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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (7401)	7/29/1999 11:13:00 PM
From: NickSE	Respond to of 9818

Government expects problems on weekend of Aug. 21-22, when GPS systems have to change their date settings. hotcoco.com ....."We do expect this to be an event," said John Loveall, director of quality for Sunnyvale-based Trimble Navigation Ltd., a leading manufacturer of GPS receivers. "We are doing everything we can to minimize the risks. Our general advice (to GPS users) is don't blindly rely on the advice that the receiver is giving (on Aug. 21-22)." The U.S. Department of Transportation last month issued a warning that "consumers who depend on GPS for geographic locations at sea, on land or in the air may experience … problems with their receiver" on Aug. 21-22. The GPS troubles are totally unrelated to the Year 2000, or Y2K, bug, which refers to a computer's inability to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000. But the underlying cause of this problem is similar to the Y2K bug. The GPS doesn't have enough computing capacity to recognize a date beyond a certain threshold. GPS satellites keep track of time by counting off weeks in sequential order starting with the number 0. Here's the rub: The satellites, which began their weekly count on Jan. 6, 1980, have only enough computing power to count up to 1,023. After Week No. 1,023, the satellites will reset to 0 in an event known as the "Week Number Rollover," or WNRO. The WNRO will occur just before 5 p.m. PDT (that's just before midnight, Coordinated Universal Time) on Aug. 21. The U.S. military believes the GPS satellites will handle the rollover just fine, but manufacturers expect some garble to occur in many of the receivers that translate the data. Some of the receivers might suddenly flash the date Jan. 6, 1980. Others might provide bogus information about locations. Still other devices might simply shut down briefly after the rollover because they no longer speak the same technological language as the satellites that serve as the system's brains. At the same time, a huge number of GPS receivers may handle the WNRO without a glitch. Older GPS receivers are considered the most prone to WNRO trouble, but newer models aren't invulnerable to the problem.....