Bubba's Revenge
"Robert J. Brown" (rj@ELI.WARIAT.ORG)
Mon, 28 Jul 1997 01:52:16 -0500
Regarding the so called Millenium problem with computer systems,
embedded system are only at risk if they depend on the date in order
to function.
I have personally worked on automotive controllers for both fuel
injection and automatic transmissions, and neither has any reason to
be concerned about the date at all.
Elevators probably don't, unless they are in a very large building
that uses energy management techniques to change the schedules and
dispatching strategies depending on whether the present day is a weed
day, weekend, or Holiday. It is only the holiday that is a concern,
since you must know the month, day, and year to compute this. Of
course, calling the year 2000 the year 00 would just cause it to get
interpreted as the year 1900 in the worst case, and the worst that
would happen is that the schedules would get confused, so the
elevators may not be as well tuned to the traffic patterns. In no way
would it stop the elevator completely.
Articles like the one that was posted here are written by reporters
who know absolutely nothing about the situation themselves, and so
they report as Gospel truth whatever anyone tells them. In this case,
the name of the company, Millenium UK Ltd, indicates to me that this
is a scammy company that was formed solely to capitalize on fears of
this problem, so of course they desire to magnify it in the eyes of
the public beyond reality.
On the other hand, there is a very real danger to financial systems.
The colapse of the financial industry because of this bug could just
be the trigger to cause the world to want a one-world ruler to come in
a solve the monetary mess that would result.
--
-------- "And there came a writing to him from Elijah" [2Ch 21:12] --------
Robert Jay Brown III rj@eli.wariat.org http://eli.wariat.org 1 847 705-0424
Elijah Laboratories Inc.; 37 South Greenwood Avenue; Palatine, IL 60067-6328
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