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 experie...
