Year 2000 Problem Essays (2439 words) - Calendars, Software Bugs

Year 2000 Problem Summary: It was astonishing to find how unprepared the government is for this potentially devastating problem facing the American people. The government has had nearly three years of knowledge about this problem but hasn't even been able to get up to the government standards that they set back in 1996. The government is really lagging behind and could essentially destroy the American economy if they keep up the performance they are currently demonstrating. The government appears to have let the American people down. The government is now starting to realize what a dramatic effect this could have on the entire world including the US. The most powerful country may be brought to its knees because of some little flaw in writing codes for computers in the last fifty years. This microscopic line of code could inevitably destroy the entire world's economy and also possibly cause a malfunction of the world's nuclear arsenal. This could cause them to fire at will or even just detonate in their silos. Furthermore it is very critical to observe the governments efforts in trying to bring this enormous problem to be fixed by falsifying Y2K compliance on many of its computers. Included are two graphs and a chart. The chart is the schedule the government was intending to stick to. It is called an immovable deadline and fixed schedule. One of the graphs demonstrates the proposed cost of fixing the Year 2000 bug. It is broken down into estimates of the total cost per year. The final graph is the grades the 24 major agencies received on their preparation for becoming Y2K compliant. With all of this information one can really understand how greatly the government underestimated the entire problem. They underestimated costs, and time it would take to upgrade and implement the programs. This truly demonstrates how poorly the government is being run and what kind of people we all have elected into office. To begin, here is a little information about what all of the hype is about. Arie van Deursen, of The Economist, describes what the major problem with the Y2K bug is. "The Year/2000 problem is about two-digit dates. But there is more to it. The year 2000 is a leap year; some programs know this. They check whether a year is divisible by four, and conclude that 2000 is a leap year. Or, they're more rigorous and aware of the exception: a year divisible by 100 as well is not a leap year ? unless it's also divisible by 400. So neither 1900 nor 2100 are leap years ? but 2000 is. Many programs, however, incorrectly treat the year 2000 as a non-leap year. This may stem from the use of two-digit dates (i.e., "00" is treated as 1900 rather than 2000). Usually, the programmer had the wrong algorithm in mind. A common error is assuming centuries are never leap years. Here, the programmer forgets the "exception to the exception." The other common error is, believing the year 2000 cannot be a leap year. This may be a result of believing leap years cannot be divisible by 1,000 (rather than 100). The leap year problem is serious. Consider the $1 million in damages caused by the failure of control computers in a New Zealand aluminum smelter. The computers could not deal with the 366th day of 1996. Similar and larger crashes are likely in 2000."(3) Duersen also talks about problems after the Year 2000 hits. "Luckily, there may be a ray of hope. For most of the systems, we have 31 + 28 = 59 extra days to solve the leap year problem; that is, assuming we have time available in those first eight weeks of the year 2000."(3) Also included is a progress chart issued by the government to chart advancement in updating and upgrading services and hardware. This chart also contains some progress figures. They claim that only fifty percent of the twenty-four agencies have completed their assessments by August 1997. They also claim that seventy percent of the total estimated cost comes from those agencies that aren't finished assessing their systems. This program was implemented on June 9, 1997. This completely demonstrates the lack of respect the government had for this problem. As reported in The Year 2000 Journal, the author talks about the lack of interest on the part of the government. "As 2000 approaches, it will increasingly preoccupy policy makers and the public too. Because the millennium-bug problem is so trivial, senior managers have found it hard to take seriously, and