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 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.