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At 7:46 AM +0800 12/19/99, Andrew wrote:
>
>"You must come to grips with the information in this report. It
>confirms what David Hall has been saying about the necessity of
>testing embedded systems. But it goes beyond Hall. It shows that it
>is impossible to test large numbers of them without removing them
>from the boards in which they are embedded. To test them while they
>are installed and on line is to risk shutting down whole systems
>permanently. The problem is the secondary clock, as you will learn.
>The logic of the chips is like the logic in legacy software: layers
>of forgotten code, all reaching back to the original starting date of
>the chip.
Clinton's Y2K czar, Senator Bennett, now estimates that only 0.2% of
the 50 billion embedded chips will fail because of the Y2K bug.
That is only 100 million chips that will fail. Whew! That's a relief!
Bob Fulks
----
>From a TV Interview:
NOVAK: Senator Bennett, there are an estimated 50 billion embedded
chips in the world, at -- I've read that six percent of them may be
defective, but because of the Y2K, but if only one percent are
bolluxed up, how much of a problem would that be for a variety of
things not working?
BENNETT: Yes, one percent would be an enormous disaster. And when I
first got into this the most responsible estimates I had were two to
three percent failure. There are some folks that have said as six
percent. But I don't really think it was ever that high.
We are now being told by the chip makers, and I've spent a lot of
time on this, that -- two things: Number one the figure is too high.
The real figure for failure is going to be something like two-tenths
of one percent, instead of one percent or two percent.
And secondly, that there's a very real difference between failure and
failure. In other words the chip can fail, but the device that it's
connected to can continue to operate because many times the date
function is non-essential. So, we've spent a lot of time worrying
about that, checking on it.
I can give you some horror stories because we know the horror
stories. But it now appears that this is not going to be as bad a
problem as we first thought.
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