Y2K Essays (1192 words) - Calendars, Software Bugs, COBOL, Hazards

It is hard to believe that two numbers have the potential to turn the eve of the 21st century from a worldwide party into a worldwide economic breakdown. Computers in most industries will have the problem of seeing the year two thousand for the year nineteen hundred. Y2K as some people call is going to be a problem that we all must face. Y2K is essentially a storage problem that early programmers failed to solve successfully. The date format that they stored in their programs is two digits for the month two digits for the day and two digits for the year, this only allows 2 digits for the year 2000 which is 4 digits long. Y2K is going to hit and hit hard. Large corporations are scurrying around trying to get this fixed so it won?t affect them. It is coming down to the end of the wire. The problems Y2K will cause are potentially devastating. If the worst case scenario comes true, stores could be looted and there will be no restocking of shelves. Delivery trucks will have no gas due to fuel pumps being offline because of electricity outages. That?s even if the products can even make it in the trucks due to the companies not even being able to produce any goods. The worldwide cost of Y2K could reach up to $600 billion dollars. Absorbing a good chunk of the worlds available funds from last year up until the millenium. Fixing Y2K is necessary, I never thought I would see the day Bill Gates didn?t have enough money for something. Because of legal statements, companies will have to include the cost of Y2K in their yearly statements. Investors or the people that rely on these companies services need to be aware that some of the year end statements and will be obscure because of the increase in spending. Most companies have prepared for this bug but maybe too late. Some people are not even aware of the problem. Some are even dismissing the problem all together. Organizations in retail and utilities are out of touch with the severity of the situation. Therefore causing the bills we have to pay overdue by over 100 years. I am thankful that some companies like banks and health services are recognizing the problem and should become or already are Y2K compliant. The stock market will drop I suspect but not completely crash. If everyone gets all of his or her own money out of the bank it will cause a shortage of cash on top of the shortage already caused by the cost of Y2K. Overseas markets may see a problem at the millenium. International mutual funds or stocks of many foreign companies are basically hands off at this point because most foreign companies are still only halfway compliant and it is way passed the point of no return. I know when it comes to money people tend to get worried about its security. That is why I believe that a rush of the ba nks will happen and I hope it will be recoverable in a timely fashion. Some people in the media are saying that everybody needs to get enough cash to run on for at least a couple of months, but that is nonsense. If everybody would take just a little cash, but not too much then maybe the banks won?t take a bad hit. If everybody goes and gets a thousand dollars out of the bank, again this could cause some money shortages. The panic will cause most of the problems in the U.S. Banking systems are particularly sensitive to this kind of panic. There are hundreds and thousands of nodes in banking networks. If you Think about how many people use Credit Cards and MAC machines and the possibility that the software in any one of these systems is not working properly it can cause problems anywhere in the network. These problems could range from money not being deposited or ducted from accounts properly, problems with interests and investment situations, or even a complete crash of the network. Testing the solutions for Y2K may be the safest bet we can make in these unsure times. The scariest

The Stock Market Crash of 1929

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 Free Online Research Papers The stock market has been around and well-known for many years and has been dated back into colonial times. However, in 1929, the stock market unfortunately took a drastic turn for the worst. In just a matter of days, the market underwent a cascading decline, and took everything down with it. To many, the stock market may seem very complicated and esoteric. However, after some research some come to find its actually very simple, because someone else basically does the work for you. This ‘someone else’ is a stock broker. In simpler terms, a stock broker is like an auctioneer. The job of an auctioneer is to pair a buyer with a seller, much like the job of a stock broker. They also determine adequate pricing of whatever it is being sold (Gerlach). In the stock market, shares of companies are what is being sold. If you buy a share of a stock, you own a part of that company. Generally, if the company did well, you would earn a profit, and if it didnt do so well, you could potentially lose money. Investors soon purchased stock on margin. Margin is the borrowing of stock for the purpose of getting more leverage. For every dollar invested, a margin user would borrow 9 dollars worth of stock. Because of this leverage, if a stock went up 1%, the investor would make 10%! If a stock drops too much, a margin holder could lose all of their money AND owe their broker money as well (Stock Market Crash). Investing money in the stock market was a very risky act. Some lucky investors end up acquiring huge profits and simultaneously become millionaires over night. However a lot of patience is necessary as not to panic and sell your share as soon as the prices drop in the slightest bit. Keeping calm through a downfall could ultimately be your saving grace in the end. Because more and more Americans were purchasing stocks, the value of the marked drastically increased (Ohio History Center). There was a peak in prices in September 1929, and after this, the priced dropped. Some brokers were on the brink of panic and quickly called in there loans, which would have been a wise decision. On the other hand, many brokers carried on, continuing to loan money, and looked at the decline as just a bad day in the market. On Wednesday October, 23rd, the Dow Jones had descended 24 points in a mere half hour, causing a slight panic across the nation. The next day, Thursday the 24th, all brokers called in their loans causing all prices on the market to face a gargantuan downfall. Many at this point figured the stock market just need a few days to bounce back. To keep a lid on the hysteria, brokers began to merge their funds to buy enough stocks to even out the market. This briefly balanced the priced. However, by the following Monday, prices had fallen again. Tuesday October 29th, 1929, ‘Black Tuesday,’ was the day all hell had broken loose. This was the very day of the stock market crash. Because of the rapidly declining prices, the once reliable ticker tape had trouble keeping up and ended up causing mass confusion and chaos. On account of the dwindling prices, many people vacated the market and withdrew all their funds while their debts were still meager. With everyone pulling out at once, mass mayhem had occurred and the market had crashed. After the crash, the suicide rate skyrocketed. Many people leapt to their demise out of tall buildings because being dead was easier than facing financial debt. The most abundant time of suicides came in 1930, the year following the crash. In 1925 the number of suicides in New York was 14.4 per 100,000 of the population. In 1934, that number had escalated to 17.0 per 100,000 of the population (Galbraith). Also, the stock brokers who decided suicide was not the answer, lost their jobs. American across the nation were in debt. However, it was the Americans who has invested all they had who were hit the hardest and has lost everything as a result of the crash. Eventually the crash of the stock market has negatively effected everyone. Research Papers on The Stock Market Crash of 1929Analysis of Ebay Expanding into AsiaTwilight of the UAWQuebec and CanadaThe Effects of Illegal ImmigrationDefinition of Export QuotasMarketing of Lifeboy Soap A Unilever ProductAppeasement Policy Towards the Outbreak of World War 2Open Architechture a white paperHip-Hop is ArtBionic Assembly System: A New Concept of Self

Computer Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Computer - Essay Example My goal while writing this essay was to convince the readers that modern life cannot be imagined without computer in it. We have become so much dependent on computer now that we can no longer imagine living a comfortable life without it. Today, people feel happy because their time and energy is saved in finding happiness, as computer has brought happiness and leisure at their doorstep. Hence, it is impossible to delete the usage of computer from our lives because it has affected our freedom and happiness in the most unbelievable way ever possible. This message is what I want my readers to take away with them. I had a wonderful experience while writing this anecdote-cum-essay, as this helped widen up my horizon regarding how much I depend on this wonderful invention of man. I am very happy to depend on it. How Computer Makes Life Easier It was May 1, 2000. I was at my house located in North California. I was sitting with my friends doing combined study. Papers were scattered all aroun d us. We had put down notes on those papers, and had made several copies of those notes by hand. However, they were all messed up. We were stressed out collecting them and stapling them together because the next day was our examination, and we had not even started studying yet. The big mess of papers was all confusing. That was the time we did not use computer to make and save notes, and so, we could not make sophisticated copies with some changes, in just one click. We all decided to get our hands on a computer as soon as our exam finished. So, all of us collected money and bought one, which we kept at my house. After that, one of us would make notes on Microsoft Word, and all the others would copy/paste the content with some changes. So, we were able to make multiple copies of one document in just one click, by attaching a printer to our computer. We were no more confused about manual copying of notes, and our rooms were no more a mess. We had gotten rid of the manual work, and th at saved much of our time and energy. We were able to organize our documents neatly in computer. We installed an encyclopedia and a dictionary, and it was so handy for us not to take care of books and notebooks anymore. For entertainment purposes, we installed some games. We also saved many of our photographs in a folder, and we would look at them whenever we missed the old days. We no longer cared about saving pictures manually in albums, because we had saved them in our computer. Every friend had a copy of them. Our new computer was really a great blessing for us. We also suggested the use of computer to our educators; and since then, they have also been trying to modify the instructional process with the help of computer. We made them realize the necessity of incorporating computer technology in teaching language; and so, they started organizing computer based instructional schemes in such a way that all students with their unique calibers were equally attended to. To sum up, com puter made our lives easier and comfortable as it brought with it a lot of resources which we could efficiently use to enhance our learning and get better informed about the world around us. So, if used for informative purposes, computer can help us make progress by leaps and bounds in today’s information society. It solely depends on the user whether he wants to benefit in