Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Technology Y2k MYTHS Y2k MYTHS By now, you've probably seen the scare stories about the year 2000 (Y2K) bug. Reports on the event have appeared in major newspapers and magazines, as well as on the nightly news. Just to refresh your memory: many computer systems, particularly mainframes programmed in a language called COBOL, have date fields that can only handle two digits- for example, 1999 must be entered as 99. If these machines aren't fixed by the time the year 2000 rolls around, they will interpret 00 as 1900 and give out inaccurate data or they may just crash. The Y2K bug is so widespread that every business and organization will have to take some sort of steps to ensure safety for their information resources. This part is true. Some of the stories about the millennium bug would have you believe that it will cause airplanes to fall from the sky, ATMs to shut down, and Social Security checks to bounce. People who are actually working on the problem say that the myths and exaggerations about Y2K have overshadowed the reality. Because of all the hysteria, most large companies are aware of the problem, and they're working on solving the problem. They expect the bug to have little or no effect on their main functions. Unlike many computer bugs, this one is easy to explain and even easier to dramatize. One Y2K programmer says, "I get email from people who are going to go to some deserted island and live of canned foods. People are just crazy. If it wasn't this, it would be Hale-Bopp or something." If you believe the millennium bug will spark a social disaster; stock market crashing, banks closing and everybody simultaneously withdrawing their money, people rioting in the streets, people not getting their government checks, the energy and transportation infrastructures collapsing...the list of horrors goes on and on. Then you should consider these facts: a recent survey conducted by the compsoftware.com asked 500 programmers, with an average of 20 years of work experience in information technology, to rate the potential danger of the problem on a scale from 1 (no problem at all) to 10 (total economic collapse). The average response was 5.76. Its been reported by media that more than 90 percent of existing computers will simply not function in the new millennium. Others predict that when January 1, 2000, rolls around, many PCs will be confused by the new date and reset their internal clocks. In fact, industry consultants are saying most personal computers will have no problems at all with the new date. Some commentators are so worried about the millennium bug because they believe that this problem is like nothing the computing world has ever seen before. They fear that Y2K teams have no idea what they're getting into and they think once programmers begin debugging the problem. They're going to find that it's far more complex than they have expected. But this is the kind of problem that software engineers solve regularly. The Y2K problem is unusual because it affects so many computers. However, since it has been detected early it can be fixed. The Y2K bug is a real problem and it needs to be fixed. But most of society's vital organizations expect to have the critical portions of their systems repaired or replaced in time. And nobody who's actually working on the millennium bug expects anything but a disastrous situation when we enter the new millennium. Bibliography: Word Count: 575
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