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Technology Stocks : TAVA Technologies (TAVA-NASDAQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (8889)	1/14/1998 2:52:00 PM
From: Mike Winn	Respond to of 31646

>>>Sensory overload "This will be a far bigger issue on the plant floor than in a mainframe," said Bill Heermann, sales director at Tava Technologies, here. "In a mainframe, you've got software that's only looking at about five streams of data. On the plant floor, you've often got 10,000 electronic sensors, and in one fashion or another, each sensor is a data stream that has to be examined. One of those 10,000 sensors may begin feeding bad data to networked devices above them and bring down the whole network, shutting down the plant." LOL! Scare tactics for little kids at Halloween! First, why does electronic sensor have to worry about date? Then if a few of them do, you don't have to inspect every single one of them to isolate the problem because you must have an idea how your plant is laid out and where the date calculation is done. For instance if your car breaks down and you take it to an experienced auto mechanics, he/she does not need to inspect every single wire, valve, switch, gear, bolt, etc. in your car to diagnose the problem. An experienced mechanics can isolate the problem by cranking up the engine a couple of times, or take a few measurements. If you debug your software, do you look at every single line of code? If you fix a PC, do you take everything apart and inspect each piece? Do you know how many pieces of mechanical, electrical, electronics are there is a complex electric or nuclear plant, aircraft, chemical plant, etc. ? It's just economically impossible to inspect each piece. If Tava doesn't know how a plant operate, forget about hiring them to do the assessment or remediation because it's going to take forever. That kind of statement from the sales director of Tava tells me he doesn't know what he is talking about. This company is loosing money even doing regular factory automation work. Tava's only expertise is in making CDs.

To: John Mansfield who wrote (8889)	1/14/1998 3:31:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 31646

Y2K-EMBEDDED interesting discussion on C.S.Y2K John ------ In article: <34b3289c.173168542@news.calgary.telusplanet.net> ttoews@telusplanet.net (Tony Toews) writes: > > But while the [large oil] company was testing some of the equipment > that controls oil valves in its refineries, engineers inadvertently > discovered a host of new problems. "Thousands of terminals that > control the [dispensation] of oil have old chips with a year 2000 > problem. The chips all need replacing, but the new chips won't fit on > the old motherboards," Wengenroth notes. "And the new motherboards > don't fit the old valves, so all the valves have to be replaced, too." > If the company doesn't address all these problems, it soon won't be > able to deliver oil to its customers. > > YIKES! This is indeed a classic problem in manufacturing plants, and is one of the main reasons why companies are (or are considering) adjusting the dates held by the embedded systems, and then compensating for this in the "next level up" supervisory (i.e. control/monitor) systems. Typically this would have to be implemented during the annual plant maintenance "shutdown" (most manufacturing companies allocate one or two weeks a year for general upgrades, etc. of plant sub-systems). One potential risk area to keep an eye on is that local engineers often like to keep a few unofficial "spares" around just in case something fails - typically they find it easier to do a quick part swap and get things moving again, and then sort out the administrative stuff afterwards. Obviously there may be problems if an unmodified part is swapped into a modified system. -- Roger Barnett Natron Software Maintenance Ltd, York, England