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Our Blogs Core Dump Y2K bug causes Mac Office 2008 users to lose data
Our Blogs Core Dump Y2K bug causes Mac Office 2008 users to lose data | Y2K bug causes Mac Office 2008 users to lose data |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Tuesday, 01 July 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 Regardless of how dates are displayed, Microsoft should have required their entry with four-digit years. The difficulty arises because at some stage it will be necessary to make assumptions about which century was intended. Is someone born on 01/01/07 one year old or 101? The former is more likely to be true, but you can't rule out the latter. To cater for such situations, programmers usually make an arbitrary decision about where the line will be drawn. That said, there is a specific Entourage bug at play that's leading to the loss of data when the International system preference is set to use two-digit years in medium dates. The Entourage address book allows the entry of a contact's date of birth, which it then uses to display the person's age. If Mac OS X's medium date format is set to show four-digit years, the problem is largely avoided. But dates of birth prior to 1950 that were entered while two-digit years were set may be mangled. In particular, years from 1940 to 1949 will be changed to 39, and any year up to and including 1939 is treated as being 100 years later. Fortunately, there's a relatively easy fix for some of these problems, which you'll find on page 2. |
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