Monday, February 26, 2007

More Spectrometer info

Following up our earlier poke around, sources tell us the following:

  • LNDD is using a GV Isoprime
  • To their credit, it is one of the very first.
  • So early, in fact, it came with Isochrom firmware and documentation.
  • That has never been updated to Isoprime software.
  • There are alleged to be problems with the Isochrom firmware used in an Isoprime, but the details and impact are as yet unknown.
[end]

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

This situation sounds similar to what I've witnessed many times in my work.

Engineering is developing a new product and sales/marketing promise it to customers by a certain date. As usual engineering is running behind schedule and the product is not going to be released on time, but some customers have a hard deadline (in the US governmental agencies often have to use or lose their funding by the end the year), so something has to be shipped to them. To meet the deadline the customer is shipped a "beta" unit and told that he will have to update the firmware when it is finally released. Engineering finishes the development and the released firmware is sent out to the early customers, but whether or not it gets installed is a coin toss.

The Isochrom and Isoprime must be nearly identical or the firmware from one wouldn't work at all in the other. But still there must be differences that are very much worth looking in to.

Hopefully GV is cooperative with Floyd's team, and they still have engineers around who worked on the development these instruments, and they still have the source code and/or bug reports for the old firmware. But I doubt they'd be willing to cross the anti-doping agencies by cooperating with Landis. Surely the arbitration panel has no power to force GV to do anything, do they?

Did all the info about the test instruments come from the lab data packs? If not, I wonder where it is coming from? Maybe Floyd has a backer at GV or even inside the LNDD.

~ Cub (Mr. Obvious)