No. 2: The Millennium bug
By now, you've probably seen the scare stories about the year 2000 (Y2K) bug, sometimes called the Millennium bug. Reports on the event have appeared in major newspapers and magazines, as well as on the nightly news. Here you will find out what it is and who it will affect.Just to refresh your memory: many computer systems, particularly IBM mainframes programmed in an old language called COBOL, have date fields that can only handle two digits for example, 1997 must be entered as 97. If these machines aren't fixed by the time the year 2000 rolls around, they will interpret 00 as 1900 and spew out inaccurate or incomplete data. Or they may just crash. The Y2K bug is so widespread that every business and organisation will have to allocate some resources toward a fix.
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 etc. This is not true, in fact its crap.
But while the Y2K bug is real and the risks of inaction are considerable, people who are actually working on the problem say that the myths and exaggerations about Y2K have overshadowed the reality.
Despite or, perhaps, because of all the hysteria, most large institutions are aware of the problem, and they're working on it. In nearly every case, they expect the bug to have little or no effect on core functions. However, on top of all this preparation, British airway's reaction to the problem is to not run flights on the last day of the mellenium or on the 1st of January.
For more info, visit the governments attempt to educate companies on the mellenium bug at http://www.Bug-2000.co.uk/
