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

To: bob who wrote (20793)	7/17/1998 10:21:00 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 31646

Anyone pick this up yet?? I ask one question. What happens to the firms that specialize in manufacturing embedded chips?? Where do customers obtain replacement systems if the manufacturer is as vulnerable as they are?? ****************************************************** techweb.com Will The Millennium Bug Halt Chip Lines? (07/17/98; 12:41 p.m. ET) By Staff, Electronic Buyers' News There could be a chip shortage -- maybe a big one -- starting Jan. 1, 2000. That's when semiconductor fab lines across the world could start doing funny things because of the millennium bug. As pointed out in an earlier column, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and chip makers face a potential year 2000 glitch in the embedded code of millions of microcontrollers. And at the Semicon West show last week, industry executives revealed another major concern: Y2K errors can cause equipment to shut down, run erratically, and otherwise foul up production lines. That could bring the chip industry's long-sought end to oversupply, but not the way they intended. If fabs are affected by the Y2K gremlins, it could shake up the chip market, literally overnight -- at the stroke of 12 a.m. As with the microcontroller Y2K threat, no one really knows the dimensions of the problem. Sematech has developed a software package to check 19 of the most likely Y2K time bombs ticking away in equipment code. Consortium officials said more than 90 percent of the equipment failed in initial Y2K-testing. To be fair, that included many minor glitches that could easily be remedied. But it also revealed many tools shut down, others wouldn't turn off, and still more continued running but produced erroneous results or data. A fab-line tool can be Y2K-compliant, but fail when bad data is fed into the machine from external sources. Since a fab is a highly complex, integrated web of equipment and software, the potential for Y2K errors is frightening. Chip makers and tool suppliers vary all over the lot in how well they are moving to fix the Y2K bugs. Texas Instruments and IBM get high marks for tackling the millennium problem early, but even these companies are pressing their tool suppliers to work more closely with them to find and defuse the Y2K mines. OEMs have a huge vested interest in helping the chip industry fix its Y2K problems. The more elite OEMs have already headed off the Y2K crisis in their own corporate computer systems or in IT products they sell into the market. They should move quickly to share that Y2K expertise with their chip suppliers to help ensure uninterrupted supply. President Clinton proposed legislation last week to exempt such industry Y2K collaboration from antitrust and liability laws. That's a helpful step, but the Y2K fix mainly involves a massive time-consuming review of every piece of software code, and an equally laborious task of writing and implementing fixes. All this costs hundreds of billions of dollars in the total global Y2K software sweep -- for which companies can't bill a nickel of revenue. That puts an added strain on the chip industry at a time when earnings are awful, and when companies are hard-pressed for R&D and capital resources. It would be ironic if the Semiconductor Industry Association's National Technology Roadmap was brought to a crashing halt by two little digits of obsolete code.

To: bob who wrote (20793)	7/17/1998 10:42:00 PM
From: hoffy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

That is definitely happening. There is usually one sector that gets really hot at a time. Sometimes it's biotech, then semiconductor, then something else. Right now it's the internet and there is nothing to stop it. SO while the market as a whole is doing very well the STORY sectors like Year2000 are suffering a little because all of the hot money is going into the internet stocks. Why fight the tape. I'm in TSQD and NAVR big time because of this. NAVR will follow BCST's thunder and roar next week. They are both in the same business but NAVR has much more revenues and earnings. TSQD has the Digital River IPO coming out in 2 weeks. If DIgital River does what BCST did, then it will send TSQD close to 20 from 5. It already has gone from 3 to 5 in the past 3 days because some people can see it coming. Read the TSQD board and you'll see what is happening over there. Tava and the year 2000 stocks will have their day again but it won't be any time soon and I hate to have dead money sitting around when there is so much to be made in other stocks. When the Y2000 sector picks up there will be plenty of time to get in and only miss a small portion of the run.