UNDETERRED by the spectacular failure of the National Lottery in the area of millennium countdowns, Sun Microsystems in Ireland has launched a competition to develop software for an Irish countdown to 2000 to be located on the World Wide Web until the turn of the century, when, of course, the computer industry faces its own headaches in resetting computers to accept the 00 dateline.

The Java2000 challenge invites entrants to develop Java software for the project. The winner gets a Javastation computer or £1,000 in cash, a selection of programming books and Sun will put their site up on the web, where looking at it will no doubt be more pleasant than peering into the murky Liffey.