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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (2355)	8/3/1998 5:24:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 9818

' Subject: Year 2000 Top Ten Problem List: From: "Mike Hornsby" <mikeh@beechglen.com> 22:45 Year 2000 Top Ten Problem List: 1. Code that validates the year as > 0 and < 99. It is very common to find programs that simply will not accept or process 99 as a valid year. 2. Date field content that implies meaning to 999999. 000000 or any other non-date contents. This prevents or complicates the implementation of expanding the date or the sliding window method. 3. ASCII conversion of numeric date fields that do not right shift and zero fill. If a date is stored as a numeric data type in YYMMDD format then 00/01/01 is stored as 101. If the program does a simple conversion to ASCII the field will contain "101 ". 4. Sorting of two digit date fields. Causes incorrect logical sorting, 00 will be sorted last in a descending sequence. 5. Birth dates and other types of dates that do not work well with sliding window techniques. Simply stated, you can't use the <50 translates to 20xx and >49 translates to 19xx for birthdays, incorporated dates, purchase dates and other dates that you already have that have a YY < 50! 6. Dates converted to or stored as days since some point in the past. Any programs that allow you to specify aging by number of days should be highly suspect. These routines usually are not year 2000 compliant. 7. JCL with hard coded dates and other processing flags. Many systems have a multitude of batch jobs that have end dates of 12/31/99 or 9/9/99 as an end date. In most cases this is meant to select all records. 8. Missing, mismatched and obsolete source code. Due to personnel turnover and lack of version control it is more than likely that problems exist with production source code. 9. Day of week calculations. Many applications use a routine to calculate the day of the week. For some it is just a nicety for a heading,for others the day of the week is important for doing rate lookups,histograms based on day of the week or determining weekdays for shipping schedules. 10. Software packages from vendors or other sources that no longer exist. On almost every system there are utilities and subprograms that they don't have the source code for and updates are not available.