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Bizarre Droid Auto-Focus Bug Revealed

Posted by timothy on from the each-droid-has-a-moth-enclosed dept.

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.'"

3 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does it use an Intel CPU? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    WHOOOSH!

  2. Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes by SerpentMage · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    This is what I hate about "smart" programmers at Google. They come up with the cleverest algo's, and they demand from their tests the ability to develop these algo's. Then they release something and along comes this sort of bug that simply does not need to happen!

    So why does it happen, because their programmers are "clever"...

    And the worst part this is the sort of bug that consumers will laugh their head off about. The reason why Apple sells so well is not because they are rocket scientists, but because when people use their products people say, "hey this is pretty cool..." Whereas techie's say, "hey this is pretty cool..." WRONG FOCUS...

    --

    "You can't make a race horse of a pig"
    "No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
  3. Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes by ZeRu · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Sorry to be a grammar nazi, but you should've written "Wish I had mod points, this entire thread is one of the funniest ever on /.." - the first dot is a dot in "slashdot" and the second dot ends the sentence properly.

    Or you could've constructed your sentence differently if you don't like consecutive dots, like "Wish I had mod points, this is one of the funniest threads on /. ever.".

    --
    If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.