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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (10124)	6/16/1998 7:20:00 PM
From: James Unterburger	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18691

But on the other hand, simply needing to know the date does not imply a need to the year. For example, my thermostat at home has different heating on/off times and temperatures depending on the day of the week. But it has no knowledge of the year. Since day-of-week is a continuous function across months, years, and millenia, there is no problem. Now if that elevator also happened to know about bank holidays and such, it could conceivably need to know the year.

To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (10124)	6/16/1998 7:31:00 PM
From: CatLady	Respond to of 18691

When the elevator issue was brought up on the TAVA thread, someone sent me this in response: ---------- To: CatLady (18512 ) From: Alastair McIntosh Tuesday, Jun 16 1998 5:29PM ET Reply # of 18551 CatLady - Regarding elevators, I checked the websites of the major manufacturers (Otis, Dover and Schindler(sp?)) and there appears to be no century rollover problem with their equipment. None of the elevator control systems know what the year is. The manufacturers state that there are simply no checks to make for Y2K compliance. If anyone has different verifiable information I would be interested in reading about it. Al

To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (10124)	6/16/1998 9:11:00 PM
From: Oeconomicus	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 18691

Michael, does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Seriously, you raise good questions to ask in "Is there any reason that this system should care what time or day is is?". As I non-engineer, I would add year to your question and might follow that with "is there any reason why the designers of the processor/system might have included the capability to reference the year rather than just the day of the week or time of day?" Elevators, as CatLady pointed out, may not be the best example, but don't be so sure just because some Otis customer service or PR person said so. After all, MSFT and NSCP also claimed they had no y2k issues, yet they did. In the case of elevators, the possibility of programming in holidays might have been considered a cheap way to add a saleable feature that the competition didn't offer. But enough about elevators. Will your VCR be able to record the bowl games on 1/1/00 while you are sleeping off the party? Seriously again, while I think worrying about whether your Mr. Coffee will work is silly, I'm sure there are lots of embedded systems where one might think the year doesn't matter, but it is part of the programming anyway. On the subject of office buildings, a much bigger energy hog than elevators is HVAC systems. I'd bet on them being year sensitive. Of course, none of this means that little $45 million revenue magic bullet sellers are worth several times that amount. After all, much more than the rest of the world, US companies and government agencies recognize the problems and are spending big dollars on it now. My guess is that any US company with a real solution would be showing meaningful revenues from it by now. BWDIK? Bob

To: BelowTheCrowd who wrote (10124)	6/17/1998 10:18:00 AM
From: Marconi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18691

Hello Michael Gat: << It's unlikely they would drop out of control since there are mechanical systems to prevent that, but you could spend the bulk of New Year's day stuck in between floors with the lights out, waiting for a rescue. As you can imagine, factory floors have similar logistical problems. A single lost day at the factory is a BIG deal. In many industries it means the difference between a profitable quarter and not.>> Two quick points. 1-The 'stuck' elevator is not smart enough to operate normally and then catch people in between floors. Presumably the response routine for manual button response operates independent of the load scheduling routine. I agree with your point, elevators are built with redundancies for reliability. 2-When I studied digital circuit design many, many moons ago, we were taught to design every circuit to settle out to a known state after power up. Hardware should be resettable in all events. A program could persist at some unwanted instruction step--which is a firmware or software issue. I think it would be hard to assert that the firmware folks are all so thick they have imbedded codes that will persistently fail the operation of a device start of A.D. 2000. Switch off, switch on is often enough to reset systems. I'll go out on a limb--any electronic system without a clock to watch should be free of A.D. 2000 faults. It's only the clock watchers that can have a problem. Best regards, m