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

Rounding error?

[geekoid]

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

Re:When Signed/Unsigned Strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.