Well, I realize that FBN's Y2K solution is the real silver bullet as Jeff Mitchell points out but I'm really fascinated with this Data Integrity solution. Let me print the entire article for you that I found when searching for some info on them and maybe you and Jeff and anyone else that understands the role of the software can comment.
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A Cheaper Solution for a Big Problem
By Reed Irvine
August 14, 1998
The looming crisis caused by one little oversight on the part of the
very
bright and able people who have brought us into the computer age is
gaining increasing attention as January 1, 2000 draws nearer. That is
the day when some say the civilized world will be thrown into chaos
because computer programmers in years long past conserved the
limited memory then available to them by entering the years in their
systems only as the last two digits, e.g., 98 for 1998. As a result,
they
say, older mainframe computers, PCs and many embedded computer
chips will be unable to cope with the advent of the year 2000. Unless
some highly labor-intensive modifications are made in time, the
computers will interpret those last two digits as the year 1900 and may
crash. This could create chaos in vital services ranging from air
traffic
control to electric power generation and transmission. To head this off,
billions of lines of computer code will have to be checked and altered
if
the year 2000 is to be welcomed as a happy new year.
This is a task that is both mind-boggling and mind-numbing for those
who have to eyeball those endless lines of digits. It is also extremely
costly. The Washington Post recently reported that the estimated cost
will be $5 billion for the federal government and about $49 billion for
our
500 biggest publicly held companies. World-wide the cost estimate is
between $300 billion and $600 billion.
Allen Burgess, the founder and CEO of a small Year-2000 software
firm called Data Integrity, Inc., tried to think of a better way of
dealing
with the problem than eyeballing all those billions of lines of code,
looking for 21st Century dates. He says he woke up in the middle of the
night with an idea that he jotted down and put to the test the next day.
The idea was that by using only the last two digits of each year the
programmers had created a math problem that could be remedied by a
simple arithmetic adjustment instead of trying to change all the dates.
Data Integrity tested the idea and found that it worked. They have
developed software called the Millennium Solution which the Bureau of
Indian Affairs, BIA, used to find the problems in its code and fix them
at a cost of only 14 cents a line. That was 80 percent less than what
they had planned to pay using another system. The BIA, whose
headquarters are in Albuquerque, is delighted with the results and the
huge saving. They have reported their results to the Interior
Department. A spokesman for Interior said they have not considered
using the Millennium Solution themselves because they are now too far
along in fixing the problem with a conventional system to make a switch
now. Three big banks, Citibank, NationsBank and Credit Suisse First
Boston, have used it to solve a big part of their Y2K problem quickly
and at a fraction of the cost required for other methods. They are very
pleased with the results.
Here's how the Millennium Solution works. It seeks out every case in
which a computer is programmed to perform calculations involving
different years, and it automatically corrects the arithmetical errors
produced when the computer reads the 21st Century dates as 20th
Century dates. For example, if the computer is asked to find the age in
the year 2010 of a person born in 1938, it subtracts 38 from 10 and gets
-28. The software recognizes that is wrong and puts it through the
"fix-date routine." That adds 100 to the answer in two increments of 50,
producing the correct age of 72. (The reason the 100 has to be added in
two increments of 50 is because the computer is programmed to
recognize only two digits.)
It works, and it can speed up the remediation of the old codes
immensely and save billions of dollars. This important good news has
been overlooked by all the media except USA Today and Government
Computer News. On August 2, The Washington Post ran a long article
about the Year-2000 problem which described a system called
"windowing" as a great time-saving way to deal with the problem. The
Post story described the ordeal of a programmer using this system who
was fixing 90,000 lines of code. It was taking him weeks, perhaps as
much as 90 days.
Using the Millennium Solution, six programmers fixed 1,580,000 lines of
code for the BIA in only 10 days. That comes to more than 26,000 lines
per day per programmer. With the Millennium Solution, the programmer
in the Post's story who was using a different "great time-saving" system
could have completed his task in three or four days with fewer errors.
The government and the media are jawboning to get the Year-2000
problem solved, but they are failing to inform businessmen and
bureaucrats of the availability of this tool that can help them solve it
more quickly and at less cost. Where's Al "Government Re-inventor"
Gore when we need him? |
