Re: The Great Year-2000 Hoax!

In article <545k5p$2bd@raven.cc.ukans.edu> mbovee@ukans.edu writes: >Indivual users can set their computer to 2000, certainly. It is >recommended that they give it a shot, in fact. Corporate systems may >not wish to use such a test to see if the system will go "face down in >the water." It just might. And it just might not, too. And that test might have already been done. >Meanwhile, this is not a question of just local usage and implications >w/in the system, but also of the potential for impact to systems on >whose information or data you depend, or to whom you provide data. >What if they're affected? You can't just take the "screw 'em" >attitude, if your business is closely linked with theirs. Believe it or not, the companies that take data from others or feed data to others have contracts -- and are intensely aware of issues like this and have to consider it. >I'm beginning to get the idea that a lot of people know of Y2K, that >for many it is a non-problem for their local system (but they haven't >thought about the broader implications of upstream or downstream >users), or they just haven't thought about it very much. Maybe I'm >wrong...maybe everybody out there is working on software that's so >flash that the millenium date change isn't a problem - just a toggle >or global default change and presto! the system now can interpret the >new century just fine. What John Q. Public does not realize is that we have been thinking about the Year 2000 since 1970 and before. We had to. Every case is obviously different but as a general rule I think it's entirely appropriate to say that the general issue of the 21st century is not catching the data processing industry particularly by surprise, and it's not coming to a head this year for any particular reason. >Of course, there's all that data that, if stored w/a two-digit year, >is indistinguishable w/regard to the century. What the hell are folks >gonna do about that? Historical, epidemiologic, and other archival >data has lots of potential for problems as systems, old or new, go to >retrieve data that cannot be deciphered w/regard to the century. Well, you never see a set of data without knowing a great deal about it. For example, anything archival is presumably 19xx or else it's already wrong or else a rule was established for it at the time. If the data needs to represent the 21st century then in all likelihood the designer of the data format was aware of it at the time. But data-swabbing is just something that you do on incoming data in any case, because people do make tpyos... omt lettrs an numbrs.. things like that. >If I'm wrong, please tell me, but tell me w/specific examples as to >why, since my aim is to gather information and bring the level of my >understanding (and that of my classmates) about Y2K as it regards >databases and database management up to the highest level I can. I think your project is good and valid -no matter what- it finds. What I expect that you will find is that representation problems are not going to be the earth shattering crisis that the press and the stock-market calls it out to be, partly because people in the DP industry have been doing their job and doing it quite well, thankye, for many years entirely unnoticed. But that's just as much a generalization as any other. The thing is that reality is going to be somewhere -between- the entirely ho-hum and the crash and burn scenarios we read about. It -has- to be. It has always -had- to be. Because the doomsday scenarios that are hobbied about these days are the one thing that CANNOT be allowed to happen. /mr/