Microsoft, which spent $50-100 million on fixing Y2K problems with its
software, announced it is working to overcome two unexpected Y2K problems.
Elsewhere in Silicon Valley and around the United States experienced few Y2K
problems and the government all but shut down its Y2K command center.
At Oracle, one high-level customer service manager on duty during the
roll-over, said his group spend much of the night "watching the paint
dry," as few if any Y2K problems were reported by Oracles customers around
the world. The same slow conditions were reported at Hewlett-Packard, Cisco,
Intel and other major high-tech companies in the Valley where thousands of
workers were on duty in anticipation of customer problems.
The first of Microsoft’s Y2K problems affects software for viewing Web
pages and causes Microsoft's Internet Explorer software to display the date as
3900 on Web pages using outdated commands scripted in some programs. Internet
explorer’s "Get Year'' command only returns a two-digit date so Web pages
that use that command will display the wrong date, The Internet Explorer problem
doesn't occur with the Netscape Communicator browser because Netscape developed
a fix. Microsoft chose not to update its software and instead asked Web site
operators and programmers t make sure they use a newer command that works
with 4-digit dates. To fix th problem requires going through the programming
code that was used to creat Web sites and change all the old commands to the
newer "Get Full Year' command
The other problem is causing a date error in some HotMail e-mail message
HotMail, Microsoft's free e-mail service, may list dates of messages sen during
or before October 1999 with the year 2099 Bill Gates has previously said he
expects users of older computers t experience minor problems in the weeks ahead
Overall, the Y2K transition has not caused significant problems in Microsoft’s
vast installed software OS and application customer base. "It' been a
fairly quiet transition,'' said Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn Meanwhile, the
Clinton administratiod declared it had "squashed" the Yea 2000
computer bug. "We can safely say what has been referred to as the Y2 bug
has been squashed with regard to the key infrastructure systems it th United
States. We are likely to continue to see glitches pop up here an there in the
coming days and weeks," said John Koskinen, the U.S government’s top Y2K
troubleshooter
One of the few Y2K glitches involved a defense reconnaissance sp satellite,
which initially failed after the date roll-ver. By by Monday, th Pentagon had
regained full control of the machines and said the system wa functioning within
normalarameters. Koskinen was in charge of the $50 million Y2K command post that
watched over the federal government's 6,175 most important systems, the chief
object of a $8.38 billion Y2K upgrade.
Koskinen said that effective January 4, instead of around-the-clock staffing
at the "Information Coordination Center," the facility will be run by
a day shift only. And a slimmed-down core staff of about 30, down from 400 shift
workers, will stay on until the end of the month. The command center will return
to full staffing on February 29, a once-in-400 years type of leap day that may
confuse some computers. Just 1 per cent of 707 adults quizzed in the United
States Sunday reported having had a 2000-related computer problem.