Are You Ready for the M2K12 Bug

This is a special issue of my blog so I can get the word out about a pending digital disaster.

I was talking to some of my friends who work for the Redmond Giant (for those of you that are non-techies, or from Washington state, Redmond is the home of Microsoft). It seems they are hard at work on the next release of Windows, with a goal to get the product out prior to December 21, 2012.

In talking to my inside sources, it appears many of the date functions in computer programs written after 2000 but prior to the year 2007 use the Mayan calendar in their functions to determining the date and number of days between dates. The problem is that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012. It seems that the Mayan’s figured the world would end on that date and it was just a waste of time and rock to chisel their calendar any farther than December 21, 2012.

In talking to others at IBM, Apple, Oracle, SAP, Google and other software powerhouses, this M2K12 bug (the official acronym of the Mayan 2012 Calendar bug) would not normally cause a problem if you don’t base your code on the Mayan calendar. It seems the big concern in the software industry is the wide spread use of open source functions. The problem lies in the inability to determine if their software uses any open source based on the Mayan calendar instead of the traditional Julian calendar. As a result, my contact says that the upcoming M2K12 bug will make the Y2K bug look like a non-event.

It seems that all the major software companies are coming out with releases to beat the December 21, 2012. For course, they can’t provide any assurance that your company will not be technologically crippled by the M2K12 bug unless your purchase their newest upgrade versions.

I have also heard rumblings in the software consulting world that many of them are also gearing up for the M2K12 crisis. They are getting together legions of programmers from Russia to India to review all their legacy code to safeguard against the M2K12 bug from rendering custom mission critical applications useless at the stroke of midnight December 21, 2012.

As a result of this crisis caused by the end of the Mayan Calendar, we at Engineered Software are not going to be caught off guard. Effective today, April 1, 2010, we will be committing all of our resources to ensure that none of our software products use any functions infected with the M2K12 bug. We are setting our release date for November 1, 2012 to provide our customers with sufficient time to provide a smooth transition of their Engineered Software programs with their established computer network systems and the end of the world.

Now it’s time to hear from you. Please feel free to share your experiences, or opinions on this blog entry or any other subject that is of interest. I can be reached at blogger@eng-software.com.

Also have a Happy April Fool’s Day.