Ted...Interesting news piece on y2K and PC's
Just in case you missed it.
ztect
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dailynews.yahoo.com
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Monday November 30 11:47 AM ET
Millennium fears shift to PCs
By Neil Winton
LONDON (Reuters) - You have defused the millennium computer bomb in your company's computers and you're feeling smug.
Your company has spent tens of millions of dollars fixing all the big computer mainframes. The computer chips which control its production lines and industrial processes and which might have carried the millennium flaw have been replaced with healthy ones.
You've earned the right to relax and there's more than a year to go, right?
Sorry -- you may not be home free yet.
Some experts say that there is another problem waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting, and it could be in the personal computer you bought only yesterday.
''Y2K (Year 2000) problems with PCs are rapidly emerging as an area of major concern for project managers,'' the Giga Information Group said in a recent report.
In the early days of computing, programmers saved space by truncating years to double digits like 97 or 98. Software writers knew this would cause problems because the two-digit numbers would be unable to make sense of 2000. But they expected most of these machines would be obsolete by then.
They were wrong, and companies and governments around the world have been frantically spending billions of dollars to upgrade computers to forestall disaster come midnight on Dec. 31, 1999.
Personal computers, the majority of which are probably only five years old or less, must surely be immune from millennium problems?
Not so, some experts say. Others say there is a theoretical problem, but so mathematically obscure as to be virtually non-existent.
Giga, a U.S. technology research compamy, said PC issues have been pushed to the back burner because mainframe millennium bug problems seemed much more important. But now companies are surprised to find many critical systems residing on PCs, an unknown number of which may be susceptible to millennium problems.
Giga and other experts say the problem concerns hardware in the PC which sets the clock and which might fail as the next century clicks in.
And some experts claim that even personal computers on sale today may carry this flaw in their clocks.
According to Ian Partington, managing director of (Computer Experts (UK) Ltd of Brighton, southern England, this new version of the millennium bomb exists in a PC's Real-Time Clock.
The Real-Time Clock is powered by a battery when the PC is turned off and sets the time when the PC is turned on.
Partington, whose company sells software claiming to rectify this perceived problem, told Reuters about 98 percent of modern PCs on sale today carry the potential to fail as the Real Time clock liaises with the machine's systems which set the time.
As the clock switches from ''1999'' to ''2000'', most computers have to do this in two parts, changing the last two numbers from ''99'' to ''00'', and then the first two numbers. The PC will, albeit briefly, switch to 1900 before moving to 2000.
The gap, which Partington calls ''latency'', can sometimes only be a fraction of a second. But modern computers are so powerful that millions of wrong instructions could still be transmitted.
This is unlikely to be a problem to home computer users on holiday across the millennium period, but continuous processes carry a risk of infection.
Giga analyst Norbert Kriebel agreed that there was a question over the ability of PC clocks to handle the switch to 2000.
''I've spoken to a number of mother board (systems which control PCs) makers and they are feverishly trying to tie this down. But they are in a quandry. What happens to the hardware maker that finds the solution? How would they react? Would they tell if they found it,'' said Kriebel by telephone from his office in Santa Clara, California.
Are PCs which may be prone to this problem still being sold?
''Yes they are still being sold today. It is still inherent in PCs being sold today. We are still finding non-compliant .... PCs sold by tier-one suppliers,'' said Kriebel.
Compaq Computer Corp (NYSE:CPQ - news), the world's largest manufacturer of personal computers, said it didn't expect any such problems with its machines, according to an E-mail from its Houston, Texas, headquarters.
''(Action) is not needed in the vast majority of situations. We know of no commercially available software applications which directly access the RTC (Real Time Clock) rather than the BIOS (which controls the time processing) - which Compaq already warrants ready for the Year 2000,'' senior manager Alan Hodel said.
U.S. technology consultancy Gartner Group also plays down this threat to PCs.
''Remember the Pentium flaw,'' said Gartner analyst Simon Levin.
In late 1994, U.S. semiconductor giant Intel Corp (Nasdaq:INTC - news) said it had identified a flaw in its Pentium processor, which turned out to have a mathematical risk of one failure in every 270 to 27,000 years of use.
''Demonstrations showed how this could cause significant problems. The key question is - who did it cause problems to? We have the same issue here. Yes, there's a theoretical possibility; but is there any evidence of an application that does this? So far nobody has done that for me,'' said Levin.
Levin said there was little risk of problems in general offices because very few PCs will need to be used at midnight as the millennium approaches.
''If it must be left on it must be doing something with critical use of the date and getting it direct from the PC hardware. This is theoretically possible but I would like to see hard evidence. This is as real as the Pentium flaw was and is likely to impact organizations as the Pentium flaw did,'' said Levin.
(Reuters/Wired) |
