Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem

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To: John Mansfield who wrote (102)	2/19/1998 1:18:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	of 618

DCY2K 17/2 meeting : 'this metric has been confirmed across the utility industry. ' Some more on this meeting from C.S.Y2K. Thanks to Jim Cobbs John ------ 'cory hamasaki wrote in message <34ea7e1a.0@news3.ibm.net>... > DRAFT >I will expand and repost this as part of the next WRP. > >Summary of DC Y2K User's group meeting - Embeddeds. Attended the same meeting(my first DCY2K). As an aside: I must say Cory is right -- the food is great; but he didn't say there were so many attractive geekettes at these soires (still not enough). The salient points I took away (I'm an IT type not an embedded type) from all the presentations are these: 1. Embedded chips are a lot tougher to find and test than it appears to an outsider. The dates they fail on may well not be 1/1/2000. For example a potentially critical date may be 10/10/2000. 2. One presenter with "20 years experience" in the power industry said (his personal opinion, not his company's position) was that there was NO nuke in the US whose chief engineer would certify to be 2000 compliant by mid 1999, which means that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wouldn't allow any of them to operate on 1/1/2000. Dumm-dee-dumm-dumm. 3. Cory quotes the presenter who stated that, in the utility his company was working with, they found 15% of all embedded systems were date sensitive. The resulatant failures would range from the trivial to the catastropic. Additionally the presenter indicated that this metric has been confirmed across the utility industry. The only thing left unsaid was: what was the distribution of the failules on the range of trivial to Gotterdammerung. 4. Telecommunications is a bigger bag of worms that even I would have guessed. One interesting "gotcha" that was emphasised was to check licences. Seems that some of this gear has EPROMS with "cut off" dates so you can't use the stuff past the date of the contract. In one actual case quoted, this can bite you if you accidentally set test dates beyond the cut off, by not allowing you to reset the dates back. Ouch. 5. The clear word from all the presenters was, "It's too late to start now and finish on time." >Got it, denial-heads, Y2K is real; don't attempt to reason it out; don't >extrapolate from what you know. That's like going into a chemical >manufacturing plant and declaring that you know that turning knobs won't cause >a problem... because you saw a chemistry set in a store once. > Forget the denial-heads. Forget about them entirely. Missionaries in the wildest part of New Guinea have better odds of success of conversion. Only the hard reality of experience might cause them to change their minds. Time and energy spent in this fruitless pursuit is time and energy that could be put to better uses. As far as I'm concerned they are in the same class of folks that believe in the "black hellicopters" and "Waco conspiricies", et. al. Nemesis follows Hubris every time. -Jim Cobbs

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