The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or simply Y2K) was a problem for both digital (computer-related) and non-digital documentation and data storage situations which resulted from the practice of abbreviating a four-digit year to two digits.
In computer programs, the practice of representing the year with two digits becomes problematic with logical error(s) arising upon "rollover" from x99 to x00. This has caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000 and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizoons". Without corrective action, it was suggested that long-working systems would break down when the "...97, 98, 99, 00..." ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid. Companies and organizations worldwide checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems.
Whether or not a significant number of computer failures occurred when the clocks rolled over into 2000 remains in dispute. Moreover, there is evidence of at least one date related banking failure due to Y2K. Some would argue that the vast sums spent on Y2K preparation to "fix" the problem were largely wasted. There were plenty of other Y2K problems, and that none of the glitches caused "major" incidents is seen by some as vindication of the Y2K preparation. However, some questioned whether the "relative" absence of computer failures was the result of the preparation undertaken or whether the significance of the problem had been overstated.
In the first half of the 20th century, well before the computer era, business data processing was done using unit record equipment and Punched card, most commonly the 80-column variety employed by IBM, which dominated the industry. Many tricks were used to squeeze needed data into fixed-field 80 character records. Saving two digits for every date field was significant in this effort.
In the 1960s, computer memory and mass storage were scarce and expensive. Early Core memory cost one dollar per bit. Popular commercial computers, such as the IBM 1401, shipped with as little as 2K bytes of memory. Programs often mimicked card processing techniques. Commercial programming languages of the time, such as COBOL and IBM RPG, processed numbers in their character representations. Over time the punched cards were converted to magnetic tape and then disk files, but the structure of the data usually changed very little. Data was still input using punched cards until the mid-1970s. Machine architectures, programming languages and application designs were evolving rapidly. Neither managers nor programmers of that time expected their programs to remain in use for many decades. The realization that databases were a new type of program with different characteristics had not yet come.
There were exceptions, of course. The first person known to publicly address this issue was Bob Bemer, who had noticed it in 1958 as a result of work on genealogical software. He spent the next twenty years trying to make programmers, IBM, the US government and the ISO aware of the problem, with little result. This included the recommendation that the COBOL Picture clause should be used to specify four digit years for dates. Despite magazine articles on the subject from 1970 onwards, the majority of programmers and managers only started recognizing Y2K as a looming problem in the mid-1990s, but even then, inertia and complacency caused it to be mostly unresolved until the last few years of the decade. In 1989, Erik Naggum was instrumental in ensuring that Internet mail used four digit representations of years by including a strong recommendation to this effect in the Internet host requirements document RFC 1123.
Saving space on stored dates persisted into the Unix era, with most systems representing dates to a single 32-bit word, typically representing dates as elapsed seconds from some fixed data.
Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a Social network service and Microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are Text-based posts of up to 140 Character displayed on the user's user profile page.
The website is based in San Francisco, California. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas; and Boston, Massachusetts. Twitter, Inc. was originally incorporated in California, but as of 2007 is incorporated in the jurisdiction of Delaware.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July. Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet ".
Twitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the Podcast company Odeo. While sitting in a park on a children’s slide and eating Mexican food, Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group. The original Project code name for the service was twttr, an idea that Williams later ascribed to Noah Glass, inspired by Flickr and the five-character length of American SMS Short code. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability". Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr".
"…we came across the word ' twitter ', and it was just perfect. The definition was 'a short burst of inconsequential information,' and 'chirps from birds'. And that's exactly what the product was." – Jack Dorsey.
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006. In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams (blogger), Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets–including Odeo.com and Twitter.com–from the investors and shareholders. Williams fired Glass who was silent about his part in Twitter's startup until 2011. Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.
Windows 2000 is a line of Operating system produced by Microsoft for use on Personal computers, business desktops, Laptop, and Server. Released on 17 February 2000, it is the successor to Windows NT 4.0, and is the final release of Microsoft Windows to display the "Windows NT" designation.
Four editions of Windows 2000 were released, listed here in increasing ranking: Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Server. Additionally, Microsoft sold Windows 2000Advanced Server Limited Edition and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server Limited Edition, which ran on 64-bit Intel Itanium Microprocessor and were released in 2001. While each edition of Windows 2000 was targeted at a different market, they shared a core set of features, including many system utilities such as the Microsoft Management Console and standard System administration applications.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) (P.L. 105-277, 112 Stat. 2681) protects the online privacy of children under thirteen by requiring commercial Web sites and online services to request parental consent for the collection, use, and disclosure of a child's personal information.
This legislation grew out of the fact that by 1998 roughly ten million American children had access to the Internet, and at the same time, studies indicated that children were unable to understand the potential effects of revealing their personal information online, and parents failed to monitor their children's use of the Internet. The targeting of children by marketers resulted in the release of large amounts of private information into the market and triggered the need for regulation.
In March 1998 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) presented Congress with a report addressing the inadequate protection of children's information online. In July 1998 Senator Richard Bryan, a Democrat of New York, along with Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Conrad Burns of Montana, introduced the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. The Senate Communications Committee held a hearing in September 1998, and the full Senate Commerce Committee passed an amended version of the bill by a unanimous vote on October 1. The House of Representatives incorporated portions of that bill into 105 H.R. 4328, a Department of Transportation appropriations bill enacted by Congress and signed by President Clinton on October 21, 1998. COPPA became effective on April 21, 2000.
The act applies to commercial Web sites and online services (both foreign and domestic) that are directed at children in the United States. And while the act does not apply to general audience Web sites, operators of such sites who have actual knowledge of children using their sites must comply with the act's regulations. Congress's intent in passing COPPA was to increase parental involvement in children's online activities, thereby ensuring safety during participation in such activities and protecting children's personal information.
Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (pronounced as an abbreviation, is a graphical Operating system released on September 14, 2000, and was the last operating system released in the Windows 9x series. Support for Windows Me ended on July 11, 2006.
Windows Me was the successor to Windows 98 and, just like Windows 98, was targeted specifically at home PC users. It included Internet Explorer 5.5, Windows Media Player 7, and the new Windows Movie Maker software, which provided basic video editing and was designed to be easy to use for home users. Microsoft also updated the graphical user interface, Shell features, and Windows Explorer in Windows Me with some of those first introduced in Windows 2000, which had been released as a business-oriented operating system seven months earlier. Windows Me could be upgraded to Internet Explorer 6 SP1, but not to SP2 (SV1) or Internet Explorer 7, and Windows Media Player 9 Series. Microsoft .NET Framework up to and including version 2.0 is supported, however versions 2.0 SP1, 3.x, and greater are not. Office XP was the last version of Microsoft Office to be compatible with Windows 9x.
Windows Me is a continuation of the Windows 9x model, but with restricted access to Real mode MS-DOS in order to speed up system Booting time. This was one of the most unpopular changes in Windows Me, because applications that needed real mode DOS to run, such as older disk utilities, did not run under Windows Me (although the system could be booted into real mode DOS using a bootable Windows Me floppy disk).
For the first time more than half of the households in America have Internet access on August 17, 2000 according to Nielsen.
2001
Microsoft announces on January 1, 2001 Windows 95 is now a legacy item and will
no longer be sold or shipped to any more customers.
Wikipedia is a free, web based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 18 million articles (over 3.6 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has become the largest and most popular general Reference work on the Internet, ranking around seventh among all websites on Alexa and having 365 million readers.
The name Wikipedia was coined by Larry Sanger and is a Portmanteau of Wiki (a technology for creating collaborative Website, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning "quick") and encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's departure from the expert-driven style of encyclopedia building and the large presence of unacademic content has been noted several times. When Time magazine recognized You as its Time Person of the Year for 2006, acknowledging the accelerating success of online collaboration and interaction by millions of users around the world, it cited Wikipedia as one of several examples of Web 2.0 services, along with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. Some have noted the importance of Wikipedia not only as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently updated news resource because of how quickly articles about recent events appear. Students have been assigned to write Wikipedia articles as an exercise in clearly and succinctly explaining difficult concepts to an uninitiated audience.
Although the policies of Wikipedia strongly espouse verifiability and a Neutral point of view, critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies (including undue weight given to Popular culture), and allege that it favors consensus over credentials in its editorial processes. Its Reliability of Wikipedia are also targeted. Other criticisms center on its susceptibility to vandalism and the addition of spurious or unverified information; however, scholarly work suggests that vandalism is generally short-lived. An investigation in nature found that the science articles they compared came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."
June 5, 2001, Nevada becomes the first U.S. state to vote to legalize online gambling.
Airlines begin to implement methods of gaining Internet access while flying.
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based Operating system and Graphical user interface developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, Mac OS X has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems. It is the successor to Mac OS 9, released in 1999, the final release of the "classic" Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984.
Mac OS X, whose X is the Roman numerals for 10 and is a prominent part of its Brand identity, is a Unix-based graphical operating system, built on technologies developed at NeXT between the second half of the 1980s and Apple's purchase of the company in late 1996. From its sixth release, Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" and onward, every release of Mac OS X gained UNIX 03 certification while running on Intel processors.
The first version released was Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, and a desktop-oriented version, Mac OS X v10.0 "Cheetah" followed on March 24, 2001. Releases of Mac OS X are named after Big cat: for example, Mac OS X v10.6 is usually referred to by Apple and users as "Snow Leopard ". The server edition, Mac OS X Server, is architecture identical to its desktop counterpart, and includes tools to facilitate management of workgroups of Mac OS X machines, and to provide access to network service. These tools include a mail transfer agent, an LDAP server, a Domain Name System, and others. It is pre-loaded on Apple's Xserve server hardware, but can be run on almost all of Apple's current selling computer models.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q2/macos-x-final/macos-x-2.html
Serial ATA (SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) is a Computer bus interface for connecting Host adapter to Mass storage device such as Hard disk drive and Optical drive. Serial ATA was designed to replace the older AT Attachment standard (also known as EIDE), offering several advantages over the older Parallel ATA (PATA) interface: reduced cable-bulk and cost (7 conductors versus 40), native Hot swapping, faster Data through higher signalling rates, and more efficient transfer through an (optional) I/O queuing protocol.
SATA host-adapters and devices communicate via a high-speed Serial communications cable over two pairs of conductors. In contrast, parallel ATA (the Retronym for the legacy ATA specifications) used a 16-bit wide data bus with many additional support and control signals, all operating at much lower frequency. To ensure backward compatibility with legacy ATA software and applications, SATA uses the same basic ATA and ATAPI command-set as legacy ATA devices.
As of 2009, SATA has replaced parallel ATA in most shipping consumer desktop and laptop computers, and is expected to eventually replace PATA in embedded applications where space and cost are important factors. SATA’s market share in the desktop PC market was 99% in 2008. PATA remains widely used in industrial and embedded applications that use Compact Flash storage, though even here, the next Compact Flash storage standard will be based on SATA.
iPod is a line of Portable media player designed and marketed by Apple and launched on October 23, 2001. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based IPod Classic, the touchscreen IPod Touch, the compact IPod Nano, and the ultra-compact IPod Shuffle. iPod Classic models store Multimedia on an internal Hard drive, while all other models use Flash memory to enable their smaller size (the discontinued IPod Mini used a Microdrive miniature hard drive). As with many other digital music players, iPods can also serve as external data storage device. Storage capacity varies by model, ranging from 2 GB for the iPod Shuffle to 160 GB for the iPod Classic. All of the models have been redesigned multiple times since their introduction. The most recent iPod redesigns were introduced on September 1, 2010.
Windows XP is an Operating system that was produced by Microsoft for use on Personal computer, including home and business desktops, Laptops, and Home theater PC. It was first released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, and is the most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base. The name "XP" is short for "eXPerience.
The Xbox is a sixth generation video game consoles manufactured by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe and is the predecessor to the Xbox 360`. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market, and competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast, and Nintendo's GameCube. The integrated Xbox Live service allowed players to Online game.
POSTERS
IDEA:
In this section of the blog I am suppose to create two posters which demonstrate the event timeline of the computer world between 2000 and 2005. I am going to use the images which I have already uploaded in this blog.
The first poster depicts a bended palm tree in the shore line of a tropical island. The idea behind this picture is to show that computers and their associated applications has spared their reach so wide into man’s life that you can find its footprint everywhere in the world. The picture includes some cropped parts of my previously uploaded images all over it. Some of them are shown as a fruit on the tree to demonstrate the growing rate of computers. Meanwhile some of the images are hanging from the tree’s with a rope. Also a number of them can be found in the sea which implies the fact that this technology is traveling everywhere.
The second poster is a setting of a Christmas tree. In this image the Santa working with a computer shows the wide spread use of computers in all age ranges. The tree illustrates a hierarchy of the event timeline.
Work Process:
The background dimension are 800*600 and 600*800 respectively for poster one and two. I used the copy and paste option to create a new layer and then with using free transform adjust the image to fit within the frame.
Each image which is inserted on the main picture is a separate layer in order to make easy for future editorial actions. Extra parts of the images were omitted by using the magic eraser tool and normal eraser tool for some specific areas.
I also used stamp tool to copy some the parts (rope…) that were needed in the picture.
