testing entire network",
"all possible failure points and their interactions with the network as
a whole", "mostly uninterrupted", "in complicated systems we can expect
the unexpected", "complicated systems must interoperate", "highly
complex information dependent accident-prone systems", "the Titanic's
maiden voyage occurred on a 99.9% iceberg-free ocean", ....
In addition to the fine services
offered by FBN Technical Services we are proud to announce FBN will be
reselling the complete product line of FBN Associates. Complete
product information available on their website.