Y2K-ready - or not?

The government and most of corporate America have declared that virtually all of their critical systems will function normally when Jan. 1 arrives.

Yet a significant number of potentially serious flaws may still exist on computer systems certified as Y2K-ready.

Richard E. Evans, an analyst with Meta Group of Stamford, Conn., a consulting firm that provides information on verification tools and services, said that "our best clients [previously certified as Y2K-compliant] still have 40 to 50 errors per millions of lines of code," and that "half of those could corrupt data or crash systems."

That adds up to thousands of potentially serious flaws for banks, insurance companies and others.

The full story is posted online at www.nytimes.com.