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Technology Stocks : Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems & Infrastructure Problem -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (446)	6/1/1998 4:43:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 618

From c.s.y2k 'hennessy@thoughtcrime.com wrote in article <6kuqlk$gdv$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>... > Hi, > I was forwarding the US News article from today's garynorth lineup to my > usual suspects, and I got to thinking (and writing)... > > 25 billion embedded chips * 1% affected = 250 million suspects > 1 hour to analyze/test/fix suspects (assume not all 250 mil are failures) > = 250 million man hours / 8766.096 hrs/yr ~= 28519 man years > 28519 man years / 578 days = 49.3 man years/day > > So, all we need to do to fix these chips is devote 49 man years and ~4 > man months each day, assuming that someone will pay for it all. > > btw: My starting assumtptions are almost criminally optimistic. Whip out > xcalc and plug in your own scenario. > > It's lunchtime but I think I just lost my appetite. > - Matt > 1 hour to analyze/test/fix suspects (assume not all 250 mil are failures) I would think that this would be closer to a man week. So 49 man years/day would become 49*40 = 1960 man years/day. You have to write test procedures, develop test equipment, interrupt running factories, run tests, find lost source code, revise or rewrite the code, look for new ROMS, PROMS, EPROMS, EEPROMS to program, do the repair task, re-test at a system level. Lot's of work. A man week average might be low. Fred Swirbul can probably give us figures for nuclear reactors that we can extrapolate from. So if we put about half a million people on it we could do it in a year and we have more than a year. I wonder how many EEs and technicians exist world wide? We do seem to have a problem that will stress available resources world wide. Harlan