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To: Craig Rogers who wrote (16394)	5/11/1998 2:38:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Respond to of 31646

[COWLES] Examples I get a strange hollow feeling somewhere at my stomach when I am reading this stuff...chilling... John __________ 'Many of you have repeatedly asked for examples of non-compliant embedded systems type stuff. Here's one that's in my arsenal, and publicly available. Bently Nevada Corporation is a leader in the world of rotating machinery real-time vibration (pumps, turbines, compressors, motors, etc.) monitoring and eddy current testing equipment. They have a stranglehold in power generation plant business; in fact, in most large industrial environments that deal with rotating equipment and must continuously monitor status of the equipment. An example: A high speed turbine has vibration monitoring installed for two reasons: 1) Performance trending over a period of time; ie. for predictive maintenance purposes. 2) If the turbine becomes unbalanced for any reason (wipes a journal bearing or whatever) the turbine will be automatically stopped as a safety measure to keep the turbine from flying apart. Faulty turbine vibration monitors will trip a turbine and shut down a power plant (I've personally seen this happen twice at a nuclear power facility; I even wrote the event reports for both occurrences). Until the vibration monitoring equipment is fixed, the large, rotating asset (turbine, circulating water pumps, etc.) can not be returned to service. Plant insurance rules will not typically allow the large, rotating asset to be run without vibration monitoring. So, where does Bently Nevada come into the picture, and where is this longish post going? I invite you to take a trip to Bently Nevada's website, and review the list of Y2K compliance of their products and equipment: bently.com You will find a lot of totally unsupported equipment and software, and a lot that requires upgrades for Y2k readiness. I'm not picking on Bently Nevada. They've done a marvelous job coming clean with their skeletons. But Bently's list points out the level of effort that would be required at a large power facility just to assess and fix Bently's stuff. I've said it before. Fixing Y2k embedded systems in the electric industry not a matter of complexity, it's a matter of magnitude, of commitment to fixing the problem, and of understanding all of the peripheral ramifications (such as the insurance issue noted above). -- Rick Cowles (Public PGP key on request) Now Shipping From AMAZON.COM: "Electric Utilities and Y2k" - The Book euy2k.com ___ Subject: Examples of the embedded systems bear Date: Sun, 10 May 1998 22:32:36 -0400 From: rcowles@waterw.com (Rick Cowles) Organization: What's that? Newsgroups: comp.software.year-2000