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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.'"
In excusable. The industry is too mature for that type of shit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wish I had mod points, this entire thread is one of the funniest ever on /.
Really?
For some reason, this calibre of comment is surprising from a sub-5k uid.
Simple == good
That is one of the dumbest things that get parroted around her ever!
Because you make the faulty simplification from efficient == good to this. And those simplifications that you can’t really make because they actually make things worse, are exactly why simple != good.
You see it is not completely wrong. It’s just simplified too much.
And what you get out, is shit like Windows, Clippy, AOL, and other things that are so “simple”, that they stop being usable by people who still can think themselves. Which causes people to dumb down, and expect to e.g. replace the “” quote characters in Word by " if they actually wanted to use that one, etc. It makes the interface tedious, and worse to use again.
Which causes the bell curve to go down. Which then gets understood by people again, as it being “too hard to use”.
Meanwhile the intelligent end of the curve gets completely ignored and more and more annoyed.
Which can even, in the case of people not being able to keep up with the “simplification” (Or rather limiting of freedoms!!), cause the program/device to be generally called the same things that Clippy gets called nowadays.
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. When really, they are very closely related. It's just that while easiness goes up, efficiency just follows it up to a point. And then it goes down again.
To make things worse, that tip of efficiency is different for every person and every experience level.
Which means, the program has to grow with the user! (I can’t repeat this often enough!)
Neither Notepad nor VI do that.
Notepad starts very low. And stays right there. That’s even the design goal for the typical commercial software.
And VI starts out close to the top professional full-time user level.
They are both very nice programs for that level. But the failure of both is that they don’t adapt to the user.
If you want to write a good user interface, write one that grows with the user! A text editor that starts out as Notepad, and can grow out to become VI. But always adapts to the needs and experience level of the user. Which will first grow to the amount the user uses it. And then either stay there, or even drop off again, when it’s less needed. Imagine you not using a program for half a year. You won’t remember that one shortcut again. With a adapting UI, you will always be at your maximum efficiency level (for your level of experience).
I just don’t understand, why software developers and UI designers can’t get this simple fact.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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"
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.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun