The Year 10,000 problem (also known as the Y10K problem, Y10K Bug, and Y10K) is an error machines and computers will encounter when they need to express five digits for a year.

Cultural practicing

Some people practice the art of cutting the last two digits of a decade. For example, the "1970's" becomes just the "70's". However, this becomes a problem, because to keep order, one will now need to take the last three digits, rather than two.

Year 10,000 problem

Computer Errors due to this

This is also a problem because the "000's" might be confused with the standard digits "00's", representing a new century. Also, the year can overflow with certain computer programs. For example: in Microsoft Excel, 12/31/9999 is considered a valid date, but 1/1/10000 is invalid and will raise errors. The date "ten thousand" is unable to be supported, producing a large negative instead.

Year 10,000 problem

Efforts

So far, the Long Now Foundation is able to preempt the Y10K by adding a "0" in front of the date. So the current year of , will look like 0. However, it would still be affected by the "Y100K" problem.

Year 10,000 problem

Database Errors

In MySQL databases, the values of some datatypes are limited to the scope of only 31-12-9999 which causes some problems as the computer would not be able to compile the data in the SQL. Many other SQL software can also be affected by this error.

Related pages

Year 2000 problem

Programming bug

Integer overflow

References

Other websites

Official Long Now Site

Computing