Year 2000 problems

hat kind of people we all have elected into office.
             To begin, here is a little information about what all of the hype is about. Arie van Deursen, of The Economist, describes what the major problem with the Y2K bug is. "The Year/2000 problem is about two-digit dates. But there is more to it. The year 2000 is a leap year; some programs know this. They check whether a year is divisible by four, and conclude that 2000 is a leap year. Or, they're more rigorous and aware of the exception: a year divisible by 100 as well is not a leap year - unless it's also divisible by 400. So neither 1900 nor 2100 are leap years - but 2000 is. Many programs, however, incorrectly treat the year 2000 as a non-leap year. This may stem from the use of two-digit dates (i.e., "00" is treated as 1900 rather than 2000). Usually, the programmer had the wrong algorithm in mind. A common error is assuming centuries are never leap years. Here, the programmer forgets the "exception to the exception." The other common error is, believing the year 2000 cannot be a leap year. This may be a result of believing leap years cannot be divisible by 1,000 (rather than 100). The leap year problem is serious. Consider the $1 million in damages caused by the failure of control computers in a New Zealand aluminum smelter. The computers could not deal with the 366th day of 1996. Similar and larger crashes are likely in 2000."(3) Duersen also talks about problems after the Year 2000 hits. "Luckily, there may be a ray of hope. For most of the systems, we have 31 + 28 = 59 extra days to solve the leap year problem; that is, assuming we have time available in those first eight weeks of the year 2000."(3) Also included is a progress chart issued by the government to chart advancement in updating and upgrading services and hardware. This chart also contains some progress figures. They claim that only fifty percent of the twenty-four agencies have...

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Year 2000 problems. (2000, January 01). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 19:08, September 29, 2026, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/47047.html