Why 2K?

This book, originally published in 1999, describes what could have happened during the era of the famous Y2K hysteria, when computers and communications devices would have had to function when four digits were needed to use the current date instead of the two digits that were commonly used in many systems. Of course, none of the expected disasters happened and none of the Y2K terrorist plots did happen either. Or did they? Certainly the vulnerabilities of the Hoover Dam and some NASA spacecraft control centers have been fixed, but the fixes were largely the result of general security measures taken after September 11, 2001.This book tells the story of Y2K vulnerabilities from a retrospective viewpoint. According to Steven Musil of Cnet, the same type of problems occurred to a number of web servers, including Gawker, StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare, and LinkedIn, when a single leap second was added to the Coordinated Universal Time. Although the scale of these problems is much smaller than Y2K, some parts of the problem are still with us.In case the leap second problem occurs again, or timing of messages on UNIX servers get corrupted in 2038, or the world ends in December, 2012, the author's favorite recipe for Shrimp with Sizzling Rice Soup has been included at the end of this book. Enjoy! Ronald J. Leach recently retired as Professor and Chair Emeritus from the Department of Systems and Computer Science at Howard University, where he had taught since 1969. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park and the M. S. degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include distributed systems, performance modeling and capacity planning; and most areas of software engineering, especially software reuse, fault-tolerance, and software performance measurement and their empirical foundations. Some of his current work includes the application of computing to the social sciences, especially in the area of name matching within historical documents, using both his computer search skills and genealogical knowledge. He is a frequent member of ABET site visit teams. He is an experienced cruise ship lecturer, with special emphasis on identity theft and computer forensics. He also lectures to other groups.Ron Leach is the author of seven print books: "Using C in Software Design," Academic Press Professional,"Advanced Topics in UNIX," John Wiley; "Object-Oriented Design and Programming in C++," Academic Press Professional, Software Reuse: Methods, Models, and Costs," McGraw-Hill, "Introduction to Software Engineering," CRC Press, "Genealogy for the Information Age," Disruptive Publishing, and "Relative Genealogy," Disruptive Publishing. He has published two books on the subject of identity theft: "Twelve and a Half Steps to Avoid Identity Theft," as an ebook, and "Identity Theft in the Cyber Age," which is available as both an ebook and in print. Revised editions of many of these are available as ebooks.Dr. Leach has offered technical training and seminars on software reuse, reengineering, and testing on three continents. He has lectured on a variety of other topics between continents! He is also the author or co-author of more than one hundred technical papers. In his spare time, he is the co-Editor of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal and is webmaster for its newly designed website.