Wednesday, January 30, 2019

The Problem with 6 Digits Dating

What started of as a noble act of providence some memory space turned out to be a quake, capable of trembling the world to its core. When maiden inventors set the grade with deuce digits instead of four, little did they realize that by 1st January 2000 it would cause arithmetic delinquencies and confuses the entire system.For example, a intrust transaction on the 25th of July 1997 would be recorded as 07/25/97. Many software add the prize 1900 to the two digits code to calculate the actual category.A credit taunt charged on 1st of January 2000 would have to bear the interest of 99 age because the transaction date would read 01/01/00. This means the computers assume that the said(prenominal) transaction took place on 01/01/1900.A nonher major problem with sestet digits dating occurs when we tend to compare the pre and post 2000 dates. For example, 01/09/99 and 01/01/00, when converted into a simple code they would read 990901 and 000101 respectively. Obviously 990901 is old er than 000101, which in humanity is non true.As the computers cannot process the current date as class 2000 marches in, it is also unable to calculate the leap year. All years divisible by 4 is considered as a leap year except for centuries. A century go forth be considered as a leap year only when if it is divisible by 400. For example, 1996 is considered as a leap year because it is divisible by 4 (1996 4 = 499) wherelse 1997 is not (1997/4 = 499.25). On the hand the hand, 1900 is not a leap year for it is not divisible by 400 (1900/400=4.75). Year 2000 is a leap year for it is divisible by 400 (2000/400 = 5) (with credit rating to explanation from http//www.ast.cam.ac.uk/RGO/leaflets/leapyear/leapyear.html).As we step into the year 2000, existing computers will not be able to differentiate the two digits year anymore. The 00 date study might be assumed as 1900 instead of 2000. Thus calculations that sham a date would provide wrong answers. On the 1st of January 2000, com puters will define this day as 01/01/00 and regards the year as 1900, leaving us 99 years behind time. This will interrupt public services, bank transactions, loan interest calculations and many more, causing formidable loss of one million millions of dollars. entirely a few systems could be spared from the Y2K and it has been estimated that on that point are 500 one million million million lines of application code worldwide, with some 85% of which needs to be corrected. motley reports stated that by the turn of the millennium, as much as 50% of all businesses which failed to address the year 2000 challenge would fall apart. Besides beingness deadly, expensive and extensive, the year 2000 problem affects hardware (BIOS, real-time clocks), embedded firmware, languages and compilers, direct systems, random number generators, database management systems, transaction-processing systems, banking systems, PBX, flight scheduling and any early(a) system that deals with dates.Surfing the net would prove that the Y2Ks awareness level is increase with more more sites dedicated to this problem. Managers and IT resources are becoming heavy-hearted thinking close to their future as 31st December 1999 rolls in. Knowing that there is acquittance to be an IT disaster does not help much especially when there are few resources to handle the problem.A rough estimation to force solutions for the Y2K issue concentrated on something like US $400 -600 billion dollars worldwide. An additional 200,000 COBOL programmers will also be required.Organizations are not the only ones that are going to suffer from the virulent millennium bug, it can be anyone, even a personal computer user.

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