If not corrected, computers that forecast or plan budgets a year in advance will have problems because they will be looking ahead into 2000. We've had people failing in this already. 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 Oct. 1. 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.
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 Sept. 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, such as expunging certain files or shutting down altogether. It's speculative, but it's something that's there to be observed. There is a counter in that clock like an odometer that was built into the specifications. The counter will reset to 0000 around Aug. 22, but if organizations that receive information from the GPS are not prepared for the rollover, they could be in trouble.