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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Eddy who wrote (1912)	5/26/1998 11:43:00 AM
From: Bill Ounce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

opinion on embedded system threat and dates -vs- time >>Having worked on many embedded systems, I have seen VERY FEW that CHECK THE DATE. That is: most embedded systems do not use a date at all. A small fraction of these systems DO use a date.<<< That does not surprise me. What makes me nervous is that some of "the small fraction of these systems that DO use a date" are part of a very critical process. How to estimate the affects of this on the economy? Recession, depression, or collapse? It's a big unknown. >>>Y2K is not strictly about DATES, it is about how the silicone machines we depend upon count TIME. Dates are just one form of time.<<< I beg to differ. Y2K problems are very much date dependent. If a system measures time via a microsecond counter, it is immune to Y2K since it does not care what year, day-of-week, calendar date it is. If a system measures time via a clock with a year-month-date it could get confused at the turn of the century. Y2K is all about automated systems that get confused because their year-month-date/day-of-week/leapyear processing stops working correctly after 1999.