Bizarre Droid Auto-Focus Bug Revealed

itwbennett writes "Pity the poor engineer who had to find this one. One of the more interesting of the handful of bugs that have appeared since the launch of Verizon's Droid smartphone has to do with the on-board camera's auto-focus. Apparently it just didn't work. And then suddenly it did. Naturally, this off-again, on-again made the theories fly. But the real reason for the bug was revealed in a comment on an Engadget post by someone claiming to be Google engineer Dan Morrill: 'There's a rounding-error bug in the camera driver's autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle,' said Morrill. 'That is, it'll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again. The 17th is the start of a new 'works correctly' cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.'"

Comments

When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[eldavojohn]

It's all over the comments on the engadget page but since 2^31 milliseconds is about 24.5 days, it's highly probably we're dealing with a very classic not so funny sign extension bug here. So if I may presume the real problem, it's that autofocusing depends on catching timestamps from the system to know how long it's been since the last sampling in order to adjust the lens and check for accuracy. It's casting this to a signed 32 bit variable which means that during the 24.5 days it is miscast to a negative number, thus breaking the algorithm when it measures time deltas and causing it to mis focus before snapping the picture.

The patch is simple, make that signed int something like an unsigned long or truncate it properly. Hopefully we're not waiting long.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Whalou]

Hopefully we're not waiting long.

We're waiting unsigned long.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[rsborg]

Hopefully we're not waiting long.

We're waiting unsigned long.

As long as it's not a justin long... he's already signed.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[sootman]

I was just about to post, asking "Why does the autofocus need to know what time it is?" Thanks for the info.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Waiting long? Hopefully we're not waiting double!

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[msauve]

Probably not measuring the times per sampling, but measuring the time the focus mechanism is moving. To keep costs down, I suspect the mechanism has no feedback mechanism, so to focus you move one way for a set amount of time (guaranteed to hit a mechanical stop). Then the software might keep track of focus position by how long it's driven the lens in one direction or the other starting at that known position (oops, I moved "out" 100 ms, but overshoot, so now I'll move "in" 50 ms). Or it might be that the bug makes it so the lens never gets properly reset to it's starting position.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Jeff DeMaagd]

What I don't get is why a time stamp is needed to focus. Most cameras don't seem to need to know what time it is in order to do that.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Brian Gordon]

Sounds like something to add to the jargon file :)

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[nhytefall]

WRONG FOCUS...

Sounds like you are on the wrong end of the 24.5 day cycle :)

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[BitZtream]

Seems like having a system timer trigger the auto focus update event would be a far better method of dealing with it rather than polling to check if its time to update again in some sort of loop.

Android DOES have timers usable by drivers doesn't it? Requiring drivers to poll would be very shitty indeed, especially on devices with lower CPU power..

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[BitZtream]

Most cameras do, they just don't use a RTC value to do so.

You don't want it continually focusing, you want it to focus then wait a bit otherwise it'll bounce all over the place. You check the distance, wait a moment, and check again, is it close to the same? If so use that as your focal length, other wise you'll probably end up never in focus cause you'll be using all the various raw values given to you by the sensor. This is likely input averaging to get a smooth value and throw out bad samples.

Take a look at the raw input values provided by most game controllers, try to hold an analog stick in one spot and not get jitter in the raw values, unless the device itself is averaging you won't got a solid result. Plug a xbox controller into your PC and use the Windows control panel (if you're using windows, never plugged a joystick into a unix box myself) to see how jumpy it is.

A sensor measuring the environment outside, in someones hand is going to bounce around like a mad man, so it has to be smoothed out somehow.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[AaronW]

When I first read about this that was the first thing that came into my mind as well. Elsewhere I found another post where a permanent fix should be available on December 11th, which is the day that the bug will re-appear.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Zero__Kelvin]

Oh, yeah! Well we've been waiting an unsigned long long time!

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

It is still very shortsighted to try to truncate a 4-byte into 2-byte before doing computation without knowing what you are doing. Heck, in most cases, those 2 extra bytes will NOT result in any reduction of performance of the device and it would be fool-proof. But oh well, optimize memory usage, don't test and then OOPS!

There are people doing more stupid things anyway, like,

    void *dst_ptr = (void*)(int)(src_ptr);

or,

    if( "test" == "" )

etc. etc. etc..

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course he's signed, we can only unsign him then.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish I had mod points, this entire thread is one of the funniest ever on /.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

The support for the camera in the Droid was developed by Motorolla, not Google.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[osu-neko]

Yeah... only "clever" programming causes bugs. /eyeroll

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[noidentity]

it's highly probably we're dealing with a very classic not so funny sign extension bug here [...] It's casting this to a signed 32 bit variable which means that during the 24.5 days it is miscast to a negative number

This involves truncation, not sign-extension, actually. Sign-extension occurs when widening a value, not narrowing it. A value outside the range representable by a two's complement 32-bit integer is being cast to one, and apparently this platform simply truncates to 32 bits and treats the highest bit as having the value -2^31, rather than 2^31 as it had in the input value. This isn't the only way to handle such a situation; common alternatives are raising an exception or saturating (i.e. anything >= 2^31 converts to 2^31-1, and anything less than -2^31 converts to -2^31).

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[DeadCatX2]

The engadget poster mentions a rounding bug, not a sign-extension bug. (and for it to be a sign-extension bug, they would need to be extending from 32-bit timestamps to 64-bit timestamps).

That doesn't mean it's not the 2^31 ms ~= 24.5 days. It could be that the platform "rounds toward zero", and the developers anticipated that to mean "round down" in the context of numbers that are always positive...and when the numbers become negative, it rounds up instead, and screws them.

The best theory I've heard so far was that a timestamp is being used to figure out where to move the lens. Other than that, perhaps it's being used in some GUID-like fashion and the rounding causes a violation of the uniqueness requirement?

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[pedantic bore]

Well, if it's written in Java like the rest of Android, it could be a bit more work. T'aint no "unsigned" in Java.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Mike Buddha]

Whenever I write something I think it particularly clever, I comment it out and write something simpler. The clever stuff I find is nearly impossible to figure out next year when you have to go back and add a feature or change something. It doesn't help that I usually think, "Oh that's so clever, there's no way I would forget how that works. It's so elegant." and don't bother to comment the hell out of it.

Simple == good

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[cyphercell]

You don't need a period after a quoted sentence that is properly terminated. Consecutive dots, are consecutive dots after all.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Abstrackt]

Sounds like you are on the wrong end of the 24.5 day cycle :)

That's what my wife keeps telling me. :(

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[sega01]

That was awesome. You need more than 5 points for that comment :-).

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[microbee]

Hopefully we're not waiting long.

You meant 'signed long'.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Yetihehe]

For a programmer unbalanced sentence termination characters are just bad.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Yvan256]

Cue the lawyers from Motorola, that new company is asking for trouble!

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Fael]

Under most circumstances, you would be correct. However, there are certain situations under which it is grammatically correct to omit the final mark of punctuation: when a speaking character is defenestrated mid-dialogue; when the narrator has just discovered himself to be his own grandpa; and (as is clearly the case in the grandparent post) when quoting the first line of a limerick:

Wish I had mod points, this entire thread is one of the funniest ever on /.
Second quite possibly only to last week's delightful essay on the breakdancing robot
Of course it would be
somewhat remiss of me
Not to mention that I find most everything hilarious because I just don't get out a whole lot.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Our jokes aren't like your jokes

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

What a timely fortune:

      C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success -- Dennis M. Ritchie

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[demonbug]

Plug a xbox controller into your PC and use the Windows control panel (if you're using windows, never plugged a joystick into a unix box myself) to see how jumpy it is.

Off topic, but I once played Falcon 3.0 under Solaris. The Air Force's Red Force (Red Flag?) software group was playing around with it when I was visiting once (I want to say around '93 or so).

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[shut_up_man]

Obligatory quote:

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the program, so if you write the program as cleverly as you can, by definition, you won't be clever enough to debug it. "

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, but what if it's someone *else* who has to go back and change your clever algorithm next year? Surely after he figures it out he'll be pleasantly impressed and grateful for the challenge you so kindly provided.

This is why I don't comment my code.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[slicerwizard]

This is so typical for Motorola - back in the day when we had to interface their r750+ handsets to Baker consoles, we soon discovered that the handsets would lock up if they were powered/running for 24.5 days straight, thus making them unsuitable as interface devices.

So we substituted i305 handsets - whose out of control audio AGC made them unsuitable as interface devices.

So we got to support the customer by showing up at 2am every two weeks to manually power cycle their sixteen r750+ handsets. Thanks for nothing Moto.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Jarik C-Bol]

notwithstanding the actual cause and what not, i find this to be truly hilarious. seems that coding some sort of timer into it, that did not use the system time stamp, would have been easier to begin with. But hey, I'm not a camera phone software developer.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Jarik C-Bol]

Yes, but on the other hand, piss off you pedantic bastard.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[StikyPad]

Word.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[TheGreenNuke]

But Justin Long is Apple signed. Once you're apple signed you're not allowed to work on any non apple hardware. Therefore I can assure you we will not be waiting a justin long.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[socceroos]

Yeah, I'm hoping I can adapt this patch to my wife's integers too.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[fatcow]

This always bothered me... what does this mean and why is it funny? "Word."

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Zero__Kelvin]

The only problem with the Slashdot mod system is that you can't hunt the moron down who either can't read, or doesn't pay attention, and beat them to death the way Darwin intended ;-)

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Good job being a grammar Nazi. The final dot of your last sentence doesn't belong. There should be just one period, inside the quotes (regardless of which standard of English you were trying to be pedantic in).

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[david duncan scott]

Well, it's a double entendre--"word" is a vernacular term for "truth," or "that's right" ("The Sun rises in the East" "Word!") as well as being a (maybe obsolete? I'm old and stuff) term for a 16-bit storage unit, often a "short int," so hilarity ensues (for very small values of hilarity.)

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Word in computers:

is a term for the natural unit of data used by a particular computer design

Word in African-American slang is:

1) Well said
2) Said in agreement
And a lot of use cases, such as:
e.g.
Party A: "I just got a new car!"
Party B: "Word?" (Really?)
Party A: "Word!" (You betcha!)

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Renegrade]

Ah if it's a continual focus/ai-servo it will definitely need a delta-time to figure out the rate that the subject is moving towards or away from the film plane.

I'm not sure that a cameraphone would have ai-servo mode though....

Other processes in the focusing system would require delays or such as well, and they might not have a convenient sleep() type call available to them for a variety of reasons (the execution context may prevent calling it, it may not be available, performance of said call might be poor, etcetc)..

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[eihab]

Yeah, I'm hoping I can adapt this patch to my wife's integers too.

You don't need to, there's a patch available today!

I believe another patch that fixes the same problem is implemented in wife-menopause-1.0.55.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn rounding errors!

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

huge failure ... VI

HEATHEN!

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

The huge failure that both the interface designers of VI and of Clippy make, is that efficiency and easy usage would be mutually exclusive opposites.

This is actually a very interesting point, on the other hand you do realize that no one here is talking about UI design right?

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

So its just not MS who makes mistakes - Microsoft Zunes Committing Mass Suicide

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you want to be pedantic, yet actually do the math, based upon the actual nature of the bug...

It works out to a period of 49 days 17 hours 2 minutes 47 seconds and 296 milliseconds.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[wiredlogic]

More generically. A 'word' is the traditional term for the native size of a microprocessor's registers. In the case of Intel Architecture this is somewhat complicated by the history of expansions in register size and the desire to maintain backward compatibility with older terminology. Hence, on IA, a word is 16-bits (the machine doesn't know about signs for integers). IA32 brought the double word and then IA64 begat the quadword. On other architectures a word can be 32 or 64 bits or really whatever the designers wanted it to be.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[YourExperiment]

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

- Samuel Johnson, 1709 – 1784

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Deosyne]

It is the ultimate in language efficiency. What began as, "My word is my bond," in classic English vernacular became reduced to, "Word is bond," within classic hip-hop vernacular. Further familiarity allowed the final consolidation to the now-common place expression, "Word."

On a side note, a fledgling attempt to reduce this to an extreme level was attempted in the early 2000s, but was soon abandoned as a fruitless endeavor when it was realized that nothing having positive connotation could ever be called, "W."

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[sous_rature]

Yeah, I'm hoping I can adapt this patch to my wife's integers too.

You don't need to, there's a patch available today!

I believe another patch that fixes the same problem is implemented in wife-menopause-1.0.55.

I know you (and the others making menstruation jokes) are just trying to be funny, and you probably are to a lot of people reading this thread, but writing about women as computers with buggy code isn't exactly the best way to show them your respect. I wonder how many people connect comments like this to the threads that pop up from time to time wondering why there are so few women programmers and computer scientists?

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Remarkably, both fix the female forkbomb bug as well. I wonder if the two are related?

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[ilitirit]

It actually comes from the Latin "dictum meum pactum" meaning "My word is my bond" which is the motto of the London Stock Exchange. It was shortened to "word is bond", which means "I speak the truth". It was also used as a question ("Word is bond?"), usually indicating a feeling of disbelief. Naturally, the phrase got shortened even further to just "word". So a typical conversation went something like:
"I made $12k last week"
"Woah...word?"
"Word"
These days saying "word" in response to a statement means "What you said is true", which implies "I agree".

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[david duncan scott]

So you're saying that American street slang is derived from the London Exchange? Pardon my skepticism, but I'd like to see that documented.

Surely phrases like, "Never a truer word was spoken" would be more familiar to Americans.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[david duncan scott]

Well, yes, and then, no.

Back in the Olden Days, when machines with oddly-large registers were pretty common (60 bits, for instance, was the word size I recall for a number of CDC machines,) then yes, word size was as you describe.

However, somewhere along the line, probably in the PDP-11 era, the 16-bit word became pretty widely accepted, so that back when I was programming in eight bits, nobody ever referred to an eight-bit value as a word, but rather simply as a "byte" or "eight bits." Double-precision arithmetic routines alowed one to work with words on a 6502, for instance.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[StikyPad]

A double entendre? Nice one!

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Tim C]

Kernighan's Law; I've seen it in action myself. One particularly good display was when a contractor working with me on a project wrote a very clever stored procedure to (essentially) calculate the contents of a shopping basket based on the audit records of adding things to it and removing them from it.

No end of bugs, and every time he tried to fix one, he introduced one or two more. Eventually his contract came to an end, and he left. One of the first things I did was to rewrite the code to use a DB table to store the stuff in. Not as clever or as elegant, but it did have the advantage of actually working being simple to understand.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Thuktun]

2^31 milliseconds is about 24.5 days

This is exactly what I thought on reading the headline. It's closer to 24.85 days.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[eihab]

I know you (and the others making menstruation jokes) are just trying to be funny, and you probably are to a lot of people reading this thread, but writing about women as computers with buggy code isn't exactly the best way to show them your respect. I wonder how many people connect comments like this to the threads that pop up from time to time wondering why there are so few women programmers and computer scientists?

No one here meant this in a derogatory way, it was an innocent (sexually-laced) joke.

The posters I replied to are (apparently) married and so am I. I'm pretty sure my wife would have a few jokes of her own about me or men in general, although she probably wouldn't express it in computer terms.

There's no need to turn this into a gender war or a political crusade, it was a funny innocent joke, let's leave it at that :)

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[sous_rature]

No one here meant this in a derogatory way,...There's no need to turn this into a gender war or a political crusade, it was a funny innocent joke, let's leave it at that :)

I certainly believe it was an innocent joke without derogatory intent, and I absolutely don't want to make this a "gender war". My point was that everyone makes innocent jokes (us, our significant others, random /.ers), but it can be valuable to point out that even innocent jokes can be unsavory to some. More to the point, they tend to be unsavory mainly to people who aren't in on the discussion, often precisely the same people most of us would want to be a part of what we do because they might have something new to contribute.

Thanks for taking my earlier comment in the spirit of a helpful observation. It's easier to be mindful of what we're doing when people on all sides are being relatively sane.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[BikeHelmet]

It's casting this to a signed 32 bit variable which means that during the 24.5 days it is miscast to a negative number, thus breaking the algorithm when it measures time deltas and causing it to mis focus before snapping the picture.

How do programmers make these mistakes? Hell, I wrote an FPS counter for a game that was aware of signed ints suddenly going negative, and accounted for it.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[ilitirit]

http://www.rapdict.org/Word_is_bond

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[david duncan scott]

Cool. Ask for documentation, and receive documentation. Thank you.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Starteck81]

If you worry about telling a joke will offend someone, then you will never tell a joke because someone will always be offended. At best you can only aim to have your jokes make more people laugh than cringe.

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Starteck81]

Yeah, I'm hoping I can adapt this patch to my wife's integers too.

You married a Fembot too?

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Hurricane78]

And that is the problem. :)

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Excel

Does it use an Intel CPU?

[Jailbrekr]

Just curious.....

Re:Does it use an Intel CPU?

[alvinrod]

No, it uses an ARM Cortex A8 according to Wikipedia. As another poster has pointed out, this probably is due to a software bug.

Re:Does it use an Intel CPU?

[Sebastopol]

wow, almost 15 years later and they still get sh*t for fdiv. of course, this joke is so stale we'll probably hear it on jay leno tonight.

Re:Does it use an Intel CPU?

[Bakkster]

Read and be enlightened.

Of course my favorite joke about the matter:
Q: "How did Intel decide to name the 586 processor?"
A: "They took 486, added 100, and came up with 585.999999999999824"

Re:Does it use an Intel CPU?

[Mike Buddha]

Is that really a joke?

Re:Does it use an Intel CPU?

[Disgruntled Goats]

Aren't jokes supposed to be funny?

Re:Does it use an Intel CPU?

[Pictish Prince]

Best joke I heard in this vein referenced the "morning after" contraceptive pill RU486. Have you heard about the new contraceptive, RUPentium? It stops the embryonic cells from dividing properly.

Auto-Focus

[kellyb9]

... Droid doesn't

Re:Auto-Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

I salute you.

Re:Auto-Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm. Actually, Droid DOES. Just not all the time... I suppose that's not as funny, though, so may I recommend:

"Sporadically bugs: iDoesn't. Droid does."

Re:Auto-Focus

[josteos]

... Droid might

Re:Auto-Focus

[m.ducharme]

Failed, you have; to be funny.

Re:Auto-Focus

[hippo_of_knowledge]

I would have expected a Schrodinger's camera joke by now. Step up your game, Slashdot.

Re:Auto-Focus

[hippo_of_knowledge]

And I've been beaten like a rented mule. Bravo.

Re:Auto-Focus

[Mike Buddha]

"Sporadically bugs: iDoesn't. Droid does."

Yeah, tell that to the iPhone browser next time it shits out without warning. iDoes, too.

Re:Auto-Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry. Focusing based on calendar - Droid Does, Bitches.

Re:Auto-Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

its that Droid of the month...

In case you were worried....

[EdIII]

Spring Break, the biggest part of it, occurs within a working cycle.

Re:In case you were worried....

[Anonymous Coward]

But does is coincide with the monthly cycle of the subjects likely to be photographed by these Droids? ;-)

Re:In case you were worried....

[spruce]

Right, like the camera is going to be the most common cause of out of focus pictures during spring break.

"OMG EVERYBODY LISTEN - DO 6 JELLO SHOTS WITH ME, THEN SAY CHEEZ. *burp*, *snap* AWW, THE CAMERA DIN'T WORK GUD"

A timestamping overflow error

[idontgno]

hoses up the camera autofocus?

Is this Slashdot, or The Daily WTF?

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[clone53421]

Same reaction I had.

Why on earth does the autofocus routine care what the date is?

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[Yamata no Orochi]

Why on earth does the autofocus routine care what the date is?

Herf derp, at least read the summary.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[Anonymous Coward]

(as another poster has pointed out) it will need to know how long it has been since the algorithm was run. Any periodic process will indirectly need some means of telling time.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it doesn't autofocus constantly. The routine is fired every few milliseconds. If the timestamp since the last autofocus has been truncated, then IsItTimeToAutoFocusYet() isn't going to be triggered on time.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations. You are among the few (but growing in number) who not only can't RTFA, but lack the attention span or comprehension skills to read the summary itself.

MTV has a network for you.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[clone53421]

I did. It explained that the autofocus routine needed the timestamp. It failed to explain why it should need it.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[clone53421]

And yes, I saw that this question was answered in the first post.

Makes sense. But it didn't, until that guy explained it.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[ground.zero.612]

Congratulations. You are among the few (but growing in number) who not only can't RTFA, but lack the attention span or comprehension skills to read the summary itself.

MTV has a network for you.

Is that network called MTV?

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[mea37]

Depends what method of autofocus is used. I haven't been able to find any reference to which type of AF it uses, and I guess that isn't surprising as most people using a phone as a camera probably don't know or care much about the differences between AF methods...

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah?

You feckin' asswhit!

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[clone53421]

The first guy to comment made hit upon the most likely explanation, probably... the autofocus re-adjusts itself every n milliseconds, and if the timestamp is interpreted as a signed value then 50% of the time it will yield incorrect results when it calculates the interval between autofocuses.

Didn't occur to me until I read his comment, but it makes sense now.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[Anonymous Coward]

Time delta since last auto-focus.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[Anonymous Coward]

What else is an autofocus going to need a routine for if not determining WHEN to autofocus again? Why else would it be measured in milliseconds? Egads.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[clone53421]

Hell, it's an embedded device, for all I know it could run the autofocus routine continuously.

"WHEN to autofocus again" could be as simple as "as soon as I've finished doing the next X other things that I do". A continuous loop, with portions dedicated to input, output, processing, etc. – and yes, autofocus.

Re:A timestamping overflow error

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's called TMV, he's dyslexic. He also meant to say FART.

Alleged...

[Anonymous Coward]

by someone claiming to be Google engineer Dan Morrill

Yeah, it could also be one of those lame Dan Morrill impersonators who solve perplexing engineering/programming issues, then post the solution under his name. MAN that's annoying..

Re:Alleged...

[NervousWreck]

Or Dan Morrill the local druggist.

Re:Alleged...

[Artraze]

You kid, and I can appreciate the humor, but it was stated that way as a matter of journalistic integrity. Rather than claiming the the true Dan Morrill posted this (which they have no proof of) they stated what they did know: the person that posted this says he's Dan Morrill. That way if it turns out that Dan Morrill didn't actually post it, they've not put word into someone's mouth, as it were, and only need to release an update along the lines of "Bug discoverer really someone else".

It's sad that we've become so used to the modern media's 'report what you think happened and maybe correct yourself later if you're called on it' style that phrases like this are actually worthy of comment, humorous or otherwise....

Re:Alleged...

[Ragzouken]

You have some interesting points, person, posting using Artraze's account, on a website my DNS tells me is slashdot.org.

"Not waiting long"?

[Singularity42]

I've been waiting a long long time for standardization of integer types.

Re:"Not waiting long"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah? Well, I've been waiting an unsigned long long time for standardization of integer types. Twice as long!

Re:"Not waiting long"?

[Yetihehe]

long long long time_t: too long for gcc.

Re:"Not waiting long"?

[tomhudson]

Keep waiting ... the behaviour still won't be transparent. For example, on 64-bit x86 cpus, you still can't shift left more than 31 bits at a time.

Re:"Not waiting long"?

[F.Ultra]

It's actually defined as __uint128_t in gcc

Re:"Not waiting long"?

[hpa]

Keep waiting ... the behaviour still won't be transparent. For example, on 64-bit x86 cpus, you still can't shift left more than 31 bits at a time.

Nonsense. In 64-bit mode you can shift up to 63 bits at a time.

Re:"Not waiting long"?

[tomhudson]

Oops - you're right - just tested it on my laptop. I forgot that the bug was only present on the crappy BSD box that I had to deal with earlier this year (the one with the defective bios that prevented remotely updating the libs + compiler because if it didn't work out, it meant a thousand-mile road trip, fetch and rebuild the box, and another 1000-mile road trip). Kick me in the head :-)

It would have been cheaper just to junk the thing, and I suggested it. Of course, that being the reasonable thing to do, you know it'll never happen. Oh well ...

Re:"Not waiting long"?

[Anonymous Coward]

me love ulong time

iFocus ... NOT

[OzPeter]

This is definitely NOT the Droid you are looking for

Re:iFocus ... NOT

[Zero__Kelvin]

Considering that the bug will likely be fixed later today and pushed to the customer shortly thereafter, whereas it would probably never have been discovered so quickly on the iPhone due to it's closed source nature, I accept your humble apology.

Re:iFocus ... NOT

[NervousWreck]

*hand pass* we can go about our business

Re:iFocus ... NOT

[CajunArson]

Open source had 0 to do with finding this bug... the (paid Google employees) who wrote the bug found the bug. The update won't be available until December 11th either, although the bug seems to be on hiatus on my own Droid phone. The barcode scanner apps work about 10x better with functional autofocus.

Re:iFocus ... NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

... But it might be tomorrow.

Re:iFocus ... NOT

[ajs]

This is definitely NOT the Droid you are looking for

While this is a funny bug, I have to disagree.

The Droid has served me well as an iPhone upgrade for the past week and a half, and the fact that its camera was for shit for most of that was barely an inconvenience. Navigation, Google Voice, file transfers and a host of other features means that this most certainly was the Droid I was looking for.

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Just buy two with opposing date stamps.

Restraining Bolt

[Anonymous Coward]

They just need to take the restraining bolt off! Luke Skywalker had the same problem!

Just one more thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that iDon't

Time-releated bugs

[Iphtashu Fitz]

15+ years ago I had to debug some code in a report printing app for OS/2 (remember that OS?). The bug would cause the app to crash when a report was printed out. But the bug would only happen on certain days. Certain days in September. Only on Wednesdays in September. Only when it was a Wednesday in September after the 9th.

The bug? The original programmer had tried to optimize memory usage as much as possible and was off by a count of one. With "September" being the longest month spelled out, "Wednesday" the longest day spelled out, and a 2 digit date, the header that the program put together to send to the printer would overflow its buffer by one character.

Re:Time-releated bugs

[FishOuttaWater]

Simply classic. ...but think of all the bytes he saved!

Re:Time-releated bugs

[qoncept]

I got a "bug report" that our Oracle Forms app would give an undefined error message after you "type in a first name, push tab twice, and click save 17 times." I didn't debug it, but I did offer a workaround.

I also had a bug report for when you tried to add a prerequisite that didn't exist to a training task (the system tracked flight Air Force crew training and experience), an error would pop up that said "All this time and it still doesn't work..." In that case, apparently debugging was as far as anyone ever got.

Re:Time-releated bugs

[amicusNYCL]

I also had a bug report for when you tried to add a prerequisite that didn't exist to a training task (the system tracked flight Air Force crew training and experience), an error would pop up that said "All this time and it still doesn't work..." In that case, apparently debugging was as far as anyone ever got.

Please tell me these aren't the same developers who wrote the Air Force's current LMS. If so, that would explain a lot. I actually submitted a bug report to the Air Force once about their LMS complete with the section of code (Javascript) that was incorrect, an explanation about why it was incorrect, the corrected code, and an explanation about why the changes fixed the issue. They responded and said that they were "reluctant" to agree with me, and never made the changes.

Oh yeah, the "bug fix" was the difference between this:

score = parseInt(score);

and this:

score = parseInt(score, 10);
if (isNaN(score)) score = 0;

Re:Time-releated bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, please see [[phase of the sun]]

Re:Time-releated bugs

[Toonol]

I got a "bug report" that our Oracle Forms app would give an undefined error message after you "type in a first name, push tab twice, and click save 17 times." I didn't debug it, but I did offer a workaround.

Was the workaround something like "Don't click save more than 16 times?"

Re:Time-releated bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many of these bugs caused by translations. My favorite is the title bar of non-responding programs in the Dutch Windows XP: it drops the last letters from "Dit programma reageerd niet." I guess they never tested a locked up program.

Re:Time-releated bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably. Companies hire people to do black-box testing, and then the developers just close the bugs with "nobody would ever do that".

Re:Time-releated bugs

[Boldoran]

That's what I call nice debugging.

Re:Time-releated bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

I was unable to use my bank account through my browser because of a small syntax error in a javascript snippet on their "you need to upgrade your browser plugin" page. I sent a patch to their customer support but after not hearing back from them I eventually switched to another bank.

Re:Time-releated bugs

[Rich0]

Yup, and it works out great until they realize that the same stack leak causing the crash on the 17th save also causes data to get silently lost in some other scenario.

When writing large programs it is critical to validate your inputs and carefully check stuff like this. Just because the way the error was caught was unlikely to come up in real life, doesn't mean that the same bug won't blow up in some other way. The only exception is if you actually ANALYZE the problem and determine that it isn't a big risk. But if you've done that then you've done half the work needed to fix it (unless you're in a shop that writes 10 pounds of documentation for one line of code change).

Re:Time-releated bugs

[qoncept]

I don't know what LMS is, or where it's developed, but no. The system I worked on is called ARMS, Aviation Resource Management System. From what I've seen, all DOD software is awful and having worked on it is embarassing whenever I've run in to someone that's ever used it.

It really puts a lot of things in perspective, though. None of the things that make ARMS (or any other DOD software as far as I can tell) is in the control of the developers. The most blatantly obvious problem, just at first glance, is the Playskool appearance that doesn't look like any other software you've ever used. Many of the bugs in our system were due to the fact that we were using Oracle Forms and Reports 2.1, so hopelessly obsolete and out of support that we had to set the dates back on our computers to install the tools and spent more time trying to make the IDE work properly than writing and debugging code (literally). You'd have to make sure every file was opened in a particular order or nothing would compile correctly, or close the IDE and start over.

Bureaucracy got in the way more than usual, especially on ARMS. Project managers just managers. The "customer" in our case was a group of functionals, people that had been using the software for years and had a one day crash course in our development process, and in ARMS case, also spent most of their time supporting end users. Because they'd been using the system so long, every one of them (and the steering committee) outranked all of the developers, so there was never any negotiation. Ridiculous dates for milestones get set, any lost time is made up in development, yadda yadda. Not totally different than everywhere else, but in my experience, much worse. ARMS was always so far behind schedule that project managers kept getting replaced, and by the time we'd convince the new guy the entire system absolutely HAD to be redesigned, they'd be fired and replaced with a new guy who was certain we could work through it. A neverending (not true -- I'm out now!) cycle of pain.

In short, though, practically no decisions aren't made by developers. Anything you didn't like about the system was on someone else, with almost no regard for the opinions of the technical team members. That was a lot to type for something no one will ever read.

Re:Time-releated bugs

[amicusNYCL]

An LMS is a learning management system, that's where they keep their online training courses. The company I work for makes an LMS and also training courses, we've done a lot of courses for the Air Force. I'm not sure if we've done a course for ARMS, but we've got courses for the GATES system, CHARM, ATOC, and some other courses for the Air Mobility Command or Air Mobility Warfare Center (now the Expeditionary Center). I even got to hang out at McGuire AFB once and watch the Blue Angels practice. Small world..

It looks like this is our list of courses developed for the EC:

Air Freight
AMOC
AOC Fundamentals
APEX
APEX Refresher
ARM
ATOC
Cargo Prep
Customer Service
Data Records
FEMO
GATES
Load Planning
MHE
OPREP
PAX
Stage Manager

This is an example of the ARM course, that looks more like soft skills training than a software sim, so it's probably not related.

IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[wiredog]

that caused Windows 95 to require a reboot in about the same timeframe.

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[NoYob]

Huh. I ended up giving my Win 95 box a woman's name and just chalked it up to "that time of the month."

I didn't realize there was a real software reason for it.

I wonder if there's a way to do the same for my wife - you know, fix a software bug.

Gotta run she's home!

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[3waygeek]

Just get her on Seasonale or an equivalent.

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[kalirion]

Same timeframe? You could actually keep a Win 95 system up and running for 24 days?

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[Mr.Mustard]

It was actually 49.7 days.

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly recommend Mirena, but then what do I know I've never even left my basement.

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[Zero__Kelvin]

I don't believe that one was ever seen in the wild, since Windows 95 also had several bugs that caused it to require a reboot approximately every 24.5 minutes ;-)

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, 48. They used unsigned integers :D

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[Penguinshit]

Try Annuale!

Re:IIRC, this is the same sort of bug

[Slashcrap]

Actually Oracle 10.2.0.1 on certain versions of 32bit Linux crashed after 49.7 days, usually badly enough that it was easier to hard reboot the system than attempt to regain control as the load average went into the hundreds.

Oracle never expected the value returned by the times() system call to be negative. Unfortunately it's a rapidly increasing signed number and some distros like to start it off high just for the hell of it. It depended on what Hz was set to as well. So on Suse 10 you got 49.7 days. RHEL got you 247.

If this issue sounds familiar to you, you need to patch to 10.2.0.4. And probably find a more suitable job, because this one has been known about for years.

Wow

[QuoteMstr]

Considering that a lunar cycle is 29.5 days long, we've actually found a bug that depends (approximately) on the phase of the moon!

Re:Wow

[wanerious]

That's because causation generates correlation. :)

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying that 24.5 approximates a lunar cycle of 29.5 days is much like saying that you can approximate the value of pi by just using the number 3. If you ask me, it'd take an act of congress to get something like that accepted...

Re:Wow

[el3mentary]

Dude, don't even joke

Re:Wow

[Wonko the Sane]

He's not joking.

A permanent fix

[MisterZimbu]

"'There's a rounding-error bug in the camera driver's autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle,' said Morrill."

Cool! The device will later be fixed to properly behave poorly only every 24.45 days!

Rounding error?

[geekoid]

In excusable. The industry is too mature for that type of shit.

Re:Rounding error?

[Anonymous Coward]

In excusable. The industry is too mature for that type of shit.

Spelling error? Inexcusable. The English language is too mature for that type of shit.

(In case you missed it, your argument has just as much validity in the real world due to differences in people.)

Re:Rounding error?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you know the unwritten rule of Slashdot? It's only cool if you say this kind of thing about Microsoft.

Re:Rounding error?

[Anonymous Coward]

Inside of what? Or do you mean inexcusable as one word?

Typos happen, bugs happen.

Life's to short to waste on you.

Re:Rounding error?

[geekoid]

Yeahn yeah, mod me as troll, but I am right.

Too many times have I seen these kinds of stupid inexcusable error. It drives me up a wall. The 'it's going to have ' bugs mentality is out of hand, and inexcusably stuff is allow to get through testing.

If we could get half the pride and professionalism then engineers are supposed to have into the software industry, it would be a good thing.

Re:Rounding error?

[geekoid]

Except this isn't a profession post, or a paper, or a book.

I am talking about a professionally(?) released, distributed and sold device. There is a world of difference, coward.

Re:Rounding error?

[geekoid]

Yet you did.

Re:Rounding error?

[DavidRawling]

Perhaps you can enlighten us on how to reduce human fallibility? How do you ensure (without using people) that every datum is of the correct type, used in the correct way, at the correct times, using the correct interfaces, and doesn't have bugs caused by a library written by someone else in a different language?

Here's some simple VB.Net code dealing with XML documents. If you can find the bug in less than a minute without Google/Bing/etc, you get to comment on code quality. Otherwise STFU and let the professionals, who really do have pride in their work, do their jobs.

pSmileyList = New SortedDictionary(Of String, String)

Dim Smileys As XDocument = XDocument.Load(Constants.SmileyImages + "index.xml")
Dim Code As String = ""
Dim Image As String = ""

For Each S As XElement In Smileys...
Code = S.@code
Image = S.@image
pSmileyList.Add(Code, Image)
Next

Re:Rounding error?

[arethuza]

Does being in VB.Net count as a bug? I rather like C#, but looking at VB.Net makes me deeply unhappy. :-)

New Moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am so sick of all this Twilight crap...

Re:New Moon?

[QuoteMstr]

Huh? Joking that a bug depends on the phase of the moon is old as time itself.

Re:New Moon?

[AndersOSU]

what, the autofocus doesn't crash, instead it sparkles?

Re:New Moon?

[Ksevio]

So since January 1st, 1970?

Re:New Moon?

[QuoteMstr]

Of course. That's when the world was created, fully-formed. How do you know the world existed before Jan 1 1970? :-)

Re:New Moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes; prior to the invention of C, programming was sufficiently arduous as to ensure that programmers made sure their implementations were flawless before typing them in.

Re:New Moon?

[shambalagoon]

Laugh while you can! When the robots develop religion, you'll find that they're creationists thanks to the Unix Epoch!

Verizon's Droid?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was Motorola's Droid, but I guess because Verizon bundles it with contracts, it's "theirs"?

Re:Verizon's Droid?

[Scyber]

IIRC, Verizon is the one licensing the name Droid. In other countries where the phone is going to be sold it is known as the Motorola Milestone. So while technically the phone is Motorola's, when referring to it with the Droid name, it is specifically referencing the Verizon version of the phone.

Re:Verizon's Droid?

[Night64]

And, in countries that doesn't acknowledge the existence of software patents, you will have multitouch in Motorola Milestone. Yes, the Droid have hardware to do multitouch. Hack to enable it in 5, 4, 3...

in Action...

[TrippTDF]

I can verify this- I got a Droid on launch day, and one thing that drove me nuts was how long it took a barcode scanning app to focus and accquire the barcode... i just tried it again after writing off that ability, and sure enough, the time to focus is much, much shorter now.

Will they remember at review/raise time?

[dltaylor]

"Tasks accomplished: fixed timestamp rounding error in autofocus subroutine"

vs.

"Tasks accomplished: designed/implemented autofocus subroutine"

Be symphatetic...

[Anonymous Coward]

... come on... phones are like woman... they just have those bad days!

iPhone 3G/3GS GPS bug

[acidblood]

Since we're talking about phone bugs, here's one I had to fight with for a while...

Lots of users are having problems with the GPS functionality on the iPhone 3G/3GS (see e.g. here). No apparent pattern there, but in Brazil, lots of users from one specific carrier were having GPS problems, and the beginning of these problems coincided with the start of Daylight Savings Time in Brazil. My iPhone, as well as my girlfriend's, are with this carrier and were experiencing the problem. Those with unlocked phones report trying other carriers' SIM cards and had GPS working again, but once you popped back the problematic carrier's SIM card, the GPS was dead again.

This nearly drove me nuts as I paid an obscene amount of money for the TomTom app and couldn't get it to work, so keeping up with the engineer spirit, I tried to debug the problem myself. I observed an interesting fact: there's a Clock app on the iPhone with a World Clock pane, and if I added a clock from any time zone, including my own, it was off by one hour. However the iPhone's main clock, shown on the top of the screen, was showing the right time. Eventually I discovered that if I restored my phone as a brand new phone (not restoring from backup) the GPS would work fine and world clocks would be fine... until you reboot the phone. After rebooting, the GPS is gone again and the world clock is off by one hour again.

Now you might ask what the time has to do with GPS. A lot, it turns out. GPS works by triangulating your distance from the satellites in the GPS constellation, which depends on knowing the exact position of the satellites. Since their orbits are corrected every so often, you must rely on so-called ephemeris data from each satellite, which is the required information to compute fairly exact orbits, and is updated fairly often (Wikipedia says GPS receivers should update ephemeris data every 4 hours). Originally this data is broadcast by the satellites themselves in their navigation message, at an awfully slow rate of 50 bits/s. You read it right, bits, not bytes or KB or MB, that's bits. As the navigation message is 1500 bits long, it takes at least 30 seconds to download it, which is about the time most standalone GPS receivers take to get a fix from a cold start (i.e. with stale ephemeris data). To work around this delay, most phones with GPS use the assisted-GPS variety, which downloads ephemeris data from a faster channel such as the cellular network. My theory is that some WTF-worthy excuse for an engineer at the carrier decided that, rather than doing time zone updates the right way, by updating configuration files to point to the new time zone, he'd just rather adjust the clock forward by one hour. The GPS chipset probably works with time zone neutral clocks so it asks for (say) UTC time and gets it off by one hour, and then computes the satellite orbits as though it were one hour later than it actually is. Obviously this means the triangulation computations go horribly wrong and rather than reporting something absurd, the chipset just pretends it couldn't get a fix.

It took a lot of complaining from a lot of people (to the carrier and to the government agencies responsible for telecommunications), but the carrier finally fixed the problem. However, it was a nightmare trying to deal with clueless customer support representatives who didn't try in the least to help (and probably were thinking all along `what does this wacko think GPS has to do with DST?'), just blindly suggesting that we restore the phone, or even try to uninstall the built-in Maps app, or blaming it on Apple and saying they weren't responsible -- and never mind that unlocked phones with SIM cards from other carriers worked fine, and that the iPhone support situation is unique in Brazil as Apple outsourced support to the carriers themselves. In the end, the customer support WTFs would be worth another post of its own, at least twice the size of this one.

But

Re:iPhone 3G/3GS GPS bug

[Anonymous Coward]

GPS works by trilaturation, not triangulation... just sayin'

Re:iPhone 3G/3GS GPS bug

[pz]

I had a similarly frustrating experience with T-Mobile's customer service in the Boston area. My cell phone was set to auto-upate time. It would always select the correct time and hour, but the wrong timezone, specifically, Pacific Time, instead of Eastern Time. I didn't bother trying to figure it out, since it only affected me when I returned from a flight to another time zone and powered up the phone for the first time, and that was somewhat rare.

Then, through a series of coincidences, I noticed that when I power cycled my phone at my then girlfriend's house about 10 miles away, the time zone was set correctly. After verifying this by testing at my apartment (incorrect time zone) and then at her place (correct time zone) again, I called T-Mobile customer service.

Yep, I was told to power cycle my phone. To set the auto time update option. Ad nauseum. I called many times. It was universally assumed that the fault was with my operation of the phone. The CS reps I spoke to were unable to grasp that there must be separate time servers for different parts of the Boston area, and that the one my home was served by WAS WRONG. I begged to have tickets put in, but eventually, I gave up. CS reps are idiots because the general population is a bunh of idiots, and it is often impossible to get around this fact.

But, someone, somewhere, noticed because some weeks later, the time zone in my home cell was fixed.

Re:iPhone 3G/3GS GPS bug

[TrancePhreak]

You're supposed to turn your phone off on the plane anyways. Wouldn't that count as power cycling?

Re:iPhone 3G/3GS GPS bug

[AaronLawrence]

I have not yet figured out how actual bug reports get past customer support reps and get fixed. Maybe, consumer bug reports are effectively ignored and only business accounts with strong account managers get stuff fixed.

Re:iPhone 3G/3GS GPS bug

[Anonymous Coward]

My G1 rarely established a network connection when I left home (and wifi) so I called to see what was up. "Have you tried rebooting your router?" was the only thing they could come up with. I told the schmuck that I smashed the thing and I still didn't have connectivity. Turns out a firmware update fixed that one. Thanks T-Mobile!

Re:iPhone 3G/3GS GPS bug

[pz]

You're supposed to turn your phone off on the plane anyways. Wouldn't that count as power cycling?

Yeah, I didn't want to get into all of the details of the various different circumstances when I saw the bug.

Here's the full explanation: Mostly, my phone was never power cycled, so the server mis-configuration never affected me, once I had set the timezone on my phone correctly (and to do that I had to disable automatic updating of the time). When I *did* have to power cycle the phone, *and* had the automatic updating feature enabled, then the bug became apparent. Mostly the only times I power cycled the phone when the automatic updating feature was enabled was the result of traveling to another time zone, where the time servers were configured correctly. So I saw the bug when returning home from abroad (or when doing some investigation). One time that I returned from abroad and went directly to my GF's house (yes, as a geek I had a GF ... we're married with a kid now, thankyouverymuch), and when I powered the phone back on, there was no bug! Bingo. That showed me it was localized to the part of the cell network near my home, and not, say, T-Mobile's service throughout our state.

Sorry the first time wasn't as clear; I was trying to be brief.

Re:iPhone 3G/3GS GPS bug

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

Obviously this means the triangulation computations go horribly wrong and rather than reporting something absurd, the chipset just pretends it couldn't get a fix.

Actually, the GPS is looking for a specific set of satellites that should be in view (based on the time and the orbit calculations) and can't find them where they should be. That's why it can't get a fix.

Schrodinger's Auto-Focus

[Dareth]

It is necessary to have some radioactive elements in your phone for it to focus.

PS, it may or may not also kill cats!

Re:Schrodinger's Auto-Focus

[mcgrew]

PS, it may or may not also kill cats!

Or drink beer

Re:Schrodinger's Auto-Focus

[pablodiazgutierrez]

Geeze, give it up already. It's been 80 years. The cat is dead.

Re:Schrodinger's Auto-Focus

[TheGreenNuke]

But was it curiosity that killed the cat or was it already dead?

Re:Schrodinger's Auto-Focus

[Max Littlemore]

Prove it.

Re:Schrodinger's Auto-Focus

[edigitalwholesale]

smartphone is more popular phone now as it has Multi function like TV ,JAVA ,wifi,PDA, MSN and so on! So smarphone is not cheap than the normal used phone! But you can find more cheap phone wholesale in online China wholesale store

Kudos to Google for being so open about the bug

[cryfreedomlove]

It is gratifying for Google to be so open about the fact that it is a bug, the details of the bug, and a promise to fix it. Most consumer electronics companies are much more cagey about this sort of thing. I suspect Google will win some important trust because they are treating their customers like adults.

Re:Kudos to Google for being so open about the bug

[Ironica]

It is gratifying for Google to be so open about the fact that it is a bug, the details of the bug, and a promise to fix it. Most consumer electronics companies are much more cagey about this sort of thing. I suspect Google will win some important trust because they are treating their customers like adults.

I realize the post was made by a Google engineer, but, wouldn't a bug in "the camera driver's autofocus routine" be on Motorola's end, not Google's? I'm sure they were working together on it, but aren't drivers usually written by the hardware vendor?

Re:Kudos to Google for being so open about the bug

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to say it, but most adults act like spoiled children...

This will only end badly... :-(

Re:Kudos to Google for being so open about the bug

[tool462]

It's possible that the bug is in the Android API that Motorola is using for the auto-focus routine.
Or Motorola partnered closely with Google to have them help develop the hardware interfaces as well.

Re:Kudos to Google for being so open about the bug

[Anonymous Coward]

That assumption holds only for Windows...

So...only 24 days of testing?

[the_Librarian]

Given that this bug made it out into the wild, does this mean that the Android team only did 24 days of beta testing of the product? Or that they thought they would release a patch within 24 days?

Not particularly smart or impressive, either way.

So they tested it for less than 24.5 hours ...

[VitaminB52]

... because if they had tested it for more than 24.5 hours then they would have found the bug immediately.

Re:So they tested it for less than 24.5 hours ...

[VitaminB52]

oops - days, not hours. My bad :-(

Re:So they tested it for less than 24.5 hours ...

[osu-neko]

No, they would have discovered their are focus problems. They would not necessarily know the cause. They may even implement a fix or two, and at some point, the problem went away, so they marked the bug "fixed". They could easily have been testing for 90 days or more without discovering the exact nature of the bug, with multiple false positives indicating that it had been fixed.

Re:So they tested it for less than 24.5 hours ...

[rikkitikki]

This could've lead to a somewhat funny situation as well. QA could've filed a bug saying autofocus didn't work. Then by the time the developer looked at the bug, it could've been in the working period and the developer could've marked the bug as 'WORKSFORME'. Which, when it gets back to that QA guy's plate, depending on whether it was still in the working period or not, the QA guy could've tested it and marked it as 'RESOLVED' if it was working, or re-open the bug if it still wasn't working. If it was re-opened, the whole cycle could continue to repeat.

I don't know if such a thing happened, but it would've been funny (in hindsight at least) if it had.

Re:So they tested it for less than 24.5 hours ...

[geekoid]

don't fee l bad, if we go "by the book". like Lieutenant Saavik, hours could seem like days.

Re:So they tested it for less than 24.5 hours ...

[SharpFang]

They might have tested it for 49 days, then after halfway through heavy testing and debugging, the bug just "vanished by itself" and they couldn't reproduce it.

iDon't Focus properly

[93 Escort Wagon]

... but the iPhone does.

I must have the same bug...

[Gavin Scott]

After about 42 years my auto-focus suddenly stopped working as well.

You think if I live to 84 or so it will suddenly get better again?

I sure hope there's a patch...

G.

Re:I must have the same bug...

[bennomatic]

Unfortunately, applying a patch causes the loss of depth perception.

Re:I must have the same bug...

[AcidPenguin9873]

And increases one's propensity for rum, parrots, and the letter R.

Re:I must have the same bug...

[BitZtream]

The patch is already available, see your doctor.

Re:I must have the same bug...

[don.g]

Some of us have no depth perception to begin with, you insensitive clod!

Not printing on tuesdays.

[gehrehmee]

There was a wonderful bug in ubuntu where it wouldn't print on tuesdays. It would generate a postscript file, which includes the date, but a faulty entry for file-type detection caused postscript on tuesday to be interpreted as some kind of erlang file... which obviously didn't print very well :)

http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619

Sounds like my wife.

[Anonymous Coward]

Though she's on a 28 day cycle.

BUG! That was supposed to be 29.5 not 24.5

[Tired and Emotional]

Half the focus group users did not want in-focus photos taken of them for a few days each month. Some idiot male programmer clearly mistyped the constant.

Sounds to me...

[DarthVain]

...like a bad motivator.

Re:Sounds to me...

[geekoid]

nice. Why haven't you been modded up yet?

I was suspecting something like...

[Hymer]

...camera will only focus on breast/nippels due to testing only done on this item.
...and it shows up as a simple rounding bug, how disapointing.

Bigger bugs afoot...

[jddj]

Honestly, autofocus on the just-so-so camera is the last of my worries:

• Can't sync with Outlook (the phone doesn't have on-device encryption that would satisfy Exchange policies). Only calendar works, not contacts or email.
• Can't hands-free voice dial (have to touch the phone to unlock it, touch to turn on voice dial, speak your choice, touch the choice from the menu of likely suspected contacts).
• Locked phone's touch-screen comes on in pocket when answering with a headset, causing much mute/disconnect/speakerphone hilarity.
• Turn-by-turn navigation is way off, literally by miles. Wrong 4 of 4 tries so far (in metro Atlanta and DC).
• Immature bluetooth won't support HCI (portable bluetooth keyboards).
• Rotating the phone after checking email checkboxes unchecks everything
• Can't order contact list by last name (fixed in first name order)
• Can't charge it with ANYTHING but the included AC adaptor (over-draws USB power from my old USB car and wall chargers)

Really, fix the camera sometime down the line. But make the phone dial hands-free. Make email work. Make the navigation something other than worthless. Make "lock the screen" really lock the screen.

Someone at Google should use one of their own phones for a while and see how (s)he likes it.

It's a wonderfully powerful platform, but clearly not as well-thought-out or fluid to work as iPhone/iPod Touch

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[DeadCatX2]

Exchange works great for me. So does navigation. I had no problem charging my phone with my netbook's USB port. I did, however, notice that changing the orientation can cause not-yet-applied settings to be forgotten (happened to me while setting up Exchange).

I don't have any Bluetooth stuff so I can't comment on Bluetooth support, but I imagine it will improve. Bluetooth seems like a very temperamental protocol. That said, hands-free Bluetooth voice dialing is actually a showstopper for a lot of important business types, so that should get fixed right away.

If you don't like the native Contacts application, I'm sure you can find some others. Personally, I use the Favorites tab of the Contacts widget, and that handles 95% of the times I want to make a phone call in two clicks.

Finally...Motorola made the phone, not Google.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[Mike Buddha]

• Can't sync with Outlook (the phone doesn't have on-device encryption that would satisfy Exchange policies).

They should've just made it to lie about its policy enforcement to Exchange server like the iPhone did. That way it'd be banned from my corporate network like my iPhone was. Thanks Steve, you're such a smart guy.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[jddj]

There's an exchange client that will lie for you for $10, but the interface - ugh...

Could start railing about "there's no task-list sync on Droid" or "ActiveSync doesn't sync notes", but only those who use both obsessively (as I do) will understand why these are huge gaps.

Am starting to realize that the REAL problem with a task-list is building a sane interface - have yet to see one better than Franklin-Covey, with Palm and Outlook coming in for a tie at second.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[jddj]

"Finally...Motorola made the phone, not Google."

but Google made the OS it's running. The issues I'm bitching about are all OS things. The Moto hardware is superb: sounds great, much quicker to work than my iPod touch.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[Anonymous Coward]

Android is such bloody garbage. And everyone thinks it's the next Messiah.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[DeadCatX2]

Technically, the charging bug (which is weird..are you sure your battery isn't bad?) is a hardware thing. But your point is well taken. The OS still needs more time to fully mature, but looking at the G1 back then and the Droid now, I must say my hopes are high.

I was surprised to learn about this "on device encryption" stuff mentioned in the sibling post. I guess my company doesn't use that...which makes sense, since IT and management almost all have iPhones.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[AaronW]

On mine, the turn by turn navigation is right-on. Charging works just fine plugging it into my desktop computer's USB port. My biggest beef so far is that the PPTP VPN won't stay up more than a few minutes.

I imagine that the rough edges will be fixed since it's a major new release.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[pwagland]

• Can't sync with Outlook (the phone doesn't have on-device encryption that would satisfy Exchange policies).

They should've just made it to lie about its policy enforcement to Exchange server like the iPhone did. That way it'd be banned from my corporate network like my iPhone was. Thanks Steve, you're such a smart guy.

Just as an aside, that bug is now fixed. To cut the story short, the 3GS does support it properly, earlier models do not, and iPhone 3.1 properly reports this to the server now.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[Darth_brooks]

The charging issue is inherent to motorola phones. My old phone (motorola razr) refused to believe that a mini-usb cable could supply the needed power without a charger. Plugging into a PC woudn't charge it. My droid doesn't have that particular problem, but i haven't tried many 3rd party chargers yet.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[hey!]

What I've seen is that some chargers power any USB powered equipment (including those on my PCs and laptops) and other wall and car chargers only power *some* USB powered equipment. I'm guessing what's going on here is that some equipment (usually expensive thingies) refuse to run off an unregulated supply. I've seen the same thing happen with a battery powered USB charger I whipped up. Some equipment won't recognize it until the batteries are drained a bit. That includes my new droid phone.

With respect to turn-by-turn navigation, I find the GPS is right on, but your mileage may vary with the accuracy of base maps in some locales. The big problem is that the software, while useful, is not really all that polished for car navigation, compared to your basic, cheap sub $100 car GPS unit. That's fine with me, because I *have* a cheap car unit that works well for me, so having one on my phone is just a nice-to-have.

As for Outlook, after years of having a phone that would work beautifully if I wanted to set up an Exchange server, I now have usable integration with my desktop computers via Google plugins to my Linux PIM software. So I'm happy.

As far as the contact sorting business is concerned, I agree this should be last name first, but it hardly matters if you have more than a couple dozen contacts. I second the call for HCI support. I haven't had problem with my Bluetooth headset, and as far as hands-free dialing is concerned it's not an issue for me, as I don't use the phone while I'm driving.

Overall, I'm very happy with this phone, although it could be better. I think the IPhone onscreen keyboard works better, and I miss multi-touch, but I like the openness of the platform. It wouldn't be hard at all to write your own contact application if you wanted to. Thus far I haven't had to struggle with the phone because the manufacturer or the carrier wants me to do things a certain way or to buy or use certain services. That's the way I like it. *It's my damn phone* so I want to use it the way I want. The only other complaint is having to upgrade to a wireless data service when I'd prefer to use only WiFi, but that's pretty standard for now.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[DeadCatX2]

The only other complaint is having to upgrade to a wireless data service when I'd prefer to use only WiFi

I, too, thought just like you. Then, one day, where there was no wifi, I needed Internet. As much as it sucks to pay $30/month for something you already have, it really is awesome to have Internet EVERYWHERE.

It's funny, too, that my 3G data connection has more upstream bandwidth than my cable connection at home.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[Falconhell]

"What I've seen is that some chargers power any USB powered equipment (including those on my PCs and laptops) and other wall and car chargers only power *some* USB powered equipment"

Quite so. We glider pilots have been using IPAQ
31X navigators which also use the mini USB, and have found they will not charge at a rate sufficient to run the unit without feeding 3.3v on each of the USB data lines, it seems these are used to tell the unit to switch to a fast charge.

The slow charge mode flattens the battery if charging and operating simultaneously is required.

Damn pest!

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like everybody at Google uses Macs and iPhones -- why would they use a Droid?

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[MemoryDragon]

Actually Copilot8 is available for Android and it is better than my old tomtom PNA...
Since I live in Europe I wont even have access to googles solution, neither do I really want it.
(roaming everyone)

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[Schafer]

"Voice Dialer HF" resolves each of the "Can't hands-free voice dial" issues listed above.

Disclaimer: After getting a Droid and being very, very annoyed at the same thing, I was involved in the development of this app.

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[jddj]

Will check this out ASAP. Thanks!

Re:Bigger bugs afoot...

[Mike Buddha]

They claimed that the earlier version supported it properly too. Are they still lying about it or has it really been implemented this time? I work at a bank. Do you want me to bet your personal financial information on Apple's bullshit claims of security?

Far more serious bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for an acknowledgement that a fix is in the works for a bug causing the speaker to stop working (no phone ring, no alarm)
and for hands-free support

As far as I can tell, there has been no comment on Verizon/Google/Motorola on these serious issues.

I love the phone, but the software was clearly rushed to market.

Re:Far more serious bugs

[DeadCatX2]

I love the phone, but the software was clearly rushed to market.

Yeah, because no one else ever has launch bugs. No one else ever launched a product into the world with a time-sensitive bug.

Here's a tip. If you don't want to ever have anything go wrong with your electronics, then perhaps you should wait until something has been out at least six months before buying it.

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[account_deleted]

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Patriot's Ghost

[Tablizer]

Hmmm, did the auto-focus programmer used to work on the Patriot anti-missile system?
   

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[account_deleted]

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Great now your phone has a monthly cycle too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the bad part of the cycle is as long as the good part of the cycle.

4.3BSD had a bug like that

[Animats]

The initial release of 4.3BSD had a bug like that. It wouldn't interoperate with implementations that chose TCP sequence numbers in the upper half of the 32-bit address space. BSD itself didn't do this until it had been up for 2^31 seconds, so it got through testing. Other implementations cycled faster. We were losing network connections for two hours out of every four.

It took a 1-line fix, after three days of looking at the generated machine code to figure out exactly how the sequence number arithmetic worked. Too many casts in the source.

Re:4.3BSD had a bug like that

[TwinkieStix]

(2^31) seconds = 68.0511039 years of uptime before the bug manifests? So this wasn't much of a problem for BSD?

Re:4.3BSD had a bug like that

[Anonymous Coward]

Other implementations cycled faster

Not much of a problem as long as you only ran BSD boxes, but certainly a problem with other boxes.

Obviously related to

[Anonymous Coward]

solar rotation:

The solar rotation period, by the way, is about 24.5 days at its equator

according to the Mormons

Pfff...

[Hurricane78]

I thought it was about Androids. Maybe military ones. Or at least ones with auto-focusing cameras as eyes.
And them behaving bizarrely human-like.

Now that would be a real story!

Who cares about some crappy niche phone?

I want my “drone wars”! Now!
That would also solve the problem of people caring about unimportant shit like this. ^^

Re:Pfff...

[DynaSoar]

I thought it was about Androids. Maybe military ones.

Ah. Well then, these are not the droids you're looking for. Unless perhaps these are the ones on the TV commercial being dropped by a squadron of stealth fighters only to do some high speed post hole digging and suffer significant damage in the process. The focusing problem explains the action in the ad, which otherwise has no point. Given the new data, perhaps it should be re-edited:

Wide shot: several F-117s in close formation pull into view.
Medium shot: pilot in helmet and goggles seen through front windscreen.
Close up: Pilot's gloved hand pushes trigger.
Medium: door opens in bottom of plane and object launches.
"Fox 3. Sprint PCS signal detected. Targeting towers."
Wide: Objects fly ahead from under each of the planes, veering off into wildly different trajectories.
"Target acquired. Bearing two six zero. Uh. Six two zero?"
"Bearing two through six, range fifty, no fifteen..."
"Blue side up, green side down. Blue side up, green side down...."
Cut in: Shot of Bomb 20 hanging beneath Dark Star:
"And I saw that I was alone...."
Close up, Sgt. Pinback sitting at Dark Star firing control: "Hey..... Bomb?"
Several rapid shots of objects impacting with supersonic soil spreading and creative crater creation.
Medium shot, up from inside crater, two cowboys peer down over rim.
Cowboy 1: "What the heck is it?"
Medium, down from rim. Object opens showing metal iris.
Close up, iris opens showing lens.
"Can you hear me now? Hello? Is there anybody there?"
Medium, up from inside crater. Cowboys scowl, stand, turn and walk away. Scene: cowboys' receding backs, going out of focus and blurring.
Both cowboys together (disgustedly): "Droids."
Voice over: "Verizon Droids. At least we can still hear you.... That is you, isn't it?"
Pan up. Falling from high altitude, a bowl of petunias. "Oh, no. Not again."
Cut to black.

LOL/WTF/Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL...while I didn't by my Droid for its camera capability, I can see others being put off by the issue. I actually have had an attitude somewhere between "wtf" and "meh". After reading the article, I quickly picked up my Droid, and...GREAT MYSTERY OF LIFE...it works! (thankfully it's the 18th of Nov.) Well in spite of my laissez faire attitude, I am looking forward to my phone getting the appropriate therapy to rid it of it's multiple personality disorder. Regardless of the focusing issue I still find the pictures to be pretty crappy but I'll hold out hope that they'll improve picture contrast/levels with some software update or another.

Mother said there would be days like this

[Cryacin]

Woke up today, and just can't focus!!!

Open Source had EVERYTHING to do with it

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Open source had 0 to do with finding this bug... the (paid Google employees) who wrote the bug found the bug."

Open Source had everything to do with finding the bug. Either you mistakenly believe that Android is a Google platform, or that paid employees don't work on Open Source software. If a Red Hat employee finds a bug in the Linux kernel, does it mean "Open Source had 0 (sic) to do with finding the bug"? Paid Google employees aren't finding bugs in Apples code, now are they?

It won't be available until December 11th! OMFG! (feigns disgust)

You mean they already have a roll-out plan in place, and they already informed you with details of that plan ???? You either don't know how software is developed (closed and/or FOSS), or you didn't eat your Wheaties this morning. If this was closed source you would neither know about the bug, or any roll-out plan, most likely because the bug would remain hidden or there would be no desire to share that information with you.

Re:Open Source had EVERYTHING to do with it

[Disgruntled Goats]

So your claim is that somehow these Google engineers who found out what the bug actually was wouldn't have found out the bug as fast if the code wasn't open source? Why would it matter whether the code was open source or when these same people would have had access to the code regardless.

Re:Open Source had EVERYTHING to do with it

[Zero__Kelvin]

"Why would it matter whether the code was open source or when these same people would have had access to the code regardless."

Your very false assumption is that Google engineers would have access to the code in the first place. Droid is a Motorola phone on the Verizon network. Google is one of many participants in the Open Source Android project, which Motorola wisely chose to use in this case. In the past they have used Linux, but they have never went Open Source in the application domain. This meant that in the past, an Autofocus problem would need to be fixed by Motorola engineers. Since it was closed source only a few Motorola engineers would have access to, and famliarity with , the code.

In case you are still not getting it, try looking at your broken "Google would work on it anyway" argument this way:

Number of Open Source handset projects in which Google is Involved: 1 or more
Number of closed source handset projects: 0

Re:Open Source had EVERYTHING to do with it

[Disgruntled Goats]

Your very false assumption is that Google engineers would have access to the code in the first place.

So you claim they wouldn't have access to their own Android code (you know, where the bug lies).

Droid is a Motorola phone on the Verizon network. Google is one of many participants in the Open Source Android project, which Motorola wisely chose to use in this case. In the past they have used Linux, but they have never went Open Source in the application domain. This meant that in the past, an Autofocus problem would need to be fixed by Motorola engineers. Since it was closed source only a few Motorola engineers would have access to, and famliarity with , the code.

If the code in question was really a bug in Motorola's code then it would have most likely been proprietary software and as such as you claim Google wouldn't have gotten access to it. That Android itself is released open source under the Apache 2.0 license doesn't mean that the customized versions created by say Motorola is going to be open source. So actually, your the one making false assumptions that go against the very words of Google's own people.

In case you are still not getting it, try looking at your broken "Google would work on it anyway" argument this way:

Why wouldn't they work on their own code base?

Number of Open Source handset projects in which Google is Involved: 1 or more

You do realize that most of the changes Motorola did to customize their version of Android are proprietary right? And that the phone manufacturers are under no obligation to open source their additions. But this is all moot since the bug is an issue in the base Android itself.

Re:Open Source had EVERYTHING to do with it

[Zero__Kelvin]

"So you claim they wouldn't have access to their own Android code (you know, where the bug lies).

If you had followed the link in my initial reply to CajunArson then you would already know that Android isn't a "Google Platform", nor is the AutoFocus code "Google's Code"

"Why wouldn't they work on their own code base?"

Oh let's see. Probably because they wouldn't have any handset code , since Google doesn't sell handsets. Are you really so thick you can't figure all of this out? If not, trust the other million Slashdot readers, none of whom have had any problem realizing that what I said is true. You are the only - oh I'll be euphimistic - misinformed Slashdot reader that can't figure it out. That is most likely because you are a person with almost no understanding of FOSS or software development in general trying to "explain it" to someone who actually has been developing closed source since before there was Open Source. Now get off my lawn, follow the above link, follow the link in that reply and learn something this time , or just go away. The Sun won't start revolving around the Earth no matter how many times, or in how many ways, that you insist that it does.

Even longer

[brunes69]

An unsigned long long time is 8 589 934 592 times as long as a long time is.

But whose counting!

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[account_deleted]

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Uh...

[msauve]

It was a single line comment. No terminator necessary.

Re:Time-related bugs

[DoctorFrog]

Be durned, I had an almost identical bug! Mine would always print on Wednesdays even if hard copy was deselected, because the y in Wednesday overflowed. The month and date weren't involved though, your bug is even cooler.

Rookie mistake

[plopez]

Enough said. But may be worse these days as people don't seem to actually think about the hardware. There seems to be an attitude of: "Java/.Net/Python etc. will do everything! Why worry about hardware!"

Yes, unsigned vs signed integers, but otherwise...

[mbessey]

2^32=4,294,967,296 /1000 (ms per second) = 4,294,967.296
/ 60 (seconds per minute) = 71,582.788266666667
/ 60 (minutes per hour) = 1,193.0464711111111
/ 24 (hours per day) = 49.71 days

I don't understand...

[jonaskoelker]

Can't hands-free voice dial [...]

This one I have never understood.

Whenever I have the time and attention answering or making a phone call requires, I also have my hands available, or I can make them available in a few seconds.

So why is this an important feature?

Re:I don't understand...

[jddj]

A: I'm gonnna guess you don't have a two-year-old. B: exactly who are you to question features I find important, presuming to speak on behalf of every user?

OK only for BSD-to-BSD

[jonaskoelker]

I quote your parent:

It wouldn't interoperate with implementations that chose TCP sequence numbers in the upper half of the 32-bit address space. BSD itself didn't do this until it had been up for 2^31 seconds

If we have a BSD box talking to a Windows box that's using high sequence numbers, we run into problems. If Windows boxes always use sequence numbers in the upper half, the bug manifests 0 seconds after talking to a Windows box.

What works for 68 years is BSD talking to BSD.

May you have lots of fun making the internet work under those conditions ;-)

simple != easy

[DingerX]

Microsoft already has these drop-down menus that only list the options you've used recently.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I hate them too. "Grows with the user" isn't the answer.

In fact, I think you've fundamentally mistaken two concepts. 'Simple' is conceptual; 'easy' is experiential.

Clippy and dynamic drop-down menus are not ‘simple’ (cf. trying to run Word on a Mac in 1999. The light dims, a hush falls over the crowd, and Clippy chunders onto the screen. Three minutes later, that superquick animation manages to say something), but they were developed to make things ‘easy.

In truth, they weren't even developed for that reason. They were built because what matters most for software is the 15-minute sales pitch that results in corporate contracts. Office (and many, many other programs) needs to look cool and to engage the complete idiot for a quarter-hour of interaction.

If software can't sell itself in 15 minutes, it doesn't sell. A proper "simple" design that works well, without confusion, without encouraging bad habits (anyone remember the Macintosh "virtual, distributed desktop" that would result in endless disk swaps?) requires motivation or teaching to learn, and those things can't be communicated in 15 minutes.

This is just great

[PassiveAggressive]

This is exactly what we need - cameras with mood swings. What's next? Phones with a short attention span?

Motorola

[Fotograf]

yea and soon they will discover that it is not only signed, but also byte inverted.

How many more?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of bug other operating systems can only dream of!

Auto Focus?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've not seen an Android phone, but I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around the concept that a cell phone has a lens large enough to bother with a focusing mechanism in the first place. Just about very phone camera I've ever seen has tiny fixed focus lens, and they usually work fine...