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

To: Cheeky Kid who wrote (3218)	1/10/1999 4:40:00 PM
From: jwk	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9818

Microwaves are NOT the issue, never have been except for pollyannas who use them and other non-sensical examples to scoof at y2k concerns. But.... sounds like you need to do a little basic reaserch in the chip department. The problem is that chips are so expensive to design and build that they often contain many features and functions which a given application does not use or care about. When the engineer who is designing a product goes to the chip catalog to find an off the self chip for a product, she will most often be presented with a selection of swiss army knife features. The product may only need the main blade and the leather punch feature, but it is more cost effective to buy a chip which has a dozen other features included. These extra functions were included in the original chip design by the chip's designer because she wanted to cast her net for potential sales as wide as possible. In the world and economics of chip design and manufacture, it is more cost effective to include the extra -- non-used functions, than to design and make a chip for each specific application. So, even though micorwaves are a non-issue, they do provide a good example of the hidden chip problem. The microwave may not care what the date is, but it could well have a chip or chips in it which have latent time functions the user, and perhaps even the manufacturer, is totally unaware. Also, chips with latent time functions won't necessarily fail or survive at 1/1/00 roll over. Depending upon how the time function is established and kept, chips could fail week, months, and even years (up to as many six years according to some experts) after roll over. The nightmare scenario for the delayed fail group is that they could be considered compliant only to fail at some crucial time in the future, and/or they could be sending bad data the whole time. If you take a break from taking shots at those of us who have concerns, you might consider doing some research on this stuff. It's sobering.