More specifically, in a world where almost no one is compliant, how is it possible that so few have experienced the predicted 'catastrophic' failures when they encountered fiscal 2000? Also, how is it possible to operate in fiscal 2000 if a company (or state agency, or whatever) is not compliant? Thanks in advance! -Jon

-- Jon Burk (j_burk@hotmail.com), October 15, 1999

Answers

Jon,

A fiscal year is an accounting year. It may be from Jan 1 thru Dec 31. It may be July 1 thru June 30. Or in the feds case, it is Oct 1 thru Sept 30.

The only way that fiscal year would have any impact on being compliant is if the programs use a lookahead feature. This is used for things like inventory ordering and the like. Your normal books, bills due, finance charge on your charge cards would not be bothered by this fiscal year.

Remember Y2K is an actual date, the starting date is 01/01/2000 at 12:00:00.01.

-- (cannot-say@this.time), October 15, 1999.

There were NO "catastrophic" technical failures predicted due to bad handling of fiscal year 2000; it was purely limited to financial applications that processed fiscal years. The most severe prediction that I ever saw was that the REACTION of people to things like not being able to get welfare checks or whatever might cause civil unrest or panic about Y2K. Obviously, that didn't happen.

Come Jan 1, 2000, LOTS of things may encounter real Y2K problems -- way above and beyond financial applications. Like embedded systems, operating systems, and mucho diverse applicatons.

-- King of Spain (madrid@aol.cum), October 15, 1999.

One possibility may be that they are doing what was done in some non-compliant unemployment offices: Giving everything an artificial date of '12/31/99', in the expectation that the code will be fixed by then, and they will have months to sort out the real and spurious expiration dates. That way, no 'look-ahead' and no problem. Until January, of course. By which time maybe the horse will have learned to sing.

-- just another (another@engineer.com), October 15, 1999.

I'm not sure if entering the 12/31/99 date has anything to do with fiscal years. It could very well have to do with the program itself not being able to handle dates in the 00 range. Most programs will use some sort of date validation to verify input. An example would be that the ending date cannot be before the beginning date. That is the way that I see the 12/31/99 date being used in this example. Since the problem started before the Feds entered their fiscal year, I think this is more probable.

-- (cannot-say@this.time), October 15, 1999.

See this thread...

"Significance of States Fiscal Start"

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00122f

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), October 16, 1999.