"Embedded Systems and the Year 2000 Problem" by Mark A. Frautschi, Ph.D.

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

Is there any reason, today, to doubt the second sentence, or the last sentence, in the section entitled "Timing" - ??

Perhaps THAT is why rollover was SO smooth?

-- Jim Young (jyoung@famvid.com), January 02, 2000

Answers

Do you have a link to this document?

-- Think It (Through@Pollies.Duh), January 02, 2000.

http://www.tmn.com/~frautsch/y2k2.html

-- Jim Young (jyoung@famvid.com), January 02, 2000.

http://www.tmn.com/~frau tsch/y2k2.html

-- Slobby Don (slobbydon@hotmail.com), January 02, 2000.

gracious!

-- Jim Young (jyoung@famvid.com), January 02, 2000.

important text follows from that site:

Timing: When will these failures occur? For embedded systems that are explicitly date dependent the minority of systems that are non-compliant will experience a peak of failures at the rollover point, midnight on 1 January 2000. For example many sensors used by electric utilities "date stamp" every "event" (allowing synchronization, exact frequency control and off-line analysis of process control data). A spectrum of other "critical" or "spike" dates are provided in (Jones, 1998) and in note [40]. Non-compliant systems that are not explicitly date-dependent will fail at other times, perhaps years into the new century. As examples of systems that may keep absolute time (or dates) internally, and have no way to "know" the actual date from an external source, consider the power train control system in an automobile. Consider the controller in a stove or microwave or load management switches (that allow the electric company to reduce peak demands by temporarily shutting down some of their customers' water heaters or air conditioners). These systems "wake up" (power on) with some predetermined, epoch date. Depending on the application, the explicit form of the non-compliance and the difference between the default time and actual time, these systems will fail at some other time determined by the interval between the epoch date and 1/1/2000. Impact: Will these failures be soft or hard? The closeness in time in which these failures will occur mentioned above is a critical and undocumented element [41]. Should these begin in 1998 and end in 2006 (to pick the earliest and latest dates known personally to the author) with a gradual onset and without sharp peaks in the number of systems that fail in a given day, this is much easier to handle than otherwise. Perhaps the only certainty that can be taken from this is to note that systems observed to be functioning normally after 1 January 2000 are not guaranteed to be Year-2000-compliant. They may fail years in the future, depending on when their internal clocks were set (their epoch dates).

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), January 02, 2000.



It amazes me that you guys keep quoting all those who were flat out wrong about y2k, and offered clueless speculations about the "crisis" of y2k in embedded systems. Frautshi was flat out wrong in his assessments of y2k, technically inept (although he has learned a few things, I will give him that, but he still mixes facts he borrows with his own fiction) and his "epoch" date cries are equally clueless. Crisis over, people. Time to accept reality. Frautshi's expertise was non-exisitant.

Regards,

-- FactFinder (FactFinder@bzn.com), January 03, 2000.


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