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Example research essay topic: Year 2000 Problem Y 2 K - 1,265 words

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Argument for the statement "The Year 2000 bug will have such extensive repercussions that families and individuals should begin planning now for the imminent chaos. " The Ticking Bomb Introduction A serious problem called the "Millennium Bug", and also known as the "Year 2000 Problem" and "Y 2 K", is bringing a new century celebration into a daunting nightmare. In the 1860 s and 1970 s, when computer systems were first built, the computer hardware, especially information storage space, was at a premium. With an effort to minimise storage costs, numeric storage spaces were drained to the smallest possible data type. Ignoring the fact that software may be run in multiple centuries, programmers started conserving storage spaces by using two digits to specify a year, rather than four. Consequently, on January 1, 2000, unless the software is corrected, most software programs with date or time may malfunction or may not recognize the entries in the year fields " 00 " as the year as " 1900 " instead of " 2000 ." Year 2000 problem is not restricted only to the above exigency. 20 years ago, everybody understood that a leap year came every 4 th year except for every 100 th year. However, a piece of algorithm has been forgotten by most people a leap year does exist every 400 years.

So, under the first two rules, year 2000 is not a leap year, but with the third rule, it actually is. Computing errors will also occur before Year 2000. Values such as 99 are sometimes used for special purposes not related to the date. The number 99 is used in some systems as an expiration date for data to be archived permanently so some computers may lose the data a year before 2000. Programmers and software developers were surprised to see some of their programs survive for only a few years but failed to anticipate the problems coming by the year 2000. It is sorrowful to find most programs are still in use or have been incorporated into successor systems.

Because of the need for new applications to share data in a common format with existing systems, inheriting the six-digit date field that has become a standard over time. The disaster scenario envisaged is that a great number of computer systems around the world will make processing errors and will either crash or produce incorrect outputs. As a result financial institutions, businesses organisations, informational technology and even aeroplane radar communications will all then be in a welter of confusion. In military services, the system meltdown may also worsen the appropriate control of nuclear missiles in silos. It is a ticking time bomb destined to wreak havoc on millions of computer systems in every economy, both commercial and residential, and thus need everyone's serious attention. However, the bug is likely to affect more staggeringly the business computers which imply an alarming economic problem.

Many organisations have not yet started projects to examine the impact of the millennium bug on their systems. By applying The Standish Groups CHAOS research to Year 2000 projects, 73 % of Y 2 K projects will fail according to the pace now taking. The biggest challenge for these companies is convincing top level management of the severity of the year 2000 problem and the amount of time, money and resources needed to fix it. On that account, to ensure this disaster is minimised, none of us should worm out of devoting resources in preventing the potential anarchy. It is a costly Task As simple as the problem sounds, the fix for the Millennium Bug will cost up to US$ 600 billion world-wide, according to estimates by the Gartner Group, a leading information technology consultancy.

The software fixes are very time-consuming, requiring considerable effort to examine millions of lines of source code in order to locate problem date fields and correct them. The costs to apply the fixes will vary from company to company, but research has given the figure of approximately between US$ 0. 50 to $ 2 per line of source code for modification, with these costs expected to escalate as much as 50 per cent for every year that projects are delayed. Unfortunately, this average excludes date conversions on military weapons systems software, which is expected to be significantly more expensive to convert, and the real figure should even be much larger. One of the first steps an organisation needs to take on the way to ensuring Year 2000 compliance is to determine what they have to be changed. The business will need to prepare an inventory of hardware and software utilised to allow assessment of problem areas.

It is hard to address the potential for problems when no clear picture of the problem space is available. Documentation showing the processing steps being performed by the company's computer system in order to accomplish business functions needs to be available to ensure that all procedures are present and accounted for. There is no "Silver Bullet" The problem looks straightforward, all we need is just to check each line of code, locate the two-digit date fields, expand them to four digit and test the correction. Unfortunately, these modifications are mostly manual labour not an automatic process. Software Dilemma Six-digit date fields are generally scattered throughout practically every level of computing, from operating systems to software applications and databases. Some dates have numeric representation, while other have alphanumeric representations.

This adds to the complexity of the problem from a management and technical point of view. The bug contaminates a large area that nearly all of the program codes must be examined to ensure that correction is free from side-effects. A case in point, a typical medium size organisation, a state comptroller's office in United States, is predicted to spend US$ 5. 6 million to $ 6. 2 million to make the software conversion, that is, nearly a billion lines of code must be repaired. Furthermore, there are computing languages still in use today that only a handful of people are even aware of, let alone proficient enough to be called experts. Skills for some older, more obscure languages and systems will, more than likely, make the Y 2 K a more serious problem. Some uses of two digit dates may not be obvious.

For example, the UK Driving Licence number encodes the holder's date of birth using a two digit year code. Dates used in this nature will create Year 2000 problems without the obvious use of dates in the program. Some systems use dates fields for non-standard uses, such as special indicators and how your systems have abused the date field is something you can only find out by looking at every line of code, which is a huge costs in time and resources. With the variety of programming languages and platforms in use throughout that past three decades, and the multitude of uses for date fields, and the extensiveness of infected programming area, no single "silver bullet" could exist to correct the problem.

Moreover, the problem cannot be solved individually. Y 2 K is a universal problem which will bring a chain effect among industries and firms. No business is immune, every firm is affected either directly in its own operation, or indirectly, by the action or inaction of others. A Year 2000 compliant computer system may fail to process, produce error messages or generate incorrect data even if it receives contaminated programs or data from a third party that is not Year 2000 compliant. With all these issues involved, and with remaining time ever decreasing, management awareness must...


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