Jan,
I don't care what you do with B-tree and you have every right to contact them if you wish. OK, there is some limit that I can go with this B-Tree issue. First, I don't mean to hurt their business even though I don't think this is a very honest company. Secondly, by posting about B-Tree on SI, I was attempting to demonstrate to people here how companies can make false claim on having solutions for Y2K when they don't. Thirdly, I couldn't imagine that some people would contact B-Tree, and so I regret that B-tree got dragged into this discussion that is primarily about TPRO. I suppose whatever we posted here cannot affect their business as I assume that none of their customers is reading this thread, and this is also not a public company.
Now I also don't want to drag my own company into this issue with B-Tree. My company is not happy with what B-Tree has delivered, but they chose to let it go. They are busy making and selling quality products, and they are not into the business of making money through litigation. Since I am an employee of my company, I should be loyal enough not to do anything that can affect their business.
I also have nothing against B-Tree in general, and the people working there in particular. Even though I am not happy with their equipment, but being a contract employee, I get paid by the hour with time and a half for overtime. So I don't complain here because I have to work extra hours to solve their problems. The more I work, the more I get paid. During my training at B-Tree, I have developed some personal relations with people working there, so I don't want to hurt anyone there either. The discussion here is strictly for TPRO sake and I hope it doesn't go out to B-Tree's customers.
Since this is my last post about B-Tree, I want to say a few things very specific about B-Tree equipment because it's relevant to TPRO. Jan, you can pass this on to Victoria Harris if you wish, so that she knows that I know enough about B-Tree and I am not making things up.
What does a B-Tree test equipment do? It's basically an expensive logic analyzer. A logic analyzer is a test equipment that can monitor the activity on the processor bus. You can program it to look for an event, for instance a read or write to certain memory locations, or a read or write of certain data pattern, i.e. a graphical object or a date. Prior to today, B-Tree was focusing their equip. to test medical devices. A medical device typically has some inputs from some sensors and keypad, a display to show some kind of waveforms, and an output that could be an electrical signal or a printout. There are much much more but I don't want to be too specific. So basically the B-Tree system can generate the input (analog or keypad), check out the display by monitoring the memory buffer inside the graphic card, and check out the analog output.
So how can B-Tree adapt this test system to check for Y2K problems as they claim? Basically using the same method, the test equip. will monitor the processor bus for certain data pattern that matches the date. Once the date is detected, the B-Tree system will check for Y2K compliance. But it's unlikely the B-Tree test equipment will find the date. Why? Because programmers are always clever, they will find tricks to make the code more efficient and there is no unique pattern to identify the date on the bus. Then also, the B-Tree system can only detect it if the data gets written to the bus. But most of the time, when you program in assembly language or even in high level language with an optimized compiler, the data will be manipulated inside the internal registers of the processor and only the final result gets writen to memory, so now the data is completely transformed and it is impossible to recognize a date in a data pattern.
I know all this mumbo jumbo is too technical to some of you but I don't know how to explain it better. Anyhow, this is how B-Tree sells their products. OK, they make test equipment that are tailored to a certain type of products, and they will use terminologies that match with that product. For instance, for medical products, they will tailor the SP processor to capture certain types of data and they will create virtual objects with names that match the medical terminologies. For Y2K for instance, they will create virtual objects such as "year", "month", "day" and then they will provide some library routines that are tailored for searching date object.
First, their hardware is crap and fails frequently. Secondly, the library routines they provide does not work and a lot of them have never been tested. Thirdly, they provide minimal support after they got paid.
OK, management got sold out because of their sales pitch. They will use appropriate terminologies when talking to each type of company. The engineers in my company tried unsuccessfully to talk to the management into buying a general purpose logic analyzer from HP or Tektronix rather that this piece of junk from B-Tree. But management got sold out because B-Tree claimed that their test equipment can automate the whole testing process and is geared specifically to test medical instruments.
Anyhow, why all this has to do with TPRO? This is an example of how companies can make false claim about being able to test and fix problems such as Y2K. It also shows that those companies can make sales to well known companies and using that as reference to make the next sales and then hype up the stock if the company is public. I know that B-Tree is loosing money every year. It's currently financed by venture capitalists and those venture capitalists will someday want their money back. Since B-Tree is getting into this Y2K business, I suspect that they will go public this year. When they do, look on the prospectus and you will see a long list of well known companies as customers. They may make a few sales for Y2K business also. No matter whether they make money or not, the stock will be hyped up and the venture capitalists will bail out. OK, this is pure speculation of my part, it hasn't happened yet. But using this scenario, I want to show how companies can dupe you of your money.
Next post will be about TPRO. |
