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Is Professional Investigator Millennium
(Year 2000 or Y2K) Compliant?
Yes! (I think we'd have heard by now if it wasn't!)
The problem known variously as the 'Millennium Bug', 'Millennium Timebomb' or as the 'Year 2000 Problem' (Y2K to those in the know!) was a serious one.
What are the problems?
1. The 'Millennium Bug' is the label used to describe the potential problems that virtually all computer systems faced on 1st January 2000. Most programs that involve date-based
calculations used the date format 'DD/MM/YY' in the UK and `MM/DD/YY´ in the US. Only two characters were used for the year and the computer assumed that the numerical value of the year date would increase with
time. This would pose no problems until 31/12/99 (12/31/99) becomes 01/01/00 when the later year date has a lower numerical value than the earlier one, thus affecting the logic of the program and resulting in
incorrect results being returned.
2. Another aspect was that many programs were written to assume that the year in which they are running starts with a '19'. This was fine until the year 1999, held as two
characters (99), rolled over to become '00'. We humans know that a year specified as '00' means 2000. However, to a computer program this could mean '1900' or '2000'. This could lead to ambiguity, corruption and
possible failure of programs.
3. A third problem associated with the year 2000 is that not all computer systems recognise the fact that it is also a leap year. The rule is that a year is a leap year if it is
divisible by 4 except for centuries, when the rule is that they have to be divisible by 400. 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 is.
How does this affect our software?
It doesn´t.
Firstly, to ensure that all countries get the right format, all dates in our software follow the 'Short Date Style' date format in your
Windows Control Panel (Start->Settings->Control Panel->Regional-> Settings->Date tab).
(N.B. If you find that dates in our software are displayed with a 2-digit year, you should alter your Windows Short Date Style in Control Panel [see above] to show 'yyyy' as the year,
rather than 'yy')
And, secondly, all dates in our software are stored as the number of days that have elapsed since December 28, 1800, so our programs do not suffer from the second or third problems above,
either.
This ensures that all our software is Millennium (Year 2000 or Y2K) Compliant.
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