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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 13 2019, @01:37PM
This is similar to an issue we had at my last job. We were testing devices in bulk and had a system to resume testing if we had a power outage. Sometimes, however, the later tests required data that was saved improperly and after the power-loss it wouldn't exist anymore. Every outage we would get a handful of devices that needed to be retested because they looked for data that was missing.
My solution? Purge the data at every resume point (where testing would resume after a power-loss) so that instead of it being rare, it happened all the time. Then the test developers figured out how to deal with it.
Admittedly, this was part of a system re-write and I actually fixed the problems in place when I made the change, but no new ones came in. Overall, we stopped seeing reports of issues after power-loss.