Gold Price Monitor Message Board

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor

GDXJ 97.44

-1.2%

Nov 14 4:00 PM EST

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next

To: Yorikke who wrote (22527)	11/5/1998 1:52:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (2) of 116762

PC's are well known to be compliant or approximately so. There is a workaround in the date thing. But a lot of big installations with DOS 3.1 software like insurance companies may get spreadsheet blues. It is one thing to do a calculation routine but another to get a date entry problem. People think they have it solved. But try running the software as of that date and it may be different. The IEEE has identified 1800 varieties of chips that are non compliant with Y2K. They power a lot of industrial equipment in assembly lines power and heating control systems and elevators. The 6809e and the Z80B are two major control chips used in a lot of boards in Ontario Hydro and other remote sites and they are not compliant. They have not been tested for error conditions in many situations. It will all in all be a most interesting time. It is mostly non-UNIX mainframe* and non converted industrial controllers that will suffer. But that is 70% of the large scale computing power that runs society. *UNIX and Linux are stable until 2038. The Canadian Forces have researched the matter in Ottawa with a lot of controller boards currently used and they announced last week a major deployment disaster plan for the event. They are not kidding. It was not a bureaucratic decision but a research conclusion. The forces will deploy at that time. It is alot more expensive to change a plant than people think. All boards measure time and date and make reports. In a mine plant these days there could be several hundred Z80B Gould controller boards worth about 2500 a piece. You cannot reduce the number of boards with redesign as they have to be physically at each machine they control. A new board with a more modern processor is no boon. They could not afford to go to 486 or 686 architecture as everything now is 8 bit or 16 bit bus and the Intel chips are fraught with math bugs (4 in the last year and half) and cannot be trusted to do BCD or other floating point crunching. They run PC's but don't use them for simulations. (The Z80 was used because it could be accurately timed for real time applications in sampling and could be easily programmed from the trained base.) I would estimate that you are looking at several million per plant to unpgrade. Some people think that a controller board does not care about the date. Sure. It is trivial to query it and get an out of date report. But what about register overflow? Induced register overflow is one way people break into computers remotely. People forget that time in computers is counted by seconds and accumulates. Hey but what about the F00F bug? EC<:-}

Report TOU Violation

Share This Post

Public Reply Prvt Reply Mark as Last Read File

Previous 10 Next 10 Previous Next