Funny how apparently Trimble were involved in the wk860 problem, I thought they 
famously used their leap second based rollover protection: 
http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US5923618 :) Maybe that algorithm isn't that 
smart after all.

Thanks,
Wojciech 

  Original Message  
From:[email protected]
Sent:29 February 2016 11:02 am
To:[email protected]
Reply to:[email protected]
Cc:[email protected]
Subject:Re: [time-nuts] GPS Outage

Hal,

Hal Murray wrote:
> 
> [email protected] said:
>>> Strange that at least 3 independant firmware trees/development teams should
>>> chose the same magic wk860.
> 
>> I don't find it strange. If the next firmware version is based on the
>> previous version and none of the developers has stumbled across this
>> potential problem earlier ... 
> 
> That sounds like poor software engineering.  Or poor engineering management.
> 
> The wk860 is supposed to represent the build time of the software ...

Do you *know* this, or are you just *assuming* this? ;-)

> so it will 
> work for 20 years from when it was built rather than 20 years from when the 
> 10 bit week counter last rolled over or 20 years from when the constant was 
> last updated.

There are also approaches where the proper extension of a week number
doesn't just work within a single 1024 week cycle with some hardcoded
limit, like this simple example:

if ( wn < 860 )
  wn += 1024;

There may always be pieces of code which generate a faulty result under
certain conditions, and no stumbles across this even in reviews until it
really happens.

I'm not aware of *any* project where each single line of code is checked
once again whenever a new release is rolled out.

Martin

_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.

Reply via email to