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To: Josef Svejk who wrote (8567)	1/8/1998 2:38:00 AM
From: Mike Winn	Respond to of 31646

Humbly report, Josef, from someone who doesn't know what he is talking about: (you posted) Industrial apps have amazing safety requirements. I've never worked on a sawmill, but something as obviously dangerous as a giant saw will have lots of "required maintenance" issues. How long has it been since unit X received its weekly/monthly/whatever maintenance? If it's past the required date, it won't start and will flash an alarm to the central controller. Mechanical sensors require calibration. You have to sense the speed of log travel and adjust it based on how well the saw is cutting (big knots slow things down), etc. When you're talking about a 6 foot saw blade breaking and throwing high speed steel all over the floor, you can bet the whole durned thing is setup to shut down if any component is past its calibration/maintenance date. ================================ I tell you what, I have seen so many examples of systems with calibration/maintenance clock. The fact of the matter is for most of the part, those examples are fabricated. Just think for a second this. If every saw in a big sawmill has a clock to time out if it gets past its maintenance period, then what do you think about the nightmare of going around to service those clocks throughout the factory when they malfunction and the saws will stop functioning? Nobody is crazy enough to design such a complex system. OK, if I am a design engineer and I am given those requirements to design, I am going to put all the maintenance calendars on a single system, like a mainframe or a mini-computer or a PC, and then I will run the control lines from the mainframe to the embedded systems that control my saws, and then my mainframe can disable or enable my saw remotely through the control line. So now, all my maintenance data and control is centralized in a single system in the factory and it's easy to maintain. If a saw gets past its maintenance period, then the mainframe will detect it and disable the saw. Simple as that. Nobody is that stupid to put a clock in every system in the factory. I will fire the engineers who design such a stupid system. You know, there are so many stories such like that floating around to scare little old ladies and little kids at Halloween. The truth is the American industry is not that stupid, thanks God. May be those problems exist pretty much in England as I saw a lot of Y2K stories coming out from there. Just like I think Canada has a lot of gold as I see a lot of gold mining stocks trading on the Canadian stock exchange. Also, the UFOs always landed in places where only a few people see it. Some people saw UFOs several times.