We as a human race have been terrible at anticipating how fast numbers grow. A similar story is that with databases, we used to think that 32bit primary keys were plenty big enough to store all the numbers we'll ever need. In all likelihood, people who manufactured these timers in the past thought that their equipment would never outlive the need for 10 bits.
There's a difference between not anticipating use of products changing in scale to the point that database PKs might need to be longer (which I would assume, albeit as an uneducated guess, has seen closer to exponential than linear growth in terms of maximum length required for unique IDs in databases), vs. anticipating "this timer will definitely hit a limit in 2022, unless the physics of time as we know it somehow changes before then".
Sure it's still a relatively easy mistake to either wrongly assume that all of whatever you're creating will be in landfill by 2022 if you were making it long enough ago that all devices would be dead by now for other reasons (or to unethically do that intentionally, to cause customers to repurchase products this year - seems pretty unlikely but perhaps...), or to just forget to think about it, or think about it and assume it's fine for now and can be checked later before then forgetting.
But "We as a human race have been terrible at anticipating how fast numbers grow" - we're talking about a number that's growing exactly in sync with time, and with an entirely simple way of checking when the limit will be hit, so I think it's just sloppy/lazy or expecting less longevity of use for their product, more than a flaw of humanity.
100% agreed. When it comes to any kind of incrementing counter, IMO the limit should always be multiple orders of magnitude greater than the expected lifespan of the system.
Taking OP at face value, these devices' counter has a zero point on February 1, 2003 so if we don't know what happens when they roll over they must have been designed after that point.
In the world of the 2000s even 16 bit processing is old school, so there's no good reason this couldn't have been a 16 bit counter instead. If that had been the case the rollover wouldn't be until the year 3259.
IMO this is the correct way to handle situations where you think you don't need any more, round up from your reasonable limit to the next major "bit border". If you have a 10 bit counter, round up to 16. If you need 16, then make it 24 or 32. The limit shouldn't just be "above where we expect it to reach in its lifespan" but "if you hit this the device belongs in a museum".
Designing a device with a 10 bit week counter in the 2000s is bad design, prioritizing either laziness or cost over quality.
> People in the 1970’s didn’t anticipate that we’d get to the time Sep 2022.
No, they just didn't anticipate that a GPS receiver would not know which decade it is (knowing the decade is enough to disambiguate a 10-bit week number) even though it knew the correct date a few moments ago. That is, they didn't anticipate counter rollover bugs caused by hard-coding of the starting point of the counter, instead of calculating it based on the last seen date.
last seen date means a single spoofed signal yields future dates forever.
Give some credit to the engineers who built these receivers and their firmware. They're extremely complex and nuanced. You can be absolutely sure that they carefully considered their options here and chose a tradeoff that made sense given the constrains they were designing for. I'm confident they anticipated them, but they just concluded that the fixes beyond using the mfgr date as a base point were worse than the disease.
It's easy to criticize from the future when we know what happened, e.g. e.g. that there was an almost 20 year delay in deployment of the modernized GPS signals and many people kept using these devices far longer than anticipated.
