It's too early to say with high confidence, but you had to stretch pretty far away from the question you asked (will it cause time problems with NTP, etc) to find a problem with the GPS rollover. General reports are that it went better than expected and that few critical systems were impacted. If you had asked whether anyone would be hit by the rollover, I would have said of course there were going to be systems and people hit. It may be fun to watch the PR wars that result.
I carefully avoided asking about NTP or any specific uses of the time signals. My question was would the GPS rollover cause more or fewer problems than when NIST set daylight savings time wrong in 1992. Approximately 600 people have reported problems, so far, due to the GPS rollover. NIST claimed fewer than a dozen reported problems when daylight savings time was set incorrectly in 1992. 12 < 600 Both are pretty small numbers, but as you point out people aren't very good at understanding extremely rare risks. You need to be carefull when you say XYZ will cause almost no problems, you didn't mean they specifically wouldn't have a problem with XYZ. See airplane crash, nuclear plant meltdown, etc. It is a PR problem, and technical people aren't always the best ones at explaining how a risk affects the public. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation
Sean, this is silly. If you compare the number of GPS receivers in the world and the number of WWVB receivers, there should have been hundreds of thousands to millions of complaints to have similar ratio. You forgot to compare it to a MAE-East outage, current solar activity or hurricane Bret. Last time I looked, nanog still had something to do with network engineering and little to do with automotive navigation, surveying, or any of the other GPS applications. In the timing world, which is the only thing that WWVB could impact, the reports of major problems are not showing up. jerry
participants (2)
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Jerry Scharf
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Sean Donelan