ABC News is reporting another rollover date problem that's somewhat
interesting. It occurs that the Global Positioning Satellite system encodes
its week count as 10 bits (0 to 1023 being the possible numbers), beginning on
the 5th of January, 1980.

What that means is that on August 22, 1999 (next year), the count will
overflow and will become week 0 again. Personal GPS units manufactured before
1996 and which are not manufactured by either Garmin International or Motorola
are not guaranteed to have a proper software workaround in them. If they
don't, the user's readout will instantly put the user 116 trillion miles (19
light-years) off of the surface of the Earth. If you were deep in the woods or
far out to sea, that could be somewhat disorienting (so to speak :-).

Wirt Atmar