Mimimi: Lack of foresight
10.4.2019
Translation: machine translated
Did you know? Some older sat nav devices have stopped working this week. Because they use a crazy date format.
GPS is a technical and mathematical marvel. It literally requires rocket science. Dozens of satellites have been launched into orbit to make global positioning possible. Even the theory of relativity plays a role, because the atomic clocks in the GPS satellites are slightly fast due to the earth's gravity. Albert Einstein's brainpower is behind this.
And then this: The German automobile club ADAC warned a few days ago that older sat navs will no longer work from 6 April. Devices that are more than 10 to 15 years old are affected. The reason is that many sat navs use a timestamp for positioning.
When defining the timestamp, it was decided to use a 10-bit value to count up the weeks. 2¹⁰ results in 1024 different values. After almost 20 years (52 weeks × 20 years = 1040), the possibilities are exhausted. There is a so-called "week rollover", the counting of weeks starts again at 0. The format was introduced on 6 January 1980. The first rollover occurred on 22 August 1999, and on 6 April 2019 it was rollover time again!
How can an engineer be so short-sighted? I mean, the Y2K problem can still be excused to some extent. When the time stamp was developed in the 1960s, IT worked with punched cards. Understandably, every bit was precious.
But how could anyone in the 1980s come up with the inane idea of designing a timestamp with an even shorter lifespan? And how could a sat nav manufacturer still be building devices in 2010 that they knew would be thrown away in 10 years? All older devices that are not capable of a firmware upgrade and for which there are no more updates are affected. They have been electronic waste since 6 April 2019.
After all, modern devices use a 13-bit time stamp. This means that 8192 values or almost 156 years are possible. So there won't be any trouble until 6 April 2176. I'm imagining my great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter right now. Wearing a radiation helmet, she's sitting in a bar on Mars sipping a Romulan ale, presumably from a futuristic-looking glass, and fretting about the 21st-century idiots.
Navi broken?
Eh, since you're here, you might be interested in working sat navs. Just sayin'.
Aurel Stevens
Chief Editor
aurel.stevens@digitecgalaxus.chI'm the master tamer at the flea circus that is the editorial team, a nine-to-five writer and 24/7 dad. Technology, computers and hi-fi make me tick. On top of that, I’m a rain-or-shine cyclist and generally in a good mood.