Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?
On Fri, 11 Oct 1996 14:09:19 -0500, Matt Bovee <mbovee@eagle.cc.ukans.edu> wrote: >Hi, > >I am currently preparing a graduate paper on the impact of the Year 2000 (Y2K) >bug on databases, database applications, and database management. Specific areas >of interest to me and the group to whom it will be presented are: > >Active Databases, >Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, >Data Warehouses, >Deductive Databases, >Fuzzy Databases/Logic/Queries, >GIS, >Image Databases, >Knowledge-bases, >Online Databases, >OO Databases, and >Text & Document Databases. There is another very important year 2000 problem that is not in the above list. Most PC's built before this year have a hardware problem (or firmware) dealing with the year 2000. So no matter what you do to your software, your PC will roll from 12/31/1999 to 01/01/1980 instead of 01/01/2000. So, no matter how you fix your software, the hardware may be fighting you. We should all build into our PC based software the ability to test for the year right at the start of the program, and either display an error message or make some kind of correction if the year is less than some arbitrary year before now. The PC only reads the CMOS date when it first boots up, so if it is corrected, it remains so until rebooted. My software checks for a PC date of less than 1990 and increases the PC year by 20 years automatically. This will allow these computers to be gradually replaced. Where I work, we have approx 25,000 pc's of varying ages, and even machines we bought this year have this problem. We have always bought premium machines, like Compaq, etc. The real cure is a new BIOS. I tested many of the Compaqs and all but the very newest ones have the problem, but my IBM PS2/77s rolled right over to 2000 with no problem, and it's over a year old. There's going to be a shitload of PC's going into dumpsters in January of 2000. --- Phil Barnett mailto:philb@iag.net WWW http://www.iag.net/~philb/ FTP Site ftp://ftp.iag.net/pub/clipper