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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 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.
My Dell Streak, running Android, gave me my 6:30 regular alarm, no problem YMMV
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
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?
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
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.
If it was open source it could have been fixed last month when the problem occurred... correct?
Well, companies like iHome make clock radios and the like that are meant for it. They even make a nice app for i(Phone|Pad) which allows for multiple alarms with sleep music and wake music.
When I traveled on business last, I was pleased to discover that both hotels I stayed in had these and I could use my iPod in the hotel, as well as my iPad propped up on the nightstand. Charging your iPhone and using it as an alarm is fairly easy with these.
Once you have a device with all of your calendaring and email on it, using it as an alarm clock isn't a big stretch. Heck, even my several year old iPod nano has built in alarms that will work if you're in a docking station.
I'm not sure why you might even be remotely surprised by this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I had no idea millions of people used their phone as an alarm clock.
Works better than my clock radio because it's always nearby, easier to set, I can change the alarm noise to something jarring if needed, and I can set it in the middle of the day when I find out I need to get to work early the next day (instead of waiting until I get home and hoping I remember).
Yup, they do. It's quite convenient, actually - if you have a mobile phone, why invest extra money in an alarm clock? Mobile phone alarms go off even when the phone is switched off (at least I haven't found a phone for which this isn't true yet). Most phones allow you to schedule your alarms in a more comprehensive way than typical alarm clocks. I have a non-smart, very basic phone (Sony Ericsson w890i) and even on that, I can set multiple alarms and specify for each of them what day of the week they're allowed to go off. I basically never have to worry about (un)setting an alarm - it goes off like it should on weekdays and stays silent at weekends. I also like the fact that it makes my bedroom pitch black - no lights anywhere. Although I realise that completely dark alarm clocks also exist, of course.
So, to summarise - mobile phone alarms do everything a normal alarm clock does plus more and it all comes for free since you likely already have a mobile phone. Why have a normal alarm clock? The one argument I could see is that you want your phone switched off, yet your ability to know the time, even at night, intact. In that case, fair enough.
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?
Doesn't matter who you are or what you like, there's going to be a few people in the group that end up making the rest look bad. Look no further than the usual dozens of posts in stories such as this one that are either blatant Apple ass-kissing, or anti-Apple flame that usually isn't even related to the issue at hand.
Some of us like our Macs (or other Apple products) but get annoyed by the people who criticize anyone who uses anything else. Why the hell some people care so much about what kinds of computer devices other people use is beyond me.
Yep, and then we could wait for months while the carriers fart around rolling out an update for your particular phone's version of android. If they ever do get around to it.
I mean, "Yay, android and open source. Boo apple."
(am I doin it rite?)
The problem isn't that iOS is not open source, the problem is that Apple didn't fix the bug after it appeared a month ago in Australia.
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!
I don't know anybody under the age of thirty who doesn't use their phone as an alarm clock.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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!
I work rotating shift work with a lot of overtime, so my phone is one among several of my alarms (including my watch and two alarm clocks). I'm also a very heavy sleeper, so I need a lot of agitation to get me up. In total, I have 3 alarms on my watch, 6 on my phone, and 2 on each of my alarm clocks. I need them all.
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.
It's Daylight Saving Time.
Not Daylight Savings Time.
It's true. I use my mobile phone as an alarm every day, and I've been doing so for about 5 years now.
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...
I use a Nintendo DS as an alarm clock (because it's one of the few things I have to hand that I remember to keep the battery charged on...) and it woke me an hour early today (I'm in Europe). I wonder why the iPhone bug went the other way?
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
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...
My phone charges on the bed stand right next to me. I have the phone alarm set at 4:00 AM.
I have the radio alarm clock set at 4:04 AM to blare horrible music at me.
The incentive for me to get up and turn off the radio alarm clock before the horrible music starts playing is greater than my desire for 4 minutes of extra sleep.
I haven't been late since switching to the method.
Mod parent up.
Most alarm clocks are way less reliable, especially if you're in a not particularly stable power grid. And my iPhone can be set, to be ridiculously loud, and shock me awake. Which is what it takes.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Oh also, I get to set rules, such as wake me up at this time on Monday to Thursday. This time on Friday, this time on the weekend. And once off at this time. All with different ringers.
Never had such a valuable alarm clock.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I can't recall talking with anyone about what they use as an alarm clock. Is that really something you have conversations about or do you really sleep around a lot?
I use mine as an alarm clock.
Isn't that a bit drastic? And don't you run out of people who step on the mines for you every morning?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
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?).
You obviously don't know me.
However, unlike the iPhone, my alarm clock does adjust itself for daylight savings.
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!
I'm under thirty and I don't use my phone as an alarm. You can now consider that you "know" me ;) Two reasons - 1) my clock radio gives me, you know, radio - something interesting, different and relevant each day (local news and a song or two) and 2) my phone is a phone, so the alarm is horrendous. Some of us can't afford these overpriced smart gizmos and have to make do with 10 year old £15 clock radios.
Alarm clock? I haven't needed an alarm clock for almost 4 years.
I'm sure it's merely a coincidence that my eldest child is almost 4 years old now.
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...
how many people do you know?
Yo.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
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.
Cut caffeene and go to be earlier. That fixes the "very heavy sleeper" problem. IT did for me and my wife.
My buddy fixed it by spending 3 years in Iraq. he used to sleep as if he was dead in college... now a fly farting in his room has him awake...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And yet it still cant do what Mine does....
Wake me 15 minutes early if is snowed last night. No you cant buy it, I built it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"I wonder why the iPhone bug went the other way?"
Apple - Think different.
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! :)
My phone is rechargeable. Aren't iPhones?
Do you have a dedicated device to duplicate the functionality of every feature of your phone that you might want to use? I really can't see the objection. It works as an alarm clock for most people 363 days of the year. Okay, so it doesn't work correctly twice a year, but nobody would have expected that so it's not exactly illogical to use it for this function. There's also the advantage - at least if an iphone's alarm clock is at least as good as the default one on my PoS J2ME based phone - is that you can set the alarm to only go off on weekdays.
Because the DS doesn't adjust to daylight savings time automatically? Just a guess.
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 used to use my Nokia brick phone as an alarm clock. It was simple and easy to set it to the time I wanted it to wake me up the next morning (which varies from day to day), and I could also set it to be in quiet mode for X hours so it would ring for phone calls in the morning, but not before I wanted to wake up.
Then I got a Blackberry, which despite being a whole lot more expensive and is supposedly for people 'on the go', only has a fixed-time alarm clock and doesn't let you set timed audio modes (except for fixed schedules).
I kept using the Nokia as a clock until it died, after which I dug out of the closet a speaking alarm clock made by Seiko in 1985 that works like new.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I do. all the time. Well, twice.
If I am not traveling, I don't use an alarm clock at all. I just get up when I am done sleeping and get ready for work. I usually get to work a little after 9, but nobody gives me any grief about it because I work until 6 or 7. Also, having woken up naturally, I am more alert and focused than the rest of the people who are barely able to keep their eyes open even with their 64 ounce mugs of coffee or $10 Starbucks concoctions.
When I am traveling, and especially when I go east, I usually need an alarm clock because it is earlier than I am used to getting up. I find myself much less alert. I still don't use my phone as an alarm clock. I prefer the clock radio that all hotel rooms have. I don't have to worry about the battery running down and the alarm thus not going off.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Those of us who have been around long enough to really like open source, had to do that years ago.
Slashdot is mostly full of foaming-at-the-mouth "Free as in Libre" types who respond to almost everything with "that wouldn't have happened on open source" and who like to deride anything that is closed source.
Anyone who has used it long enough to either see a piece of software that is covered in warts, or just simply can't be made to do what a commercial products does knows better -- open source can be good. But, it isn't automatically good by virtue of being open source.
For almost everyone else in the world, the rabid "open source" fanboi-ism mostly leads to the conclusion that you should back away without making eye contact lest you have to endure a lecture from some kid who hasn't been around long enough to understand where this stuff breaks down.
It has it's place, but it's by no means a cure-all. Sometimes, it just creates crappy, unmaintained software.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Why am I picturing some crazy Rube Goldberg device which hangs a snow collection device out the window that sinks down as it fills with snow and then sets some crazy machine motion that turns on your alarm clock? ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hi, nice to meet you, now you do.
I USED to use my phone as an alarm clock when I was in-between houses and couch-jumping from friend to friend - all of which who still live with their parents.
All in all though - I'm terrible at getting myself out of bed. Sleep is like a drug, my semi-conscious self in the mornings will battle it out mentally on whether I can spare another 5 minutes with my eyes closed or not. My phone, being a touch device, can dismiss the alarm with a simple mash, and that'll be the end of it.
Whereas my alarm clock, even with the snooze button, will continue to go off every 9 minutes at least. I've used this to my advantage though - since I know It usually takes me hitting the snooze button 5 times before getting out of bed, I just set my alarm 45 minutes early. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in actuallity I get less sleep this way, but it works for me.
Point is though - phones today don't cater to this rather niche area where I want to be able to look over and see what time it is whenever, and not have to pickup my phone or anything. Likewise, I want a large snooze button, and a simple way to turn it off but not so simple you can do it without some focus.
And in before someone says "Why don't you just put your alarm clock (or phone) across the room, forcing you to get out of bed before you turn it off?"
I have tried this, and it results in me falling back to sleep on the floor and not in my bed, which isn't pleasant to wake up to.
Your DS probably went off at the wrong time either because the alarm didn't care about the time but rather the time left until it should go off, or it didn't adjust for daylight saving at all, or because it wanted to ring at the same solar time and adjusted the alarm too. The summary is a mystery, because TFA says that's what the iphone did as well. Lie-in in this case meant one extra hour of sleep after the alarm went off an hour early.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
This is actually why Google has been moving more and more of the apps in Android to being Market based rather than attached to the System. Examples would be Maps, Gmail and YouTube already. Screw the carriers and hardware mfg's not getting crap up to date. Just update all we can via the Market!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
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.
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.
And my iPhone can be set, to be ridiculously loud, and shock me awake.
With just a slight adjustment to the included rectal probe...
I had no idea millions of people used their phone as an alarm clock.
I sure as heck do. I have conference calls at all sorts of weird times, but only occasionally. Using a normal alarm clock would require me to check my calendar every night before bed to see if I need to adjust the setting on my alarm clock. Since my phone has my calendar in it, I just go to bed, confident that my phone will wake me up 15 minutes before any meeting I have to attend. Or if I don't have a meeting, it wakes me up at my regular time (or one hour later on weekends and holidays). It also works when I'm traveling in different time zones, etc.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The iPhone probably stores the time in UTC, like OS X. When daylight savings time ends, that only changes the offset from UTC that is used when displaying time. The alarm was either always stored as UTC or converted to UTC so real time clock hardware can generate an interrupt to wake the phone at the appropriate time.
Less reliable? Most alarm clock have a place for a battery, which solves the issue of unstable power grids. I've never had an alarm clock crash overnight, or be so lagged with crap programs running that the alarm program either didn't run or started late. I've never had an alarm clock lock up.
I use my phone as an alarm for convenience, but I recognize that it's less reliable. I've had all of the above happen to me with various phones.
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!
> Most alarm clocks are way less reliable,
Quote your source. I think you just made that up. Anecdotally, all my phones have been very unreliable as alarms (an iPhone's battery only lasts about 2 days for starters, so frequently goes flat). In fact on many mobile phones, the alarm doesn't even sound if you've accidentally turned the phone off or if it's battery is too low (ancient Nokia's excepted). My mains alarm has never failed - even during a 3 day power cut (it's lithium battery back up lasts around a 4 years or so and can sound the alarm even when the display is off). Many are also not daylight-savings aware resulting in the same glitch featured in this article. Many get their time off the cell network, which frequently seems to balls-up and sets your phones time to be something random while they're playing with the phone network during the night.
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.
Twenty somethings generally do make a habit of crashing at friends' places at least now and then. Whether or not that involves any *wink, wink - nudge, nudge* is immaterial to the issue.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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)
my phone is a phone, so the alarm is horrendous
Isn't that, you know, a good thing for an alarm? It's supposed to jar you awake, not make sweet love to you.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Honestly in the last year or so I've done both. I have an old (as in older-than-me old) clock radio, but sometimes I forget to set it and the phone saves my ass. Sometimes I forget to put my phone in my room and clock radio saves my ass. In general I'm too scattered to rely on one or the other alone anymore, but then most of my twenties are behind me. For the better part of a decade I used my phone alarm and nothing else.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I take it you missed the "rotating shift work" bit. Being required to constantly change your sleep cycle is not conductive to good sleep.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Dude, I grew up in the Seattle metro area. Those are my people, for better or worse, respectively.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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.
I use mine as a secondary alarm clock since I find it very difficult to get motivated in the morning, but need to be at work by 7. Having two alarm clocks allows me to use one as a way to pull myself out of a deep sleep, and having a second across the room forces me to get out of bed.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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.
Yes, and this is one of many reasons that I hate BlackBerries and cannot wait for RIM's marketshare to go down the toilet when people realize that what they are paying for just email could pay for rich content on better platforms with companies that don't routinely sell out to corrupt Middle Eastern governments. Fucking RIM.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I don't have a phone with an alarm clock on it, but I do have a clock/flashlight/alarmclock that also has phone (and text) capabilities... does that count?
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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 worked rotating shift for 12 years. 1 week 1st, 1week 2nd 1 week 3rd, back to 1st... etc... and YES making sure you get a solid 9 hours of in bed time and cutting out caffeine completely made a huge difference.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I figured you were the type to make up nonsense and pass it off as facts.. you suck at bullshit.
My Nokia alerts me even when Off - all of them did, since my first in '98. It obviously keeps a dedicated alarm system that triggers the booting of the main chip.
What, you need to keep your cellphone on to alert you?
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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 phone is Off during the night, so it can't crash or lock up, yet it still wakes me up. Seriously, Nokias can do that since the nighties. Do you actually need to keep your cellphone on to alert you?
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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.
You suck at understanding things which are obviously jokes and not statements-of-fact.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
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 $15 every three months because I use hardly any voice minutes.
In general I think it's a bad idea to rely on cellphones as alarm clocks. I don't know if this is true for all of them but at least for the phones I've had, the clock stays synced with the nearest tower and if there is no service within range, there is no clock. So if there's no service, there's no alarm, and that makes the phone completely useless during travel in unpopulated areas. I've also missed alarms because a technical difficulty of some sort disabled a nearby phone tower.
So now, I use a regular battery-backed alarm clock at home and I use a simple portable alarm clock for travel. Reliable and unbreakable.
/* No Comment */
It's not a better phone. It's not a better computer. It's not a better alarm clock, calculator, translator, dictionary, book, mp3 player, flashlight, cigarette lighter, gaming console, and it sure as hell is not a better pen.
My brother does. He uses a (very loud) air raid siren as his wakeup tone. Well, he used that tone until he scared the crap out of others in the dorm at 6 AM.
and where I live, DST does not make much sense eighter. The reason being, apart from the short transitional periods, it doesn't make much of a difference anyway. In the summer, we got sunlight 24 hours every day so it doesn't really matter what timezone you follow. And of course in the winter, its the opposite and if you manage to see the sun at all you should consider yourself lucky.
Mine does too. It also auto-sets itself if there's a power interruption. Set the thing once and forget about it.
I'm under 30 and I have always had a side table alarm clock. It has a very reliable 9 volt backup battery as well. I once disconnected the clock's power cord and it happily went on doing its daily job for a whole month until the battery died. It has a radio, three different alarm presets, time/date, and it cost me 8$.
I also use a DS as an alarm. It's surprisingly good as an alarm even if you have to set it every day. The auto-snooze is handy, too many alarms either don't shut up or shut up permenently, both of which don't suit my habbit of lying in bed for 10-15 minutes after waking.
How do you get 9 hours of in-bed time when you've just gotten home from work, haven't eaten in 9 hours, and have to be up to get ready to go back to work in 5 hours? I mean, without breaking the laws of physics.
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. )
Yup. My old WinMo phone and my Android phone both have to be on for the alarm to work. My old Motorola candy-bar phone (I don't remember the model) was the same.
23 here, i actually use http://kukuklok.com/ on the electronic sound setting.
with full 5.1 surround sound on full blast. entire house is up at 6am sharp. we all have to get up then.
if this sound doesn't wake you up....you need professional help.
-Noc
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."
My alarm clock does that, I can set an alarm for each day of the week. During the week I like to be awakened by a little AM country music radio. On the weekends if I'm not up by a reasonable time I get some soothing bird sounds.
And to the GP's point, I've got a 2xAA battery backup built right in just in case of power failure. I like being able to go to bed at night without having to make sure I have my phone on the nightstand. Sometimes I just leave the phone in my pocket, but I never have to worry about missing the alarm.
I had similar problems. 9 Minutes of snooze is far too long, I was back in deep sleep by then. 5 minutes work much better. Now I have to hit snooze not quite as often as before, and even if I do, the time wasted is much shorter.
The disadvantage of most alarm clocks is however that you cannot change he snooze length, whereas my phone can.
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. :-)
Who knows to be honest. About half(~100) of the PC's at my shop rolled back, and ~50 mobile units did the same thing. At home 2 of my 4 pc's rolled back, and I'm in Canada. I have no idea what happened or why.
Om, nomnomnom...
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).
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.
My Nokia alerts me even when Off - all of them did, since my first in '98. It obviously keeps a dedicated alarm system that triggers the booting of the main chip.
What, you need to keep your cellphone on to alert you?
I don't know TBH. I've never tried. I don't really use my phone as an alarm anyway. That being said, the battery on my phone is sufficient such that I don't generally turn it off anyway. Maybe I'm unusual in that regard, but something tells me I'm not.
Just don't live in a place that follows Daylight Savings Time...Aloha!
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.
If I had someone asleep on my couch who couldn't be woken up by calling his name, or face poking...I think i'd call an ambulance. That sounds like "coma" not "asleep".
The Palm Pre and Pixi, when placed on the Touchstone magnetic induction charging dock, function as you described (displays time, large snooze button during alarms).
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
That makes me want to move somewhere snow is a genuine possibility, just so I can build one too!
Just use Apple Time Machine to get to work on time.
I have a roommate that's notoriously difficult to wake up, so instead i just play his ringtone for work. He can't ignore it because he'd risk his job, so he always ends up getting up. But boy does he resent me for an hour or two.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
I don't like the idea that if I forget to charge my phone (a regular occurrence) I could lose my job. Plug in alarm clock with battery backup that is set to the morning news is my preference.
Also, Irony: In an article discussing the failure of certain iPhone models to properly adjust the alarm clock to account for daylight savings, we have a commenter arguing that the reliability of an iPhone alarm is better than that of a standard alarm clock.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
I've always wondered why the snooze on alarms always seems to be set for 9 minutes. That has never really made sense to me.
PS. My $5 Walmart radio alarm clock has an adjustable snooze.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
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:
I could afford a $20 alarm clock... until I bought a $300 phone with a $100 monthly bill. Now I cannot.
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
There's "wakes you up" and there's "jerks you awake suddenly in a way that makes you feel you've had a bad night even if you didn't". Maybe that's just me, though, since I don't struggle with getting up once my alarm goes off. The shrill beeps that my phone does is something that I avoid unless I have to (e.g. I'm on a work trip).
As a more extreme example, think of the old mechanical alarm clocks with the two bells and the hammer. My wife thought one of those would be nice, until three days of feeling stressed/jumpy/terrified when the alarm went off *really* load. It went not long after.
Ugh. You're like my parents. My dad gets up to the sound of a radio at the volume of a whisper. I don't know how they do it. Unless a bomb goes off in my ear it's pretty hard to wake me, especially as I have to get up ungodly early and catch a commuter train across three counties.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
363 days a year - not quite. It stopped working the day daylight savings starts and is still broken.. and will be until Apple releases a patch. One month and counting ..
- Chuq
Presumably if you reset it it will work correctly until the clocks go forward again.
Yes, in fact, I did notice that, and was remarking on the fact that this story has basically morphed into "APPLE GETS EURO-PEENS FIRED FROM DEY JERBS BECUZ DEYS LATE AGIN!"
As opposed to the far more accurate, and less sensationalist, "A few people overslept for work this morning because their alarms didn't go off when they expected them to."
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.
I've tried, but my phone enjoys switching between two time zones at its own desire just to mess with me.
This is anecdotally for me. I've had heaps of alarm clocks, and they've all failed me. People seem to think the 9v battery option makes them perfect, but I've never had a good experience with that.
I live in a location with heaps of little power outages, and the occasional big power outage. I believe that the little ones (5 seconds to 10 minutes), slowly kill the battery, such that when the big ones come around (10 minutes to 20 hours) it doesn't work.
My parents both live in the area, both have different alarm clocks, and both have the same problem. We've all had various alarm clocks which have had this problem.
I've been using this phone as my alarm clock for little under 2 years these days, and it's only failed me once (when it woke me up too early). It has automatically adjusted for daylight saving time, it is always exactly the right time, it runs multiple rules. For example I set it to wake me at a certain time with a certain alarm, Monday to Thursday. At another time with another alarm Friday. At another time with another alarm on the weekends. And I set multiple general alarms for other things throughout the day.
Overall the iPhone is the best alarm I've come across. It works far better than the alarm clocks I've used, and used to run in tandem. But these days, it is perfect.
While this bug was a hiccup, it wasn't that big of a deal, and I just moved my alarm forward and hour. In 4.2 they're releasing a patch for this, and I'll be on it quickly, and test it out.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I leave my phone in another room, because if any alarm is near me, before I properly wake up, I will turn it off and go back to bed.
So my iPhone is actually about 15 meters away, on the other side of a door, connected to my computer via USB.
It wakes me up by shocking me awake with its "Alarm" sound. It works well, I used to use "Buzzer" on alarms to wake me up. I don't wake up if its just music.
I've had nothing but bad experiences with alarm clocks, since I've had the iPhone, its become my alarm clock, and has only failed me once with this update. Also, it was easy to compensate for the problem.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yep. This is a single failure in the several years I've had one.
In comparison, my parents alarm clocks have failed them numerous times.
I don't understand how so many people on here seem to have these awesome alarm clocks that always work never stuff up, have all the same features and kick ass. I've had many alarm clocks, they've all had heaps of problems. This is the first alarm clock I've been happy with, and has (except for this single instance, which was quickly adjusted for by me) been extremely reliable.
I never forget to charge my phone, I charge it religiously. However, I have had an instance where it got quite low, into the red and I recall that when the alarm went off, it just woke up and went off. Only if the battery is dead will it not go off.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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...
The problem with the standard ones that have a red LED display and take a 9V battery as a back up is that the circuitry was designed in the 1970's and no one has bothered to change it since. When they have power, they keep time by the 60Hz line frequency, which is fine. When the power goes off, they use a RC oscillator that is not only really inaccurate, it drains the battery like crazy (about 1-2 days for a fresh battery). Really, there is no reason why a 9V battery shouldn't be able to keep the time a good part of a decade at this point.
The solution would be to find one of the ones that uses a LCD display. They generally keep good time when the power goes out, and the battery power will last a long time. You don't even really need to have it plugged in unless you want to have the backlight on all the time.
Every phone I've owned, if featuring an alarm clock, didn't require me to keep it turned on to wake me up. Even the cheapest ones. I was surprised when I discovered that my Android phone didn't alert me when it was turned off, and now I learn that the iPhone has the same limitation. It's strange because even my old Motorola, which is american-designed, does turn itself on for the alarm. I'll bet Apple will add this feature in the iPhone 7, and then every technical analyst on the Internet will proclaim that Apple has revolutionised the market of alarm clocks.
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?
Sure. But if it were (properly) open source, the bug would have been patched long ago, and any user still inconvenienced by it would have themselves to blame (and could easily find instructions to fix it).
I have a 3G and it's time to upgrade. This --- very real example of the inconvenience created by closed source --- is the single biggest reason I have identified to switch away from iphone.
My Samsung Galaxy (Android) did the same thing.. It altered the time okay, but for some reason woke me at 5am instead of 6am.
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Otherwise I'm sorry and invite you for some starkes ale when we meet.
I have some good experience with Finnish friends
Quit working in a 19th century mill.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
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.