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Straight foward article w/links

http://marad.dot.gov/whats_new/y2k.html

-- John Callon (jcallon@gate.net), February 03, 1999

Answers

See also this recent paper produced by Vaughan Pomeroy & Alan Lough of Lloyd's Register, presented to the Lisbon meeting of the International Union of Marine Insurers in September 1998: The Millennium Bug-Technical issues in relation to marine systems

It's a thorough professional overview of the subject. On embedded systems the authors are brief, but informative and to the point. On compliance, they write:

It may seem strange to refer to 'uncertainty' in the use of the concept of 'compliance'. It has been widely reported that some items that have been declared 'compliant' by the manufacturer have later been shown by testing to experience failure at one of the roll overs included in the Millennium period. A widely accepted definition of 'compliance' is given in the British Standards Institution document DISC PD2000-1 'A Definition of Year 2000 Conformity Requirements' (ref 7) which states that conformity shall mean that neither performance nor functionality is affected by dates prior to, during and after the year 2000. This gives rise to four fundamental Rules as follows:

*no value of current date will cause any interruption in operation (general integrity)

*date based functionality must behave consistently prior to, during and after the Year 2000 (date integrity)

*in all interfaces and data storage the century in any date must be specified either explicitly or by unambiguous algorithms or inferencing rules (explicit/implicit century)

*Year 2000 must be recognised as a leap year.



-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), February 03, 1999.

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