ITinfo: Global Positioning Systems Fail Today

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Global Positioning Systems Fail Today

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Ninety-Five Thousand Japanese drivers may have to leave their cars at home starting today.

Pioneer Electronic Corp., a vendor of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices had started to receive hundreds of calls for assistance from owners of it's products when the GPS display screens started to go blank or the units froze up.

Pioneer has assigned about 450 workers to its help lines because of the flood of calls.

The problem for Tokyo drivers is that many urban streets are unnamed and follow curving paths that skirt tangled property lines.

At midnight GMT (Greenwich Mean Time, 00:00 Zulu), the 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System, which provide navigational data from 11,000 miles out in space, switched their timing system back to zero.

The date rollover is caused by some GPS unit's inability to keep track of more than 1,024 week's worth of dates. The first date recorded in the Global Positioning System is January 6, 1980.

This problem was reported in a previous ITinfo article, Dates To Remember. The next problem date for world computers is coming up in less than a month.

Are you lost today? Leave your comments on the Message Center.

Dates To Remember
Message Center

Previous issues are on our website at http://itrain.org/itinfo/.

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http://itrain.org/itinfo/1999/it990821.html
updated August 21, 1999