Re: filmscanners: yet *another* low cost way to avoid the future

[Ian Boag <ianboag@partslink.co.nz>]

>A production system, in this context, is a mission-critical system, without
>which the business cannot operate, not even on a short-term basis.  In other
>words, a failure of this system is a failure of the company or business as a
>whole--it is a "loss-of-life" failure, for the business.

And I'm surprised that you don't have a dupe of it sitting in a cupboard
for the day it fries something. I would. I do. I understand your situation
perfectly. As an example of the problem - I had an mc machine using a
specific 8-port serial card. When I blew one up and installed the spare I
discovered the card was no longer made so I couldn't replace the spare. I
had to go to the new model, buy 4 of them, rewrite my code that used it,
and throw away my perfectly functional earlier model card. If the spare had
failed life would have been over ..... 

The "spare" machine can of course be used to see just how hard the OS
change and related fallout would be .....
 
IB