From then on, different government agencies start hitting their fiscal years nearly every month through the end of the year. The federal government's fiscal year begins October 1. You can lump that all together and call it the government fiscal calendar, and that has a real significance, he said. Jones, who is chief scientist at Artemis Management Systems, a Boulder, Colorado based project management software and consulting company, said he was not confident federal, state, and local governments would meet their deadlines. The federal government is not exactly setting records for getting things right regarding the millennium bug, he said.
State governments are worse than federal and city governments are the worst of all.
On a Julian calendar, which simply adds up the days of the year, April 9 would read 9999, as would September 9 in the more common Gregorian calendar. The 9999 dates could pose a problem because some computer programmers have used that string either as an end code or as a flag to trigger a specific computer action, like expunging certain files or shutting down altogether. There's a lot of debate, a lot of Internet bantering, as to whether or not that's a true problem or a contrived problem, Freeman said, referring to the nines. That has to do with a built-in limitation of the GPS system, Orr Institute senior partner Dave Higgins said. There is a counter in that clock like an odometer that was built into the specifications.