I didn’t know about this. I’m hoping it is a non-event. I worry about the GPS equipment in my airplane. Particularly since the age of the device seems to be a factor.

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/04/02/gps-week-rollover-event-devices-systems/

Y2K marketing driven panic...they hope.

I personally am more concerned by these big brother, "self-empowered" , possibly too powerful, government employees that I found on the same link:

Rights?

Thread derailed in just a single post.

Sorry.

Back on track, still sounds like "the sky is falling"/"Y2K again" marketing to me.

Luckily, have my bag of cat bones, my secret horn full of runes and, in a pinch, street signs to get me where I wanna go.

You aviator types may want to brush up on your IFRR.... I Follow Roads/Rivers.

It's a bit overblown.

And Nixer, some of us are still using landmarks for aerial navigation.

It's a very real issue. Simple to fix. A guy in my group is updating the code we use.

OG, just make sure you get all the firmware updates for you nav equipment.

There was a GPS rollover in 1999 (usually treated as a part of the "Y2K problem"), and it just happens every 19, 20 years or so (1023 weeks). Most GPS systems that were made after the year 2000 should already be able to handle it.



Also, Y2K was real.
Smug remarks that it was a hyped up are somewhat disingenious; things would have gone south rather quickly had it not been for the massive effort of countless IT professionals to fix the problems before they occurred.
Just sayin'.

As Ssnake says it happened in 1999 and my pre 1999 Garmin 45XL gps is still working today. There was a letter that went out to car drivers that have TomTom navigation systems built in to their cars to apply a firmware fix.

I use TomTom on my iPhone, but my car does have a built in GPS but there have been no updates for it in many years so I do not know what will happen to it.

oh I hope this finally puts the stake in my dad's GPS and makes him get one that can be updated.... (his has had no updates since around 2007)

For us civilians outside of the IT world, it was terribly over-hyped. Everything from the water in the taps to clouds in the sky were to stop working thanks to Y2K and an ever-competitive 24 hour news cycle.

But thanks to a bunch of old gummers with their somewhat rusty but easily remembered FORTRAN skills that were brought back as contractors, disaster was avoided.

+1 Dart


I remember seeing all of the BS books about the impending "Y2K disaster" throughout 1999.


How does that quote from PT Barnum go again?

Y2K was quite literally the Scam of the Century, aimed at lining the pockets of software and hardware manufacturers with oodles of cash based upon the computer-ignorance of senior execs and politicos everywhere.

The claim was that “the old computer systems won’t be able to cope with going from 1999 to 2000 (or from 99 to 00), so the sky will fall”.

What that claim failed to recognize/admit, is that the old computer systems worked in binary or hexadecimal, _not_ decimal. For example, 1999 in binary is 11111001111, 2000 is 11111010000. In hexadecimal, 1999 is 7CF, 2000 is 7D0. So there was never going to be a cliff-edge rollover problem with them.

Mike (been doing computer stuff since 1971)

I thought it was COBOL that saved the day. That and monochrome monitor's.

Hmmm...I wonder...

There are lots of things that can go wrong... as a simple example a string concatenated from individual table cells, then later parsed by another program, or routine assuming fixed length strings.

201904050202 is a representation of the date when I wrote this text... now if it was back in 1999 represented in 2 digit format as 9912312359, and then ticked over by adding 1 to the year... 10001010000

Which is year 10, a month which doesn't have a value, on the 10th, at midnight, - and all other data following is also off by one position.
It is an easy fix - check the date field is 4 digit, or make sure it knows that it rolls from 99 to 00, and that the code knows this is *after* 99... even when doing date sorting by text field etc...

Definitely a ton of places where *some* ways of doing things can cause problems.

You don't even *understand* the problem as you demonstrate it's absence by using 1999 and 2000 to prove the issue is a nothing-burger, when this is the *solution* to the problem of 00 being less than 99 and 100 not fitting into two digit fixed length ascii fields.

QED I think. Again, the older “legacy” systems we were told were going to crash the entire world, worked as noted in binary or hex, not decimal or ASCII as described here. Am old enough to remember working with them in machine code.

But signing off now. Not going to bother getting involved in futile debate.