EMBEDDED SYSTEMS and Why You Won't Want One ....

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

IMPLANTING A THOUGHT: A Tentative Spiritual Lesson From Y2K

Let's just watch things over the next few months and track as best our feeble energies allow to see whether the degredation of the infrastructure that we THINK we are witnessing already underway, proceeds or accelerates. A lot of us like-minded and determined doomers are pre-posterating that embedded systems glitches are the probable cause for continued declines in the production capacity of U.S. refineries (e.g.: down from 87.1 percent in January, to 84.4 in February, with further shutdowns, outages and reductions in capacity noted daily); for MD-80 mishaps; for 737 mishaps; for 911 systems going down and radio systems shutting off; internet outages; e-mail delays and routing problems; stock market "freezes" like the NASDAQ event last Friday, etc. etc.

We'll certainly know if it things worsen; and we'll certainly have reason to have feel our suspicions, hunches and eddykated guesses were justified if indeed they do continue to suffer longer and wider fractures.

I just want to propose another point to ponder, if'n we do come to witness YEAR TWO THOUSAND as "A YEAR TO SHUT DOWN". If the embedded systems do take us down, who knows how long it may be until a restoration of comparable "social order" is proposed using ANOTHER EMBEDDED SYSTEM ... the "bio-chip implant", or "Number of the Beast". None of us, me included, know "when" such a form of "social order" might be implemented .... BUT, in the event it might happen in our lifetimes or those of our children, it seems to me that it may prove to be an instructive, useful and even salvific OBJECT LESSON to watch what is the ultimate CHAOS OF EMBEDDED SYSTEMS,(Y2K) as it unfolds before our eyes: our perfect technological MACHINE tossed in the crapper because of a simple human oversight. So that, thereby, we have all the deeper understanding of the consequences of yielding our nature (as e.g., Temples of the You Know WHO) over to control by man-made technologies ...... or worse.

As I say: just something to keep in mind, in case.

>"<

-- Squirrel Hunter (nuts@upina.cellrelaytower), February 25, 2000

Answers

Every piece of equipment or infrastructure I can think of either requires an increasing amount of maintenance as it gets older, or works progressively less reliably as it gets older, or both. You don't need to posit embedded system failures to explain things breaking down ever more frequently. It's just normal commercial pressures at work, and ageing plant.

Basically, (good) new plant works near-perfectly and needs little maintenance (after teething troubles are ironed out, anyway). It makes large profits forf its owners. As it ages, the maintenance bill starts rising and the reliability starts falling, but there is a trade-off to be made between the two. It's usually in someone's (narrow) commercial interest to minimize the maintenance at the expense of reliability. Trouble is, the maintenance not being done is cumulative. So eventually when reliability sinks to the point where "something must be done", the accumulated amount of maintenance needed is far larger than it would have been, and something can't be done in a hurry. Especially since the owner is often by now no longer profitable (BECAUSE his plant keeps breaking down, and because everyone can SEE that the maintenance bill will be enormous). Some of the profits from the young plant should have been set aside against maintenance, but they never are: they get paid out to shareholders, or splurged on diworseification, or pillaged by an asset-stripping takeover or MBO. I'd be in favor of nationalisation of key infrastructures if it weren't for the fact that politicians are even less responsible than businessmen, and cut maintenance to cut taxes to bribe the electors to re-elect them!

Many of our infrastructures are new-ish and have been undermaintained. Now they are approaching the point where the accumulated undermaintenance is starting to hurt. But market pressures won't get them replaced until there's a clear profit to be made in shutting down the (by-now decrepid) plant and building anew. Regulatory pressure can help, if the regulator has enough teeth and the inclination to use them.

Why am I pretty sure it's not Y2K? Because a computer bug is binary: it's either there, or not. If the bug were year-rollover related, it would have been there on 1/1/2000 and, if widespread, we'd have been in trouble. We weren't (to my considerable relief). It's things like rat-gnawed wires, and weather-ravaged cement, and fatigued and rusted metal, and oxidized contacts in sockets and switches, that cause the one-by-one failures.

-- Nigel (nra@maxwell.ph.kcl.ac.uk), February 25, 2000.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ