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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.'"
hoses up the camera autofocus?
Is this Slashdot, or The Daily WTF?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
that caused Windows 95 to require a reboot in about the same timeframe.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
GPS works by trilaturation, not triangulation... just sayin'
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.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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. "
Of course. That's when the world was created, fully-formed. How do you know the world existed before Jan 1 1970? :-)
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?