hing which wouldhave been unexpected and unavoidable. Programmers who have "professionaloversight or neglect" clauses in their consulting insurance plans may beable to claim this, if sued. Affected corporations will no doubt belooking into ways to assign financial liability to others, as a way todefer what can be enterprise-crippling expenditure.While not a solution in it's own right, assigning blame and negligencein this matter will be a part of a corporation's solution matrix,especially if their development contracts for their software are clearin this respect. Other personnel which may be found liable for failureto act could face being fired or disciplined - something which is alsojust as sure to happen when upper management is forced to deal with alarge failure or shutdown caused by a failure to act on the 2000problem."Gartner Group, Inc., an information technology research firm, hasestimated that it will cost between $300 billion to $600 billion tocorrect the Year 2000 problem worldwide. "-- Legal Issues Surrounding the 2000 Bug, by Jeff Jinnet"The U.S. Department of Defense, for example, plans to solve the problemat a cost of $1.1 billion. "-- Reuters News, April 7th, 1997Possible Solutions to the 2000 ProblemThe Key Solution: ISO 8601 Standard Date Formats. The real solution forpreventing this is to write software to standards. The wonderful thingabout the computer industry, it is said, "If you like standards, thereare a lot to choose from." There is, however, such a format. TheInternational Standards Organization has a standard for the formattingof the date and time for electronic computing devices. The objectivewould be then to get the software compliant with this internationalstandard. If this had have been done from the beginning, there would notbe this dilemma. Indeed, the problem originates from programmers notwriting software to accepted standards, or even being aware that theyexist. Getting the software there, unfortunat...
