Potentially critical dates which some systems may fail to manage correctly
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Date
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Reason for criticality
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1998 |
In some older programmes 1998 has been used as an indicator of a break in a file or sequence, particularly in systems where 1999 has been used to denote the end of file
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1999 |
In some systems 99 has been used to denote the end of file
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9th September 1999
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Some systems may recognise "9999" as an end code and therefore shut down
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December 1999 |
End of file indicator in some systems
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31st December 1999/1st January 2000
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Century date change
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28th February - 1st March 2000
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Some systems may not recognise 2000 as a leap year
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31st December 2000
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Some systems which have superficially handled the leap year in 2000 well may not be able to handle the 366th day.
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28th February - 1st March 2004
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Possible leap year problems
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2024 |
This year has been reported as containing a date when there will be an overflow problem similar to 2038 (see below) but the precise date and cause have not been ascertained.
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2030 |
This has been reported as a breakpoint in the windowing system used by Microsoft in a large number of their products. In these systems 29 will imply 2029 and 30 will imply 1930.
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19th January 2038
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At 03:14:08 on Tuesday 19th January 2038 the seconds counter used for date and time information in UNIX, C and C++ will reach 2,147,483,647 which is the largest number which can be stored as a 32-bit signed integer. As a result an overflow problem will occur and the value of the next number is unpredictable. Global time differences mean that it appears that the event will happen earlier in the States.
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