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iPhone Alarm Bug Leads To Mass European Sleep-in
nk497 writes "A flaw in the alarm clock in iPhone 4s gave Europeans a bit of a lie-in this morning. While the Apple handsets automatically adjusted to daylight savings time, a bug in the alarm system meant many were woken up an hour later than they should have been, after clocks rolled back over the weekend. Annoyingly, Australia was hit by a similar problem last month, but Apple failed to fix the problem or even warn users. American Apple fans, consider yourselves warned. The iOS4 bug can apparently be avoided by using one-off alarms, rather than pre-set regular wake-up calls."
my girlfriends 3gs (running iOS 4.x) had the same bug this morning.
Fortunately, my $99 android phone woke us up at the right time
People, what a bunch of bastards
and another ridiculous Apple story makes it to the front page.
What a bunch of whiners. Apple tries to do something nice for you, give you a little more time in the morning, and this is how you thank them?
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
I would have gotten a first post if it wouldn't be for those meddling kids at Apple!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I had no idea millions of people used their phone as an alarm clock.
did you forget to take your meds?
Hm interesting ... my Nexus One calculated that I will have 1 hour more to sleep
when I was setting alarm the night before the switch happened.
I have a very low-end Huawei phone that doesn't auto-update it's clock to account for daylight savings and it woke me up an hour earlier than it should have.
The real bug is that we change the time at all, considering all the problems it brings.
With all new fancy (and not so fancy gadgets), you can NEVER be sure has the damn thing changed the time correctly or not. So you wind up watching weather forecast on TV, only to check the clock in the corner.
Note to engineers everywhere: if your gadget DO change the time, please use some kind of notification that it did so. Otherwise, we can presume that time is wrong, and that we have to manually adjust it
The story fails to mention several key details.
1. The problem only manifests if you have a recurring alarm set.
2. The alram goes off an hour late if it was set before for DST switch.
3. The alarm goes off an hour early if it was set after the DST switch.
A clock with a 9v backup worked just fine. Who would have guessed?
Was this story submitted by RMS? What's with the '!opensource' tag?
Whoever wrote that has obviously never used any open source products, because if that person is under the flat-out delusion that all open source products such as Android and Ubuntu are mysteriously free of strange rarely-occurring or one-time bugs... wow. I want some of whatever she's smoking.
It's snippy, egotistical little things that really piss me off about the open source movement. The benefits of open source isn't a bug free program- it's a program that anyone can change and distribute as they see fit, within the bounds of the licence. (technically, closed source fits the exact same description, except the bounds of the licence are usually extremely tight or completely restrictive).
That kind of attitude only harms the open source movement by making us look (even more) like elitist snobs.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
If the battery had not died overnight.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm still waiting for the day where these phones will actually have software that someone would want to use. I've yet to see a touchscreen phone with a UI that is as responsive as physical keys.
Not one comment yet about the real culprit here: daylight savings time. If we didn't have it anywhere in the world, then programmers wouldn't have to worry about when DST happens in different timezones (or which places have DST and which don't), or worry about what to do with log files or anything else when time jumps an hour.
Someone remind me please what we're saving? It's not electricity, because we use lightbulbs before sunrise and after sunset in summer and winter.
This would have never happened if iOS was open sourced.
Under a thousand eyes, you won't oversleep.
While the Apple handsets automatically adjusted to daylight savings time, a bug in the alarm system meant many were woken up an hour later than they should have been, after clocks rolled back over the weekend.
How does this bug work?
OK lets work it inductively and assume the phone stores all times internally as local time and trusts the time the cellphone providers send out. So, "spring forward fall back" so your 5am wakeup remains at ... 5am.
Well lets try option 2. Maybe they store it all internally as UTC and get local time from the cellphone tower. So your 5am local daylight time is X UTC. "fall back" to regular time and that wakeup is now X-0100 UTC. The alarm program reads the local time, converts to UTC, and you sleep in one hour. oops.
What mystifies me is that Apple would store the time internally as UTC instead of going pure local time. Not owning an iphone, if you travel east/west across a few timezones, do you have to reprogram all your alerts to the new local timezone which has a new UTC offset?
The other oddity is people use their phone as an alarmclock? A smartphone with a battery life measured in hours, probably dead by wakeup time? I'm with the modern generation in that I haven't worn a wristwatch in over a decade, but is it a generational thing that people don't own/use alarm clocks? What do you glance at, at 2am, when you just want to see the time if you momentarily wake up, etc? Get the tiny little phone, unlock it, put on the glasses/contacts, and read the time?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
a lot of people still use Nokia or HTC smartphones. iPhone penetration is much lower than in the states ... because we like to buy the phones outright and use prepaid SIM/uSIMs.
In fact, I didn't see anyone oversleep ... but then again I'm in Germany and not only is everyone cheap (non iPhones) but they're also steadfastly punctual (unless they work for DB, then they're always 15min late).
I have an HTC desire running on Orange and the time never changed. I had to reset it to get the right time.
I do have DST updating enabled.
Who most likely doesn't live in the North. I like seeing daylight every now and then.
My iPhone 3g did not have this problem this morning and I am in Europe. Are there people here who really experienced this?
Hey, Jim Furyk's iPhone made him oversleep and he still won the FedEx cup worth 10 MEEELION dollars, so quitcher whinin!
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
The nexus one is as unlocked as it gets - I got the latest 2 OS updates OTA not depending on my carrier, direct from google!
Our work clocks and many computers failed to remember that the western third of the country voted daylight saving/summer time down in to the trash heap of history and promptly told us we all were an hour late turning up for work this morning.... my guess is it will take them ... 4 months maybe?... to fix the clocks and the messed up online calendars.
The nexus one is as unlocked as it gets - I got the latest 2 OS updates OTA not depending on my carrier, direct from google!
Unfortunately, it failed to sell well and was essentially pulled from the market.
It's Daylight Saving Time.
Not Daylight Savings Time.
Not to excuse the iPhone bug, but I never knew about it until I read this story, probably because I live a place without this whole DST business.
But really, which century are we living in here? Why would anyone still wants to adjust their clocks twice a year, and what are we "saving" here exactly?
Oliver.
Old Man Withers!
Really, these stories are starting to be VERY stupid. When did we start being such crying babies?, in the past if X device didn't serve it's purpose, we would use another thing and be done with it... Yes, I know, devices should work as advertised, blah blah... But the iPhone is not an alarm clock, it HAS an alarm clock function thou. I think the question here is which functions are essential (Phone, for example) and which are just supporting apps and should work as best effort (everything else IMHO). If this weren't the case and the manufacturer was blamed for every little glitch in every application etc etc it wouldn't be possible to market these devices.
iLate.
Lets see the time change happened on the night of October 30 to October 31 so if they overslept to the morning on the November 1, then they have more problems then a broken app.
I'm always surprised how many people are dependant on alarm clocks... I just go to sleep early enough, such that I wake up naturally in the morning. I usually get up at 6am, so it's lights-out at 10pm. 8 hours later, I wake up. I will use an alarm clock if I need to get up early to catch a flight (i.e. 4am like last week) but even in that case I seem to wake up a few minutes before the alarm goes off.
Main downside is the weekend - My circadian rhythms are set such that I pretty much wake up at 6am seven days a week...
Here in France we never work on November 1st, who's setting an alarm clock on holidays ? And after all, if you've forgotten to turn it off, it's nice to hear it ring one hour later than usually...
I see a lot of posts with hate for DST.. that's fine, I'd be happy if it were abolished as well.
But now back to there being a bug in how the alarm thing is handled on the iPhone. How does that bug even exist?
If the alarm is set for a particular time, say "7am".. then what does it matter whether or not the clock went back an hour at 3am?
I can understand the alarm app going a bit batty if the clock went back at 8am (essentially the alarm going off -twice- that day), but given the actual circumstances... how did the alarm decide that it should instead be going off at 8am? The clock, presumably, does give the correct time.. so it's not like its internal time functions don't know what time it actually is. I'm confused. Is this just some manner of shoddy coding going on?
What's worse is how Apple is handling it... i.e. 'not'. Most of America (some states ignore DST already) is up for its DST change next week. I guess most people are now warned by the media attention (where was that when it was NZ / AU?).
as Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Cap Verde, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Irland, Italy, Liechtestein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the Vatican have an official holiday.
I do not know about the US. But the author of the original message must be pretty Con-European!
High time this ineffective measure causing so much more harm&hassle than good got abolished (before it kills people as e.g. a medical device fails in the same way).
It's always been a doubtful privilege for those keen to play golf after work at everyone else's expense anyway...
If you can afford a $300 phone with a $100 monthly bill, you can afford a $20 alarm clock. You're fired.
My n900 is happy. It also isn't locked down and lets me do all sorts of fun stuff with it. But maybe my n900 isn't a phone. :-P
Europe is not exactly known for its stellar productivity per capita per hour rates, but I still can't imagine that Apple's negligence didn't still cost $Billions.
It's too bad the time change isn't in August when Europe isn't producing anything. The effect would have been nil.
I'm starting to think it would be easier to keep track of when Europe is NOT on holiday, rather then when they ARE.
"yes we have 7 fixed working days every year, and 3 floating work days."
I love iPhone! :)
It depends on how you treat alarms.
If you treat them as a special sort of calendar function (which in essence they are), I can easily see how a bug like this can creep in. Calendars - particularly in things like the iPhone - generally keep track of appointments in such a fashion as to account for people being in different time zones so you don't wind up dialling into a conference call four hours after it finished, bearing in mind that the conference call may be an hour later this week because the organiser's in a time zone that has gone over to DST but the user isn't.
There's a number of ways to do that, but generally speaking it means that the form you store the appointment in and the form you display it to the user and use for firing off alerts are two different things. It's quite possible that neither of these forms will bear much resemblance to how the underlying operating system keeps track of time. It's while converting from one to another that you find the bugs.
I've been using my phone as my alarm clock roughly since I started traveling on business a lot, and realized it is better to use my own than trust all the random clocks in hotels.
In the early years, the phone's alarm wasn't very effective at waking me (before midi/mp3 customizable ringtones) and I sometimes used my work laptop as an alarm clock instead. Full screen digital clock in red-on-black, brightness to minimum, and a sleep timer to start my music application at wake-up time. Sometimes I used both, set to trigger about 15 minutes apart, because waking up jet lagged for a meeting can be such a bitch.
Just a note: November 1st is All Saints Day throughout most of continental Europe (well, at least for Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Belgium). So any correlations between this and mass sleep-ins is to be suspect.
Of course, being an Android user and stereotypical American, (living in Germany at the moment), I showed up to an empty office punctual as always.
I see a lot of posts with hate for DST.. that's fine, I'd be happy if it were abolished as well.
But now back to there being a bug in how the alarm thing is handled on the iPhone. How does that bug even exist?
If the alarm is set for a particular time, say "7am".. then what does it matter whether or not the clock went back an hour at 3am? I can understand the alarm app going a bit batty if the clock went back at 8am (essentially the alarm going off -twice- that day), but given the actual circumstances... how did the alarm decide that it should instead be going off at 8am? The clock, presumably, does give the correct time.. so it's not like its internal time functions don't know what time it actually is. I'm confused. Is this just some manner of shoddy coding going on?
I'll venture a guess:
Applications, especially ones using phone APIs, usually aren't running 24/7. At a high level, what they will do is, in some manner, register for an event with the operating system. They will then idle indefinitely until that event occurs, at which point the operating system will give the application execution time and it will respond to that event. The event can be several things, including "when the user taps the screen" and "if the phone is powered on", and notably (for this discussion) can be based off of time, such as "8 hours from now".
My guess is that, when an alarm is set, the alarm calculates the amount of time in the future until it needs to be sounded, then registers with the OS to be woken that much time later (probably via some form of nanosleep iOS API derivative). If the alarm fails to factor in DST when calculating that time difference, then it'll get its event later (or earlier, or whatever) than it was expecting, and sound (and then probably calculate the next time difference and sleep until then).
On the surface, an alarm application could register for more periodic events (clock ticks, UI update loop iterations, or just sleep for seconds at a time) and evaluate if it should sound periodically. This would have easily avoided the DST issue. The problem here is that each time the event gets dispatched, the phone has to wake up to handle it, and such periodic waking would cost unnecessary battery. In fact, the OS knows how / when / for how long to sleep based on scheduler details derived from some form of these event registrations. Applications in general (and especially on battery-consuming devices) should attempt to register for the least number of events as possible, hence (I'm guessing) why they chose the time delay calculation option instead of a periodic one.
In the US, not Europe... Had alarms set for 7:30 am and 8 am in Apple's alarm clock, iPhone 4. The 7:30 evidently went off at 7, and the 8 at 7:30. (The early alarm was for my wife, who decided to sleep in until my alarm.) When I got up and actually looked at a clock, it was 7:32, so somehow the alarms went off a half hour early today. Weird!
Because one of those days it won't be just an army of cellphones running amuck but something medical, chemical, "nucular" =;-o ... you get the idea.
It's a disastrous bug waiting to happen, and I for one don't want to be near the Springfield Power Plant when Homer forgets they change the time that night.
not subsidised, it was 99 euros prepaid at vodafone
I checked the web site of Vodafone's US operations (Verizon Wireless), and the only available prepaid handsets were "feature phones", not Android phones. I checked a Best Buy Mobile store in my area, and none of the prepaid carriers had an Android handset.
I use mine as an alarm clock. A few weeks ago my brother was asleep on the couch and I couldn't wake him up by calling his name, or poking him in the face, so I set the alarm on my iPhone and it woke him up.
I often wonder if coma patients might respond similarly.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
On the surface, an alarm application could register for more periodic events (clock ticks, UI update loop iterations, or just sleep for seconds at a time) and evaluate if it should sound periodically. This would have easily avoided the DST issue.
Not at all. The problem here is that if you want an alarm at 8am every morning, that's always 24 hours after the previous time, except one day where it is 23 hours later, and one day where it is 25 hours later. How you measure the time is irrelevant, as long as you know that on this one day the alarm must come after 23 hours and not 24.
maybe people should just use an alarm clock rather than rely on mobile phones? wtf?
and live in a place without Daylight Saving Time, which is one of the most ridiculous ideas in human history. ELIMINATE DST!
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
you would have to wake up at Sunday 3 am to set the time to 2 am. Most alarm clocks in that price range do not do summer -> winter time conversions.
You can of course cheat by changing the clock the next morning or the evening before.
There is no app for that.
Set the whole damn world to Zulu time and leave it the Hell alone!!!
No time zones, no dateline, no nothing. So when I have a conference call scheduled for 03:00 on Thursday, there's no question about when it's really going to take place. None of this "my time/your time" crap.
My guess is that the iPhone has a little timer in it somewhere that you can tell "Give me a signal in $n$ seconds". Because it would be pretty ridiculous if it was a busy loop that checked "is currenttime()==alarmtime?" as most commenters seem to think. Anyhow, whoever wrote the part that calculated $n$ failed to use the proper date library routines, which would correct for DST nastiness.
I had the opposite problem happen on my iPhone in the US. Both yesterday and today my phone was set to go off at 8am and it went off at 7am. I thought I was crazy and my friends didn't believe me, until I saw this.
I'm all for ending daylight savings time. Provided my timezone gets shifted forward permanently. I don't want to deal with 4am sunrises in the summer, which basically means a waste of daylight.
It might be pointless closer to the equator, and perhaps even at the poles where the days and nights get so long. But at the middle latitudes DST is quite helpful.
Perhaps time zones should be broken into half hour increments. Some places fall into awkward spots on the time zone and end up in a situation where they get the day shifted forward excessively. 8am sunrises and 10pm sunsets, for example. Some places are at the other extreme, or close, like where I live.
My iPod touch went off an hour early today. Then my wife kicked me in the leg until I got out of bed, thinking I was being lazy. So I went out to the couch and ended up falling back asleep and being late for work.
Not since he got this nice blue pill he doesn't.
Yeah its subsidized
When researching entry-level Android devices, I checked all four major U.S. carriers, and none had a voice contract with fewer than 450 anytime minutes per month or for less than $39.9x per month. I'm currently on Virgin Mobile with a bare-bones Vox 8610 phone (talk and text only), which costs me $15 every three months because I use hardly any voice minutes.
I use a prewar Sessions / Esquire radio alarm clock. 5 tubes, one motor, and has never failed. Even if the power goes out for a minute, it just stops running and is a little slow the next day. No blinking 12:00 ever again!
In general I think it's a bad idea to rely on cellphones as alarm clocks. I don't know if this is true for all of them but at least for the phones I've had, the clock stays synced with the nearest tower and if there is no service within range, there is no clock. So if there's no service, there's no alarm, and that makes the phone completely useless during travel in unpopulated areas. I've also missed alarms because a technical difficulty of some sort disabled a nearby phone tower.
So now, I use a regular battery-backed alarm clock at home and I use a simple portable alarm clock for travel. Reliable and unbreakable.
/* No Comment */
It's not a better phone. It's not a better computer. It's not a better alarm clock, calculator, translator, dictionary, book, mp3 player, flashlight, cigarette lighter, gaming console, and it sure as hell is not a better pen.
and where I live, DST does not make much sense eighter. The reason being, apart from the short transitional periods, it doesn't make much of a difference anyway. In the summer, we got sunlight 24 hours every day so it doesn't really matter what timezone you follow. And of course in the winter, its the opposite and if you manage to see the sun at all you should consider yourself lucky.
Computers don't time themselves on our clocks. They have internal time representations that are just things like, say, number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970. They convert that number to the current date/time and show it to you, but inside it's just a really big integer. It sounds like in this case when you set an alarm the phone figured out what the internal time representation for the next alarm should be, and set a wake-up timer for that time. When the clock changed for DST the timer wasn't recalculated, and internal time isn't affected by the DST change, only the displayed time, so the internal alarm timer is now off by the amount of the DST change.
That's what I first thought as well, but it doesn't make sense?
Let's say you set an event notification for "100 seconds from now". Let's say 'now' is 0s, so that you get the event at exactly 100s.
Now a time change comes along at 50s, which sets the clock back 50s.
So when the clock ticks through 100s for the event notification to occur, the clock ticks through to 50s, time change makes that 0s, then the clock again ticks through to 50s, triggering the event, and the clock ticks merrily onward from there.
The event thus comes at the new 50s, not at the new 100s.
I.e. the alarm goes off -before- it should have gone off. The bug as stated in the story, however, has the alarm going off -after-.. essentially at 150s. I think.
So if an alarm is set for "7 hours from now", and the clock ticks go like this:
0h, 1h, 2h, 3h/2h, 3h, 4h, 5h, 6h, 7h, 8h, 9h.
And the alarm says "in 7 hours I should go off", rather than "at 7am I should go off", it would look like this:
0h, 1h, 2h, 3h/3h, 4h, 5h, 6h, 7h, 8h, 9h, 10h.
Thus making the alarm go off at 6am - not the 8am in the story.
Did I mention I'm confused?
( I do hate DST as well, for this very reason, but I still can't fathom the bug. )
is this "daylight" everyone keeps mentioning? The reflection off my parents basement walls of the fluorescent light emitted by my LCD screen strikes me (heh) as a perfectly cromulent source of illumination.
Please use the correct terminology. As the OED says, "USAGE Use savings in the modifying position (savings bank, savings bond) and when referring to money saved in a bank: your savings are fully insured. When speaking of an act of saving, as when one obtains a discount on a purchase, the preferred form is saving."
It is pretty simple. Here's my theory:
1) The user picks an alarm time in his local time zone.
2) The software converts that time to UTC.
3) When you go from daylight saving to standard time, you technically switch between two time zones.
4) But since the alarm time was stored in UTC, the alarm goes off the same time it has always done. Its just that in your new time zone this is an hour later.
So why does the software do all this? Well, its common practice to store your datetime fields in UTC and only convert them to the local time zone for display.
Unfortunately this has some rather bad side effects when its an alarm. :-)
You on the other hand...
Posting as AC since i'm on an iphone. hope i'm early enough...
i think there is a similar bug in some calendar apps - sunbird? - when you change the timezone, it corrects the appointments by the timezone delta, so something scheduled at 8 gmt will shift to 9 cet when you set system time to cet from gmt. iphone may be the same, considering gmt and bst/dst are different timezones...
Damn! Are you telling me I went to work for no pay?!
The device references time everywhere internally as UTC time.
The alarm app stores time as UTC time as well, so when you set an alarm for 7AM local it gets converted to UTC, which will say that yesterday that conversion meant 7AM UTC as well (Just to keep it simple), everything works.
DST change happens.
Alarm.app is still set for 7AM UTC, but 7AM UTC is now actually 6AM local time.
Of course, thats the exact opposite of what happened here, but its a pretty easy mistake to make.
No matter what scenario I try to come up with to explain this bug, I get the alarm going off a hour early, rather than later.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Can someone explain what actually happened in the alarm? It seems to me that there are a few possibilities, all of which lead to the alarm going off an hour early or on time. Maybe I'm missing something.
Actually this sounds a lot like the 'Outlook/Exchange' issues that occured the last time the US changed DST. The key thing to notice is that this pertains to reoccuring scheduled appointments. ...from the Outlook debacle... I can tell you. It makes a difference when you scheduled the appointment. Was it DST when you set it up. Is the appointment in DST, is it in the period that was changed (in the US this was 1 week in Spring, and 3 weeks in fall).
Add in the variations of device location (and the various rules about when to apply DST) and you have a nightmare for anyone responsible for scheduled appointments (in a corporation).
in the time based module
You seem to be correct. But what were we, who live in Germany (I'm not a German by the way), doing today??? I even had a dentist appointment and they were there! All my co-workers were in the office, too... I didn't know it was a holiday till I read your post :-O
Besides, my iPhone 4's alarm went off one hour late. I first thought I slept through the alarm when I woke up on my own...
I take it you are unemployed. If you are in full time education or work, in the depths of winter you will get up and be in the office/classroom in the dark before coming home in the dark having not seen natural sunlight all day. This is extremely depressing and has even been even proposed as a reason why people in the far north of a country have comparatively higher suicide rate than those in similar situations and backgrounds in more southerly locations. Anything that can stave this fate off for a few weeks in the year is most welcome.
Just don't live in a place that follows Daylight Savings Time...Aloha!
Only the historically Catholic countries. You listed quite a many countries where today wasn't a holiday.
Just use Apple Time Machine to get to work on time.
Yes - same in NZ. Got woken out of bed an hour early, along with tens of thousands of other people.
Problem occurred the next day, and I had to delete the alarm and create a new one.
I no longer trust the device to do a simple thing like waking me up in the morning. Incredibly poor programming, since the phone actually records the correct time.
Steve thought you were looking tired.
Commander: The iPhone 4 failed to wake European users here, here and here. ...Sir, the same bug existed in 3GS. ...those who use Android phones and were waken up on time please leave the room.
Hitler: I am sure Steve Jobs will fix this promptly.
Commander:
Hitler:
If the bug didn't exist and you woke up on time you'd have no news piece to comment. So, no first post for you.
...the iPhone woke me up, I turned the alarm off, and went to the bed again...
The only dentist I think would have business in Germany on this day is on an American or British Military Base. Right?
I have Baby3.0 (20 month old). His alarm works flawlessly.
My first two versions where heavily flawed. I suffered as an early adopter of Baby1.0 back in 1995. Then Baby2.0 came out in 1999...had the same broken features (notably more stuff comes out than goes in).
> You seem to be correct. But what were we, who live in Germany (I'm not a German by the way), doing today???
It is only a holiday in the more Catholic (e.g southern) states: I am in Hessen and we did not have a holiday today. :-(
(FYI the real con this year (at least in Germany) is that Xmas and Boxing day occur on Saturday and Sunday this year, so us Monday to Friday workers do not get either of these Bank Holidays
Remove Sweden from that list, today isn't an official holiday here and hasn't been for more than fifty years.
My Palm TX did the same thing Saturday AM, and is STUCK on Oct 31st!!
You're saying the alarm events should use local time? What if you're moving between time zones, for example? You presumably want them to occur the same relative time from now, regardless of local time. DST is the bug, not all these devices that don't handle the subtleties of it properly.
It's round, it has numbers, an hour hand, a minute hand, a second hand, an alarm hand, a great snooze button on top, and it doesn't give a rip about what "time zone" it is in. It's not radio controlled, it's not set by GPS, I set its time by hand. (It's a seiko QXE011ALH)
I have an iphone, and have used its alarm on a couple of occasions -- but never for a 'mission-critical' wakeup. I only use it as a safety net when I need an earlier-than-normal wakeup. The thing sleeps on the same table as my clock, yet I still use the clock as the primary.
This little episode just makes me grin. All that tech trumped by a humble little clock.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Nice try, but it's worse than that. Even if you clear and re-set the alarm, it *STILL* goes off at the wrong time. They daylight savings code in the OS is simply broken.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Can't it just be that the alarm and device time are both recorded in UTC and the offset isn't considered?
I prefer your parent's solution: "ask the OS for the local time every minute, compare that with 8am".
something to do with Alarm clock and no mention of Jean-paul ?? what is happening with the world?
And a non-school day in Bulgaria.
What the hell. I'm in Finland and I don't have any holiday?!
You mean to tell me that we all came to work for no reason?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Otherwise I'm sorry and invite you for some starkes ale when we meet.
I have some good experience with Finnish friends
I was amazed to find no one had corrected this in the comments. It is not "savings" it is *Saving*
I live in Ireland, and there is no holiday on/before/after the day of DST
I confirmed this in the US this weekend.
It happens with repeating alarms set before the time change -
they still display the correct time but go off an hour late.
Alarms set after the time change seem to be fine.