Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]There is, unfortunately, a great deal of misinformation circulating with regard to the Y2K problem. Most of it is due to ignorant media blowing the whole deal way out of proportion, because it sells. Knowing a thing or two about computers, there are some points that need to be made. First, the Y2K problem is only relevant to computers and computerized equipment that keeps track of the date and year. There is a tremendous amount of equipment with embedded processors that do not. So, your washing machine and microwave are not going to go berserk and fry your cat, because neither of them are the least interested in the date. The same is true for modern infrastructure: a great deal of the equipment does not keep track of dates and years. Secondly, only those computers and databases that use two digits for the year are affected by the Y2K-problem. I don't know for sure, but an educated guess is that the very vast majority of computers built and operated in the past two decades do not have this limitation. While a number of so called "legacy systems", such as large mainframes or other antiquated systems, will suffer, the change-over will go smoothly with the modern systems. Thirdly, life isn't going to grind to a halt, things aren't going to get blown up, and computers aren't going to go berserk. The Y2K-problem manifests itself as the computer assuming the century is the 20th century. So, if the year is 2000 and a Y2K-problematik computer with only two digits to represent the year (00) has a choice to make, it will assume that the year is 1900 (the year 00 in the 20th century). An example would be a credit card that expires in the year 2000 not being accepted by a computer, because it thinks the card is out of date. This means that the behaviour is well known, since program code will have been written to deal with years that are out of date. In other words, the behaviour of the computer will be incorrect (for the year), but not unknown. Finally, there are two factors that are rarely talked about: People know about the Y2K problem and are working to solve it, and people typically have alternative ways of getting the job done. Simple back-up systems. If the computer won't accept a card, you pay by cash, check, or use a manual credit slip. The real problem lies in the little systems. Systems tied into national safety, modern infrastructure, governments, large corporations, etc, are well taken care of, because people stand to loose large amounts of money if things don't work smoothly. But the cash register at your local Mini-mart that prints a date on the receipts might start printing "3 january 1900" instead of "3 january 2000". Automatic switchboards that keep track of when people are in or out of their office may route all calls to the operators instead, because they're getting the year wrong. As a private person, there should be rather little call for concern with regard to the Y2K problem. However, if you are the owner of a business and use computers as part of your living, it would be prudent to look a little deeper to (1) ensure that you are not affected by the problem, and (2) devise back-up operations if things should working oddly. That buys you some time to investigate your systems. Sorry for the long, off-topic message. M. - -- Martin V. Howard, Application Systems Laboratory, | Dept. of Comp. & Info. Sci., Linkoping University, | Just "DOHH" it! SE-581 83 Linkoping, Sweden. Tel +46 13 282 421, +----------------+ Fax +46 13 142 231; marho@ida.liu.se; www.ida.liu.se/~marho