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Technology Stocks : Year 2000 (Y2K) Embedded Systems and Utilities -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Mansfield who wrote (46)	7/29/1998 1:39:00 PM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89

'U.S. Announces New Campaign for Millennium Readiness By JERI CLAUSING ASHINGTON - If the millennium computer bug hit today, the lights would stay on -- most of them anyway, a top energy official said Tuesday. But that's the most specific answer the president of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) and federal officials could give when pressed for detailed assessments of what has or is being done to ensure that the millions of computers that control nearly every aspect of our daily lives are ready for the year 2000. John Koskinen, appointed by President Clinton to a special Year 2000 office that is overseeing the daunting task, did, however, announce a new national campaign to conduct a comprehensive survey of the electric power industry's preparedness and help coordinate solutions. The announcement comes on the heels of a congressional survey indicating none of the nation's top 10 utilities is prepared for the so-called y2k bug, a programming problem that will cause millions of computers and embedded chips in systems around the world to read the year 2000 as 1900. .. nytimes.com

To: John Mansfield who wrote (46)	8/1/1998 11:01:00 AM
From: John Mansfield	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 89

'GPS ROLLOVER: Power_Grid Date: 1998-08-01 09:21:39 Subject: Aug. 22, 1999: GPS Rollback Problem. Dead Silence on Risk. Link: nerc.com Comment: Will [the power grid, telecommunications, banking] make it much beyond Aug. 22, 1999? On that day, the Navy's Global Positioning Satellite system rolls back 1,024 weeks and starts over at Jan. 6, 1980. The GPS has made available free of charge access to the time signals of its cesium atom clocks. Around the world, industries that rely on split-second time signals have taken advantage of this gift. Now the question of software rears its ugly head. Has every industry that is dependent on GPS time signals built into its software automatic compensation, so that not a nanosecond will be lost when the GPS rolls back? This question -- on which the survival of Western civilization literally hangs -- is not raised anywhere on the Web, let alone answered. Here is what NERC, the U.S. agency in charge of coordinating the y2k efforts of the U.S. power industry, has said: "Energy management systems - Control computer systems within the electric control centers across North America use complex algorithms to operate transmission facilities and control generating units. Many of these control center software applications contain built-in time clocks used to run various power system monitoring, dispatch, and control functions. Many energy management systems are dependent on time signal emissions from Global Positioning Satellites, which reference the number of weeks and seconds since 00:00:00 UTC January 6, 1980. In addition to resolving Y2K problems within utility energy management systems, these supporting satellite systems, which are operated by the U.S. government, must be Y2K compliant." That's it. That's as much as I have been able to find anywhere on the Web about the electrical power and the GPS. There is not a word on the rollback (or rollover). Nothing on the software conversion requirements, if any. Nothing on any plan to make sure that the industry is making specific plans to be 8/22/99 compliant. NOTHING! ... garynorth.com