Hello, everyone - I'm a former "lurker" on this and the TOPRO thread and the person who emailed Cheryl with the information about the "Chemical Engineering" article (since I wasn't yet a member and therefore lacked my "license to post"). As I mentioned to her, I've been following the embedded technology issues for awhile and have come to the conclusion that while only a small percentage may be adversely affected, the issue isn't so much "how many" as "which ones and with what consequences."
One of my sources of information has been Dave Hall, who moderates the embedded technology/infrastructure discussion thread on the Society for Information Management discussion forum and who has collected an impressive amount of information about about actual problems. He spoke at the NIST Year 2000 Conference in June and his slides, I believe, which contain lots of reference material, can be located through the NIST Year 2000 page. I believe the main page is http:/www.nist.gov/. In any case, I copy below his most recent post from the SIM Forum of "true life experiences" with embedded technology, which is the specific purpose of this post:
"6. Author: David C. Hall ( dhall )
Date: Aug. 11 7:03 PM 1997
Have noted that Central Maine Power Company
found date sensitive chips embedded in its
transformers and power equipment. Hawaiian
Electric Company ran tests and found that "It
simply stopped working". part of its
generation and transmission system would stop
and part would deliver power "at higher
frequencies". This is called a surge and could,
if large enough, make electrical equipment
explode. if nothing else, the clocks will run
faster and we'll have a Year 2000 plus a few
hours/days problem.
Dave Hall
dhall@arinc.com"
Dave and I are both speaking tomorrow at the Year 2000 Conference sponsored by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in Stroudsburg, PA. If he has any other references that can be documented, I'll post them on Thursday, so you and others can check them out.
I'm not a technical person, myself, so I always attempt to verify every example of a problem given to me, as you do, Bill. I think there's nothing wrong with that. One reference I'm assured by a member of the AIAG (the Automotive Industry Action Group) is based on hard facts, is the letter sent out by the AIAG to its consitutent members warning them of numerous possible problems with embedded technology on their factory floors. You can find it at http:/www.aiag.org/project/. Unfortunately, I can provide no examples of actual occurrences of the risks enumerated by the AIAG that can be documented, at present.
I apologize for not making these references into links but, this is my first post, so I haven't yet mastered the technique, and I now have to get ready for my talk tomorrow.
Best regards to you all. |
