How the GPS system works and why April 6, 2019 is so dang important.

IK04 said:
Tomtom owns the automotive GPS market in Europe... Every Fiat has a Tomtom navigation system.
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Drove a rental in Germany with a TomTom GPS. That was the single worst POS GPS I have ever seen or used in my life. Took us on a several block merry-go-round ride in Berlin (and put us right back on the road we were on, several blocks back). An hour later we were on the Autobahn, and it showed us a few km off the road in a forest - for half an hour. It was aggravating, then almost entertaining, but we eventually decided to just turn it off and wing it.

Our take was, TomTom SuckSucks.
 
DaleB said:
Drove a rental in Germany with a TomTom GPS. That was the single worst POS GPS I have ever seen or used in my life. Took us on a several block merry-go-round ride in Berlin (and put us right back on the road we were on, several blocks back). An hour later we were on the Autobahn, and it showed us a few km off the road in a forest - for half an hour. It was aggravating, then almost entertaining, but we eventually decided to just turn it off and wing it.

Our take was, TomTom SuckSucks.
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I had the same experience with a Garmin. It added over an hour to a 30-minute drive...
 
Kenny Phillips said:
The reason that Y2K wasn't a disaster was that we fixed the systems that needed to be fixed. I did a couple of large projects for the DoD; they came down to the wire.
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The company I worked for at the time (a Fortune 500 Company) had a massive Y2K project team for over 2 years. Every programming department had devoted programmers on the team. We met every week for updates. Those meetings were probably the only wasted time. The number of bugs uncovered and fixed was eye popping. We had a Y2K celebration on Dec 29 when the last known bug had been fixed and tested. On New Years Eve, we had almost every programmer on staff standing by. Food, coffee and soft drinks were plentiful. But no alcohol. We had ONE undetected bug show up around 9am and it was fixed by 9:15am. We had another party on the evening of Jan 1.

People make fun of the Y2K scare that never happened. There was a reason it didn't happen.

But what ****ed me off the most was that it wasn't long I noticed various programs again using 2 digits for the date field. The logic was that those programs would not be around in 100 years from now. They were probably right, but the sloppy programming habits would be. At one time, memory was so expensive that saving those two bytes was important. These days, there is no excuse.
 
JOhnH said:
The company I worked for at the time (a Fortune 500 Company) had a massive Y2K project team for over 2 years. Every programming department had devoted programmers on the team. We met every week for updates. Those meetings were probably the only wasted time. The number of bugs uncovered and fixed was eye popping. We had a Y2K celebration on Dec 29 when the last known bug had been fixed and tested. On New Years Eve, we had almost every programmer on staff standing by. Food, coffee and soft drinks were plentiful. But no alcohol. We had ONE undetected bug show up around 9am and it was fixed by 9:15am. We had another party on the evening of Jan 1.

People make fun of the Y2K scare that never happened. There was a reason it didn't happen.

But what ****ed me off the most was that it wasn't long I noticed various programs again using 2 digits for the date field. The logic was that those programs would not be around in 100 years from now. They were probably right, but the sloppy programming habits would be. At one time, memory was so expensive that saving those two bytes was important. These days, there is no excuse.
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Well put! Yeah, that. There was a ton of work done to make it a non-event.
 
jsstevens said:
Not to say that there are no lazy programmers, but that’s not fair to most of the builders of those systems. Many of those systems were built in mainframe days where systems were only rented from IBM and all the core (yes, core) as well as disk cost real money as you used it. Those systems programmers were never expecting the longevity that occurred and were saving real, run time, money by limiting those fields.

Now that I have gray hair I’ve dug through enough old systems (some that I built) and realized most engineers do what makes sense given the conditions, goals and assumptions in place when they built the system.
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I describe it as doing as good a job as management willl let me, as opposed to the best job I can do. Been in both situations, far too many times
 
Kenny Phillips said:
The reason that Y2K wasn't a disaster was that we fixed the systems that needed to be fixed. I did a couple of large projects for the DoD; they came down to the wire.
Click to expand...

I worked for a LARGE Fortune 500 company at the time (a little Silicon Valley startup called Intel) and got a Division Award (2nd highest individual award) for my work on preparing our lab for Y2K. A total yawn at the end of it.

Now, I'm not playing with any GPS toys in Singapore this week (it's Monday morning here). Anyone have any problems on my birthday?
 
I turned on my 1997 garmin 12 hiker ... not one problem other than the batteries are getting low. The real issue was more the software in the satellites and not our receivers.
 
Also a good thread to point out - if you put KGPS as the airport identifier to pull up NOTAMs on Pilotweb, it will give you any NOTAMs of GPS interruptions or interference happening in the US.
 
The firmware in the Garmin 300 in Cessna's Skycatcher can't handle this. It now thinks today is September 2, 1999, which matches the offset from the rollover.

Everything seems to be working, but when I pulled the logs they were all the wrong date, and bringing up the date live onscreen confirms it's confused.
 
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