UK Nuke alert regarding 9/9/99. Not sure if you've seen this, I found it interesting. A couple examples of the 9/9/99 problem are claimed to have been authenticated - not sure by whom.

Regards,

-- Anonymous, September 02, 1999

Answers

And now for the link....hopefully ;) http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/zdy2k/news/0,6158,2324149,00.h tml UK Nuke Alert Regarding 9/9/99.

Regards,

-- Anonymous, September 02, 1999

Lane? Lane? lol.....

-- Anonymous, September 03, 1999

FactFinder,

I really wish you weren't always tagging an LOL onto your posts. It is very disconcerting to me to see someone who purports to be a reporter of "facts" taking these issues in such a carefree way. I realize you are basically a Polly in your attitudes about Y2k problems in the electric utilities, if not the world in general, but when you add the LOL it's like adding insult to injury. Perhaps you can explain why you have such a passion for treating such a serious matter in this way?

-- Anonymous, September 04, 1999

Gordon, I do not "always" throw in a "lol", but sometimes I do. It is not my intent to insult or injure Lane with this particular "lol." In this case, I was picking at Lane a little since we have both discussed and agreed that the 9/9/99 date wasn't a big deal (Lane has written several articles calling it a "red herring" and I agreed), yet here are a couple of examples of embedded system problems with the 9/9/99 date. (I still do not beleive that this date that will turn up very many problems, but a few more days will tell....)

And Gordon, I have no intentions of modifying my behaviour or humor. You may want to take a short course in tolerance, or change your own behavior if you wish to change one, ..lol (no ill intent meant...lol).

Regards,

-- Anonymous, September 05, 1999

ROFLMAO Gordon! I just saw your UFO stuff in the previous thread....and you have the audacity to question someone elses "passion for treating such a serious matter in this way"? The UFO stuff was good humor though....it was humor I hope...please Gordon, please say that it was humor and you weren't serious....lol!

Regards,

-- Anonymous, September 05, 1999

Factfinder, when I see a post of yours I have started going to the bottom first. If I see an "lol", I usually don't read your post. I will sincerely try from this point forward not to screw up and read one. Lest anyone think we are "picking" on Factfinder, he is supposed to be a professional. That gives him a certain responsibility. I believe people on this forum want reliable information from the professionals, not information made questionable by laughs.

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

ROFLMAO Gordon! I just saw your UFO stuff in the previous thread....and you have the audacity to question someone elses "passion for treating such a serious matter in this way"? The UFO stuff was good humor though....it was humor I hope...please Gordon, please say that it was humor and you weren't serious....lol!

you know factfinder this is another example of your myopic worldview. just because you can't see it, feel it, or touch it, it doesn't mean that it does not exist.

as i noted before... most engineers are limited in their worldview. why don't you start expanding your horizons a tad?

ever hear of nikola tesla?

start there and work your way up the food chain.

"there are more things in the universe horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

Marcella,

I agree with you 100%. FF presents himself and his opinions as that of a professional. But the content is often anything *but* professional. I consider Malcolm Taylor a professional and just a cursory reading of the postings of these two shows the difference between amateur and professional presentation and reasoning. I find the LOL stuff to be offensive and immature, especially so when coming from a supposed researcher. I can see I am not the only one to define it that way. Apparently he is determined to keep doing that though, almost with a "shove it in your face" attitude now.

FactFinder,

It is obvious that you have not done a great deal of research on the world Y2k exposure and made the connections. Marianne has clearly spotlighted that for you. What about UFOs? Have you done *any* serious research on that matter beyond the urban legends and US govt. spin reports? Have you looked at the serious documentation of 1,000s of credible witnesses from all around the world and drawn any conclusions? Or are you just blowing it all off, like the Y2k scenario, because it just doesn't fit into your view of how things "should" be? There are a tremendous amount of facts out there about this matter. If you wish to live up to your name, spend some time in that area before offering another "flippy hanky" opinion, as Cory would say.

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

... and another thing.

everytime there is any type of parallel drawn that creates a 'tiny' leap in consciousness, i.e., the ability to relate seemingly disparate and non linear events, someone, usually an engineer, starts whining that the forum is 'devolving.'

this has been going on for months and is, it would appear to me, a rather transparent attempt to control the content of this forum.

another thing that i noticed, by way of a current comment, was the intimation that emotional responses were not of an acceptable nature.

we are not androids for christ's sake... we are human beings that respond in a myriad of fashions... do not mistake passion for emotionalism.

and do not discount 'gut' feelings... this is commonly refered to as intuition, and is more of an emotional deduction than a logical one.

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

factfinder,

in my never ending attempt to beat a dead horse to death... something else just occurred to me.

has it ever entered your ever so pragmatic and logically programmed consciousness that gordon is a commercial flight pilot?

is it even remotely possible that he might be privy to experiences and events of which you are not aware and can not even contemplate?

i would assume, also, that many of his friends and coworkers are pilots and might have experienced similar events and actually discussed them among themselves?

or... is this too far to reach?

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

Don't let this happen, Rick. Please, not to this forum. Nothing against thinking outside of the box. Y2K has challenged my box (paradigm) continuously for the last 18 months. I'll tolerate religion, reductionist thinking, essentialist humanism, none of which makes sense to me, but people believe it, it has effects, so I have to deal with it as a factor in the game. But please spare me this X files stuff. It has/is destroying TB2000 and driving enquiring minds back into the arms of the complacent (and scoffing) majority.

Sorry Gordon, Diane, Marcella - I have had a great deal of respect for much of your input, but this latest stuff ... UFOs, extra- terrestrials and everything. I mean ...you're messing around, huh?

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

Sorry Marcella, I meant Marianne.

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

Chris,

No, I'm not messing around. But I agree that this matter is very close to off topic if not actually off topic, so I won't pursue it further here. The TB2000 is the proper place to address it. I do disagree with your assessment that the TB2000 forum drives people back into the arms of the scoffers. I believe that there is far less scoffing and troll posting going on there now than there was even 6 months ago. While there have been many credible reports of UFOs hanging around over power lines and power plants, I can't realistically tie that to Y2k, so it doesn't belong here. Sorry this item got carried as far as it did. Personally, I just reacted badly to FF's scoffing, but I react that way to most scoffing if it is not backed up by good data and reports to support their position.

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

Gordon, When I was a kid, I had an interest in UFO's...fortunately I found the "Compton Report" and saw a number of famous UFO "incidents" get shredded by scientific inquiry. Now that I am grown, I regard both George Fawcett and Gary North as deviatioons from the standard norm, so to speak.

Regards,

-- Anonymous, September 06, 1999

OK FactFinder,

You had an interest as a kid. You read a report that debunked it. End of research and end of story. And that's the end of this story on this forum. Sorry Rick for getting off topic. I'm actually far more fascinated, and concerned, about EDGs than UFOs at this point in time. ;-)

-- Anonymous, September 07, 1999

Gordon, I am sorry for letting this get out of hand, I apologize to you. I agree, EDGs are an interesting subject. Another subject that I would like to discuss at some point, related to y2k, is the move to computerized control systems. You posted something in a thread regading aircraft moving from manual/hydraulic controls to fly by wire - isn't this more common in military aircraft and not so much in commercial aircraft (seems like I remember something about the Airbus being fly-by-wire)...anyway, a worthy topic.

Regards,

-- Anonymous, September 07, 1999

FactFinder,

As usual, the military led the way with this fly-by-wire technology. Basically what happened was that fighter jets needed to be able to maneuver and respond in ways that the human pilot could not keep up with. Too tight a turn, with too many "G's" would cause a black out of the pilot. The computer system could be rigged so that no matter how hard or fast a pilot tried to turn, in the heat of battle, the computer just wouldn't allow more than some predetermined G-load. That could be 8-9 G's or whatever was considered maximum. Also, some exotic aircraft, such as the F-117 Stealth Fighter, are just so inherently unstable that only a computer driven, fly-by-wire system, can keep it acting normal, from a pilot's handling standpoint.

This technology then found it's way into commercial passenger aircraft, with the result that all new large (and many smaller) civil aircraft have adopted the computer driven systems. It ranges from hybrids in which there is some direct hydraulic inputs by the pilot, but with attitude monitoring by computer, to totally fly-by-wire in which the controls only send electric signals to the computers, which then direct the control surfaces, engines, etc, through their own command system. On paper, this all looks real good, and is good, until some major electrical or computer malfunction, at which point there is no manual way left to control the aircraft. A pilot can, and has, found him/herself just along for the ride. In the military fighter, when this happens, they have an ejection system. Civil aircraft do not provide this escape route. As I have made clear before I am philosophically oppossed to this control approach in airplanes, and would like to see a return to even a minor level manual backup ability. It is possible, wouldn't add much weight, or complexity, and would be the final link in the control safety chain. The justification used against installing such minimal manual backups is both economic and, here is the kicker, mathematical probability studies that say the risk of complex failure is so small that it is acceptable. Acceptable to whom? Pilots just coming on line now, will probably never have seen, and appreciated, the old cable backups in large commercial aircraft, but I have, and I loved them.

Malcolm Taylor has mentioned a SCADA system malfunction they had which caused a remote site to freeze up, or otherwise misbehave. They had to send a person over to the site to physically reset some switches/relays or something. Fine, they could get to it and manually regain control. This isn't possible in a true fly-by-wire aircraft.

-- Anonymous, September 08, 1999

Gordon, I believe that one of the great "lessons learned" for the Y2K problem should be that there are weakness in the design and implimentation of computerized control systems. Whether or not industry actually learns this lesson is in doubt - I have not really seen much discussion of this aspect of Y2K - the vulnerability due to our ever increasing reliance on computers for control. Computerization itself isn't the problem, the problem is one of engineering - reliance on single computer systems, or in many cases redundant computer systems that are exactly the same - same hardware, same programs! . In theory, redundant systems are highly reliable, since a single failure will not cause the entire system to malfuntion, and the odds of a dual system failure(or triple in the case of triple redundant systems)are extremely low. In practice however, I have seen more common mode failures that I care to, just in the nuclear industry alone.

A recent example of an apparent common mode failure is the shuttle launch that currently has the fleet grounded due to shorted wires that cause loss of TWO of the three computers to fail.

It doesn't have to be this way. For example, PLC manufacturers typically carry warnings in their manuals that the PLC should not be used in applications where a failure could result in a threat to human safety or equipment damage (not these words, but something to this effect). It's been a while since I have looked at manuals, but I assume such warnings are still there. Sound engineering design requires the assumption that the PLC (or any other computer) IS going to fail and that it's just a question of time. Using this logic, the systems should be designed to fail to the "safe" mode.

I am a firm believer in diverse redundancy for critical systems, such as computer controls with manual backup, two computerized control systems, each of a DIFFERENT MAKE and PROGRAM, etc. Your explanation of the evolution of aircraft controls from hybrid to total fly-by- wire is a good example of a system WITHOUT diverse redundancy ( I am assuming here that the fly-by-wire systems use triple redundant computer systems of the same make with voting logic).

I believe that this is a topic worthy of discussion in it's own thread. If you and others agree, lets try to discuss this (in relation to y2K) sometime soon.

Regards,

-- Anonymous, September 09, 1999

bold off I hope.

-- Anonymous, September 09, 1999

FactFinder,

You have brought out a good point about redundancy. Also about common mode failure. Last year there was a crash of a Swiss Air MD-11, which is the newest computer controlled model of the older DC-10. While I don't have the final report on that accident, preliminary data tended to show that there was a bad electrical fault in the cockpit where the major bus controls are located. This could take out the computers and render the aircraft uncontrollable. (no manual backups here) It seems that the crew, in fact, did lose control of it, based on both final radio transmissions and radar tapes just prior to it diving into the ocean.

-- Anonymous, September 10, 1999