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Technology Stocks : Y2K damage reports -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cruiser who wrote (66)	12/29/1999 12:18:00 PM
From: Gersh Avery	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 286

Some folks have never had to set the date in their computers .. I guess that means that they would be immune from date change stuff .. not. some things that are not Y2K compliant will continue to work like the VCR .. as long as you never try to preset the thing to record a program it'll probably work just fine. The problem would not be discovered until the first time that it is tried to be used that way. My thought for coug was that if he was concerned about such possibilities a simple solution would be to switch the thing for something simpler than what he had. I would be concerned about possible frozen pipe damage if he just shut the thing off.

To: Cruiser who wrote (66)	12/29/1999 1:44:00 PM
From: Christine Traut	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 286

Cruiser: <<Can someone give a plausible technical explanation why valve controllers and other embedded devices have any use for the year in controlling the device?>> This is from a conversation I had in 1997 with John Hiles, CEO of Thinking Tools. It still holds. Virtually any embedded chip that measures a process (heat, temperature, pressure) by taking a measurement at a given interval has a potential (potential!) Y2k problem. Let's say that you have an analog thermostat which uses mercury to indicate a change in temperature. Remember, a thermostat does not care about absolute temperature - just change over time. The mercury is a perfect analog of the change itself - it expands and contracts over time. In a digital thermostat, you need two measurements - the absolute temperature and a given interval. Let's say that the temperature was 72 degrees at 99/12/29/11/03/59 and then is 71 degrees at 99/12/29/11/04/19. The chip does a comparison and notes the change. If the manufacturer has used the unfortunate strategy of using a two digit year in this measurement, and has put it first, the equation can give a negative result, cause the chip to blow up at midnight on January 1 and essentially indicate no change for a pretty darn long period of time. Long enough for blood gas measurements to put patient's lives at risks, long enough for heat measurements to turn off air conditioning systems in coal generated power plants, long enough for pipelines to blow, etc. Do all digital interval processing control chips use dates? - pretty much. Do they all take the dates out to the year? - no. Do the ones that take it out to the year all use a two digit year? - no. Do the ones that use a two digit year all put the year first? - no. But there are billions, perhaps trillions of these chips out there. And there is precious little standardization. And many of them are inaccessible. Christine