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The American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the national association for amateur radio, has a reminder about older GPS receivers which may hit a wrap-around bug on April 6th this year.
The GPS network will encounter a small millennium bug of its own in April when the network's "week number" rolls back to zero. This known issue especially could affect those who use GPS to obtain accurate Coordinated Universal Time (i.e., UTC). In the GPS network, the number of the current week is encoded into the message the GPS receives using a 10-bit field. This allows for weeks ranging from zero to 1023. The current period began on August 1, 1999. On April 6, 2019, the week number rolls over to zero and starts counting back up to 1023.
This should not affect later-model GPS receivers that conform to IS-GPS-200 and provide UTC, [...]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 12 2019, @04:51PM (5 children)
You're totally right. It couldn't have been that 10 bits what what they had available when all critical tradeoffs were considered, and something they knew SW could deal with.
Must have been planned obsolescence. Everyone is evil.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:41PM (4 children)
Well yeah, software CAN deal with it, but some manufacturers didn't plan for the future and designed their software with limited lifespans. This isn't an unknown issue. This isn't the first time it's happened. And according to the linked documents, this is something which *most* manufacturers were able to get right. The rest are incompetent at best and at worst they intentionally designed a limited lifespan into their products. Any devices created before 1999 would have already been through this once, and presumably already patched, so this would probably only be an issue for early 2000s era products. There is no way in hell that it was a hardware limitation that prevented them from handling this. We certainly had the technology to build a halfway decent digital clock in 2000.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 12 2019, @09:15PM (1 child)
I will LMAO if/when I hear about a bunch of car models, witt it as extra for some $xxxx, have their GPS navigator bricked and are out of warranty.
That will be a good reminder for the UNIX philosophy: never think of your car as a smartphone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday March 13 2019, @11:21AM
Eh, the car would probably be ten or fifteen years old by the time it happens, and if you had the money for such extras then you probably wouldn't still be driving a car that old. So it's probably the guy who bought it used who gets screwed rather than the original owner, which kinda sucks. On the plus side, it's not like you can't just swap out the GPS unit itself -- AIUI a lot (although certainly not all manufacturers) of these things DO kinda follow the Unix philosophy -- there's standards for size and placement and it's usually not too difficult to pull one unit out and drop another one in, as long as it's one of those embedded into the dashboard itself...although on a car that old most people wouldn't consider it to be worth the effort and they'd just use their phone anyway. It's also possible, if there's enough such vehicles out there for the manufacturer to give a damn, that it could be fixed by sticking a CD in the player to update the firmware. Just like they usually do map updates.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)
The common patch was to add 1024 to the week number, since it wasn't going to happen again for another 20 years.
Worse is this one:
if week number manufacturing week { add 1024 to week }
Or this one:
while week number manufacturing week { add 1024 to week}
I'm not kidding. Both have been used by major GPS vendors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:58PM
Edited for >
The common patch was to add 1024 to the week number, since it wasn't going to happen again for another 20 years.
Worse is this one:
if week number greater than manufacturing week { add 1024 to week }
Or this one:
while week number greater than manufacturing week { add 1024 to week}
I'm not kidding. Both have been used by major GPS vendors.