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iPhone Alarms Hit By New Year's Bug
An anonymous reader writes "Non-recurring iPhone alarms stopped working on January 1 for devices running iOS 4.02, 4.1, and 4.2.1. Apparently, it will fix itself by January 3, and the current workaround is to set the alarm to repeat. My girlfriend wasn't impressed, sleeping in, and I wasn't either, having to race her to work!"
Uh oh, I see Apple bashing coming. Defend yourselves
Date issues... These have been "known problems" for ages, there are libraries for this. Why aren't those being used?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
They're probably (like me,) old nokia candy bar phone users. You could leave the battery dead for a week where the phone wouldn't even power on, but it would still wake up and tell you to go hop in the shower for work for another week or so. Phone clock (and more importantly, phone alarm clock) software has been stable and 100% trustworthy now for over a decade. I still have two extra (wall plug) alarm clocks for those occasions when you absolutely have to be there on time, but my phones have served me well as my primary alarm solution for the last 10 years, am i'm sure that's the case for most other people, as well.
moox. for a new generation.
Why so much noise, won't ordering a wake-up call to that same phone work better?
Day light saving errors, new year errors, do they just have crappy coders at apple?
Apple can't quite seem to get that alarm working right. This isn't the first time. My Android based phone hasn't had any issues with the alarm, but since I work from home it's not as much of an issue.
well you could have an alarm clock like mine that randomly started passing time at a much faster pace so that at 1am your 8am alarm is blasting. That's when I started relying primary on my phone over a normal alarm clock.
Errr, why NOT use a phone as an alarm clock? Virtually every smart phone typically needs to be charged daily. If it doesn't need to be, generally people do anyways. Plug it in, let it charge overnight while you're sleeping, alarm wakes you in the morning, ready to go and fully charged.
It's *better* than your average AC alarm clock, as a power failure throughout the night won't interfere with your alarm. The phone's battery keeps you covered. I've been using my cell phones as alarm clocks for, well, as long as cell phones have had alarm clocks. I've never once had a problem with it.
And I've certainly never once considered getting a 'traditional' alarm clock since having a phone that could do the job just fine and, thanks to the magic of custom alarm/ringtones, much less offensively.
Meh.
See, this is why you need to convince your girlfriend to get into the habit of morning sex. There is no alarm clock more reliable than the human wang and as an added bonus there is no snooze button either :P
Monstar L
Thinking back to the Zune clock bug error, that one affected only a single model because the bug was in the interface between a particular brand and model of RTC hardware and the kernel.
Is this a similar error, confined to a driver issue with one platform's RTC, or is it an error in logic somewhere higher up the stack, and thus going to occur on all iDevices of a given firmware level?
Mine didn't go off to get me up for work. Fortunately I woke up only 10 minutes after it was supposed to go off. Apple released a comment saying they were unaware of any reason this could happen, but as the article above said it should resolve by Monday.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
This is like the third slashdot reported instance of a Y2K style timing bug and the last was in 2010 when 9++ = kaboom lol. It's unbelievable that people still leave glitches like this in their software. Is time really that hard to calculate and program around? People still can't program their software mere months out from a year rollover to be able to handle it?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
OMG, it is self aware, has introspection and can self improve? Now I know what all the Apple fans love it so much.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Why shouldn't I use a phone as an alarm clock? I have been using my phone as my 'watch' and as my alarm clock since getting my first mobile back in 1999.
It has multiple advantages:
1) It allows me to set the required waking time during the day when I'm at work and find out what will be my schedule tomorrow, do I have a 8:00 meeting that I need a bit of preparation, etc.
2) Alarm clocks usually have a single alarm time and don't work well for multiple people - I want to keep napping if my wife's alarm rings first and vice versa;
3) The phone is always with me - it ensures that I can stay with my clock habits when on a hotel on business trip or when I'm staying over at a friends place - no need to bother with different options;
4) On decent mobiles, alarm clock function works even when the phone is turned off due to low battery - the screen and calls are off, but the alarm still ran;
5) It's more accurate than an alarm clock - since it must sync time with the operator anyway for proper functioning, it's always accurate, I never have to adjust it (as for a watch), and it handles daylight savings time automagically.
Frankly, the only issue is how deeply faulty your testing process has to be to ship with such bugs in core functions such as clock and making calls? It's not a frigging computer you're shipping, it's a consumer device for which these functions are not 'additionally included applets', but main features of the product...
This just isn't a plausible claim. As if "anonymous reader" has a girlfriend. Now I've heard everything.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I remember learning the correct date formulas in the first semester. What's so hard about them?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I started using my phone as an alarm clock after discovering that although a backup battery will allow a regular alarm clock to keep the time through a power failure, the alarm will not ring if the power is out at the time of the alarm.
Yeah, most won't do this.
I use one of those bose wave radio things as my alarm though, and that does ring the alarm if the clock is running off the backup battery.
I use my phone for alarms because it's the thing all my other alarms and alerts are in. I have a lot fewer missed alarms using my phone than I did when I used physical alarm clocks, which are much more failure prone in my experience.
Heck, I don't think I even own a clock anymore. Why would I bother? I have many things which reliably know the time.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It just works.
For what it's worth, I've never taken a CS class. As to whether that makes me underqualified or not, well, I guess that's up to the rest of the world to decide, but my employer seems happy with me.
So, let's see.
1. You seem to assume that shareware is bad code, but quite a lot of the shareware I've used over the years has been excellent.
2. Nothing to do with "Apps" has anything to do with the built-in clock and alarm in the iPhone, which is part of the Apple-provided stuff, presumably developed by relatively qualified developers.
3. You have this rant about "Visual Basic". Whatever. I have an app in the app store, and I have never in my life touched VB.
4. Who cares about a 4-year BS? For crying out loud, I never even finished high school, nor did I get a GED. Instead, I hopped on over to doing college, where I got a BA in Psychology.
Just given the quality of this rant, if I had to choose between you and whoever wrote the code with this bug in it, I'd probably take the author of the buggy code, because that person might just have made a silly mistake, which most people do from time to time. I know you're incoherent; I'll take someone I just know made a single mistake over totally incoherent any day.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The point is that the iOS time routines are unreliable. You need a redundant clock/alarm that doesn't run on iOS.
This bug is AMAZING. It will revolutionize the way you get fired.
I bought my girlfriend an iPhone, and the damn thing seems to set off the alarm at random times.
However, when I look at that thing, my Nokia N95 looks like crap in comparison. I'm no Apple fanboy, but I am really impressed with that thing.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I remember learning the correct date formulas in the first semester. What's so hard about them?
They were different by second semester. The problem with rolling your own date/time functions is that people keep switching things, adding a second to a year due to a close earth asteroid or switching when DST is applied. The problem with using the common libraries is that you need to update the library regularly and trust that the library maintainer is doing the above.
Don't be surprised that this keeps happening. Writing reliable software as mundane as the clock routines just isn't going to impress anyone. Everyone assumes that the existing, broken & untested date time routines works fine. We all know what happens when you make an assumption...
these are simple errors that anyone who has written clock and alarm code should be aware of to begin with. It's not like date and time algorithms change very often or without a lot of fanfare.
That's probably the sort of thinking that resulted in the bug in the first place. Dealing with time zones and daylight savings issues and the goofy calendar is a big pain in the ass. It's easy to get it subtly wrong. I doubt there's a programmer alive who hasn't made at least one mistake in dealing with time and dates.
I suggest we adopt a 12 month 30 day calendar, with a five day holiday at the end of the year (six days for leap year.) And no friggin' daylight savings.
Really? Is that what really happened?
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
I don't understand why you use a phone as an alarm clock.
Because I already have it, and don't want to go out and buy another alarm clock when I already have something that functions perfectly well.
Qxe4
Why do you even need an alarm clock to wake up? Your body's own clock works pretty well. Whenever I have to get up at a predetermined time, I just repeat loudly " Wake up at $time", before going off to sleep, and I have consistently had positive results, waking up anywhere from 15 - 30 mins before the desired time.
There are several comments like this. What sort of alarm clocks are you guys using? My $20 alarm will work just fine with the electricity out. The only difference is that without power the time is not projected onto the ceiling. The alarm and the clock don't get affected at all.
4. Who cares about a 4-year BS? For crying out loud, I never even finished high school, nor did I get a GED. Instead, I hopped on over to doing college, where I got a BA in Psychology.
So you're the guy who wrote the $999.99 app? Excellent use of your degree.
The last $20 alarm clock I used that had a battery backup would keep poor time, and run many minutes fast every time it when on battery.. even with the battery it would start blinking and want to be reset just to be sure..
Also those alarm clocks just take up space, travelling? Yet another thing to pack, you could figure out the hotel alarm clock or ask for a wakeup call but it is still convenient to have your own alarm. Many people have stopped wearing a watch because they have a phone with them everywhere.
I really can't believe this is a problem.. I figure someone at Apple is getting fired over this..
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
"...My girlfriend wasn't impressed, sleeping in, and I wasn't either, having to race her to work!"
So for once in your life, you have an iron-clad excuse as to why you were late to work (posted on Slashdot, confirmed by vendor), and you're bitching?
That is sad, when you really think about it. Sad.
I wasn't thinking about traveling. I sure don't pack a clock. And I don't trust those crazy "sleep system" alarms in hotels. I both set my phone alarm and ask for a wake up call.
I hope we've all made time and date mistakes before, that I'm not the only one. I wrote some accounting software that ran a script every hour that calculated a set of numbers for billing information. Each hour the script would run, then at midnight another script would run to calculate the average hourly total for the day. To calculate the average, I merely added each hour's numbers together then divided by 24. My fatal mistake was assuming each day contained 24 hours, which would normally be true, except for one day. This specific day, the script ran only 23 times instead of 24 due to daylight savings time skipping an hour. The mistake lead to an artificially deflated average and quite the yelling from my boss. You would think we programmers could assume something simple like there being 24 hours in a day, but apparently our time and date system wasn't invented by a programmer.
I don't understand why you use a phone as an alarm clock. For one it depends on a single power supply, or you have to charge it overnight next to your bed. Second, it uses software prone to bugs. I use a normal alarm clock on 220V, with a backup battery. It invariably goes of in time...
Because it is there, is an alarm clock, and that is good enough for those of us who aren't alarm clock elitists.
Also what is this "single power supply" business? Most alarm clocks you plug into the wall don't have backup power or aren't actually using the backup power option (who actually puts backup batteries in?), phone alarm clocks do. Power goes out on my alarm clock that plugs in, it won't go off. My phone would though.
You are aware that the 9volt dosent run the alarm if the power is off, only keeps the clock on time and the alarm in memory, I lent the hard way on that.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
You and GP seem to be playing a game of "trolling by pretending that whatever works for me obviously would work for everyone else." Seems fun, so I'll jump on:
Why would anyone need to "wake up?" I just contracted fatal familial insomnia and won't go to sleep for several months until I die.
The rest just wing it; never mind that not every CS degree makes you a programmer. Some untrained people are good, but from the rest we have buggy code like these alarms; nobody tests their products well because updates are "easy."
This is the alarm clock program that ships with the iPhone. Apple does not hire untrained programmers to write the iPhone's core apps, nor does it hire bottom of the range code monkeys. It hires qualified and experienced people who somehow still make mistakes like this. The difference between a good and a bad programmer is that a bad programmer will write a thousand line solution to a problem like this over the course of a week, it will have hundreds of edge cases because of its needless complexity and will fail in some cases. A great programmer will write a ten line solution in an hour that is elegant and captures the essence of the problem and the patterns within, but it will still fail, because the great programmer only spent an hour thinking about it and nobody can think through everything in an hour. This is why we have testing.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
We've gotta nap for that!
What's to excuse? Bugs happen, they get fixed.
Two points here.
First of all, it's not the first time a stupid but major bug is found in iOS alarm app.
Second, it's a major issue. Alarm not going off at the right time is a bug that would be classified as "critical" under any sane categorization system - it's the most basic, fundamental function of the application not working properly. Even worse, alarm is by its nature a "mission critical" app - unlike most other stuff, which is annoying but mostly harmless when it fails, this one really trips you up. Consequently, it should be heavily tested.
And this leads us to another issue... these kinds of bugs, both this one and the one back in November, show that unit and functional testing coverage of the alarm app in iOS is really horrible. I mean, DST change and year change? It's some of the most obvious and basic corner cases that you write tests for, especially in an application that specifically deals with time! It's practically textbook stuff, or an interview question for QA position. And so it's extremely surprising when that kind of thing goes wrong in production.
I actually do this, I swear! I haven`t had an alarm clock for years now. I MAY be ten to fifteen minutes late waking up once or twice a year - tops. This includes odd times for holidays and awaydays etc.
I can`t be the only one surely ("you are - and don`t call me Shirley").
Oh yeah. Happy new year, everybody.
Llike with building services do _not_ trust any single device not to fail.
Instead use any two different type wake-up devices whenever it's important to get up at certain time. If it isn't that important then any single device will do the job usually.
Why would anyone need to "wake up?" I just contracted fatal familial insomnia and won't go to sleep for several months until I die.
Did it help?
Though last year they failed to charge the battery for some reason.
Yeah, why the fuck would I want to use a feature on a device that I paid quite a lot of money for? In fact, why are we using our iPhones as anything other than a fucking phone?!
(Note: For the slow amongst you, this post is laden with sarcasm).
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
and the 2nd being Sunday, I am actually surprised how many people have crappy jobs that hey had to get up for on the weekends.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Trollbot is boring.
One of the first actions that I take when arriving in a hotel room is to disconnect the alarm clock, so that the room at night is not illuminated by its red LCD glow!
What's to excuse? Bugs happen, they get fixed. This one becomes a non-issue in two more days.
-jcr
I have a Despair Inc. poster hanging in my office that was made just for people like you -
"Mediocrity: It takes a lot less time and most people won't notice the difference until it's too late."
1. There is nothing unexpected about a new year, guess what... there's going to be a new one in 364 days.
2. This isn't the first time this has happened.
3. This isn't even a hard problem to solve OR test.
never mind that not every CS degree makes you a programmer
No CS degree makes you a programmer. They make you a Computer Scientist.
Proper testing is a function of Software Engineering. This isn't some nitpick: they're completely different fields that both happen to often involve computers, and are frequently confused by many people who go to school to learn CS when what they really want is to be a programmer.
This is exactly the kind of bug I'd expect from someone with a CS degree, fresh out of college and working their first SE job.
I don't understand why you use a phone as an alarm clock. For one it depends on a single power supply, or you have to charge it overnight next to your bed. Second, it uses software prone to bugs. I use a normal alarm clock on 220V, with a backup battery. It invariably goes of in time...
This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. A normal alarm clock runs on 110V, everyone knows this.
But a regular alarm clock that runs only on batteries will ring just fine in a power failure. They can take years to drain those batteries, too...
"the alarm will not ring if the power is out at the time of the alarm."
Mine does. It's an irritating high-pitched beeping, but it still goes off. Maybe you just have a crappy alarm clock.
I agree on both counts, that it is a) stupid to rely on a phone as your alarm. It's a phone use it as such. Also b) this kind of bug is still inexcusable.
just that.
There was enough time to fix this an several other updates were pushed out since this happened last,
so i'm not impressed by the job Apple does here.
- Hubert
I'm not too sure about other phones, but my N900 will power itself off once the battery is empty; yet still leaves enough power for it to trigger the alarm in the morning.
The only time this 'feature' annoyed me when I once was unable to turn the alarm off once my battery was empty (and I didn't have my charger with me); Then again, it also saved me a few times, because I forgot to charge it.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
The bug is inexcusable, yes, but so is relying on a phone and not an alarm clock to get up for work on time.
Except this bug is for one off alarms, not reoccurring. You would not want to reset your hard to set bedside alarm just for one day.
Or you could just use one of these.
http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=mechanical+alarm+clock&hl=en&cid=3439387371748796012&ei=ZVkgTdX5HoGI-gbkoNCzCw&sa=title&ved=0CAoQ8wIwATgA#p
No worries about electricity at all.
Oh, really? Relying on a phone for one of its simplest features is "inexcusable"? Mobile phones have been able to do this reliably for more than a decade. It's practically an Apple-only problem: for everyone else, it "just works".
But yeah, let's blame the victim.
Hard to set bedside alarm?
Turn a knob and pull out a button, versus tons of keypresses.
Have you ever owned a decent alarm clock?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Mechanical sometimes make precision hard, but precision is not necessary.
Digital almost always requires numerous button presses, while holding down one button. And if you go past your time then you have to cycle forward till you hit your time.
Everybody uses their phones as alarm clocks now.
Simply because it works reasonably well, is always on hand and works the same way at home, on business trips and vacations. And has a battery backup.
People simply assume the alarm function to be much too simple to allow even the stupidest developers to not get them right. Nobody expects people to mess up simple functions like that. And nobody expects the device itself to report the wrong time. For that reason, developers who can't get an alarm app working should be fired straight away. And OS developers who can't get their OS to report the correct time for each and every case should not only not be developing OS'es, but only be allowed to develop static HTML web pages for the rest of their careers.
Just how did you get into college without a GED or HSD? In the USA, as far as I'm aware of, not one single place will accept you without that as a demonstration of a minimum level of educational development.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is absolutely correct. CS is not software engineering, it's not programming, and it's not computer engineering.
CS = Theory and research into computation. What is computable, on what sort of machine, in what time bounds. Research into new applications for computation (such as machine vision or natural language processing).
SWE = The engineering process of delivering software that is functional and reasonably defect-free on time and on budget.
CE = The design and engineering of computer systems. CPUs, GPUs, buses, storage systems, interconnects, etc.
Programming = The act of creating code, which (when done correctly) requires skills from CS, SWE, and CE.
The bottom line is that you can't be a good coder unless you have at least some of all three skills. Algorithms and time complexity matter. So does writing code that actually performs on real hardware. So does writing code that is maintainable and reasonably defect-free.
I am fortunate that my "CS" program was actually more of a CS+CE+SWE program. I am not an expert in any of those fields but I do know enough to work effectively on a team to solve problems and write good code.
until i read read this i wasn't know about my iphone alarm as i never used it.
How old are you? Do you know anyone under the age of 25 (number pulled from my arse) who doesn't use their phone for alarms? I mean nearly everyone I know doesn't have an alarm clock. Nearly everyone I know doesn't have a clock at their bedside either.
Why at this day and age can I not expect to have an alarm application working perfectly enough that it can be used for mission critical cases where it's fault has nothing at all to do with a failure of the underlying device? Why at this day and age do I need yet another piece of electronic rubbish sitting in my room if I consider the time I wake up "mission critical"?
I remember learning the correct date formulas in the first semester. What's so hard about them?
I think most of these bugs come about in the conversion between internal time storage (which is probably something simple like "seconds since the epoch") and the UI layer. Getting the number of days in the year is easy, but how do you then deal with things like timezones? What if the phone's moved timezone since the alarm was set? Then you have things like Daylight Saving (which varies according to where you are in the world - some countries don't observe it at all, others don't all observe it at the same dates).
Put it this way, if you wanted an example of something with real-life application that on the face of it looks simple but in reality is absolutely chock-full of corner cases for you to make mistakes in, you couldn't do much better than something date/time based.
Not to mention there's no way to reliably determine if the battery is still working or not. Without the alarm clock blinking like they used to, it's very hard to tell if there were daily short blackouts when you and everyone else were at work that drained the 9v battery. Depending on the reliability of your power supply, replacing the battery on fixed, pre-set intervals wouldn't guarantee a thing.
The only ways to know the battery is dead is by either checking it regularly with a voltmeter and replacing it much before the critical voltage or live with a remaining risk of x% where x can only be guessed after you sleep-in.
Probably unsuitable for people working in transportation, medical, law enforcement, power generation. How do these people ensure their wake-up on odd schedules, different changing locations with harsh consequences for ever being a minute late?
I'm the opposite. I don't understand how you don't use it as an alarm clock. Here we have a device which (aside from the bugs in one specific phone) should be capable of perfectly performing an alarm clock function. It is a device that people tend to keep fully charged at all times, and it is a device which most people keep on their physical person whenever they can.
I can't fathom why you want yet another device to do something that any number of devices in your immediate vicinity right now is capable of doing already.
A normal alarm clock runs on whatever voltage it was designed for. Usually, they are designed for the national grids of the countries where they are to be sold. Clocks to be sold in the US run on 110V, clocks to be sold in most other locations run on 220-230V.
Since the advent of switching power supplies, this distinction is usually moot as most electronics are now designed to accept any voltage between 110v and 230v with either 50 or 60Hz line frequency. Eliminates the logistics hassle.
Unfortunately I am getting this vibe more and more from Apple's latest offering. Their earlier iPhone was great, and their new iPhone's glassy facade gives me a woody every time I see it. But there seems to be one critical problem after another with this one.
Are they the new Microsoft? Is this the Vista of the iPhones?
Phone alarms have proven to be extremely reliable for more than a decade. Only smartphones of either OS flavor have ever ever failed something as dumb as the alarm function.
I have a iPhone with my corporate e-mail (Exchange) configured. The security policy locks the screen. My cool alarm clock app won't work due to the sec. policy. But, I fail to see how this iPhone "bug" becomes an issue - there are many other ways to wake up or be reminded and if you rely on your iPhone for everything, you have a single point of failure. Plan A. My iPhone wakes me up. Plan B. Not needed - see Plan A. Oops.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
FWIW I'm 25 and I use dedicated alarm clock - though it's electronic and not mechanical. The reason is that 1) it has a nice and simple display for a bedside clock that doesn't shine too much at night (dim red digits and no not-quite-black backlight), and 2) it's got a nice huge snooze button.
As I said, using my mobile phone (not iPhone, I've usually had Nokia devices) as alarm has worked for me for 11 years now - I have no Plan B other than waking up sometime later myself; simply the Plan A needs to be actually reliable as consumers would naturally expect.
But, I fail to see how this iPhone "bug" becomes an issue - there are many other ways to wake up or be reminded and if you rely on your iPhone for everything, you have a single point of failure.
So how many alarm clocks do you have on your bedside table? I have only ever had two alarm clocks that have ever been unreliable: a clock radio that would randomly turn itself on for a minute at a time throughout the night, and my iPhone which failed to wake me up this morning. All the other problems have been due to blackouts, which is why I only get clocks with battery backups.
I'm mean seriously, the age of digital watches being a pretty neat idea is over. Even the cheapest Chinese clocks can reliably sound an alarm at a specified time of the day. How could the iPhone get it so wrong?
my kingdom for mod points. Alas, I will have to comment instead. The parent is totally correct. While I haven's coded in a long time (seriously, that is), this is a major moving target, and has been since antiquity. Just read up on the history of the calendar and time keeping to keep yourself occupied for hours.
It is not as simple as the GP implies, and I totally agree with the post above that mentions using an alarm clock with a battery backup.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
I put mine in my pants pocket, not on my person, and I take my pants off at night. Maybe I'm weird.
Probably unsuitable for people working in transportation, medical, law enforcement, power generation. How do these people ensure their wake-up on odd schedules, different changing locations with harsh consequences for ever being a minute late?
RAIAC - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Alarm Clocks. Seriously, I used to use two alarm clocks - one regular and one nasty "you're about to oversleep, go directly to work, do not pass go, do not collect $200" alarm that's only slightly less annoying than the fire alarm. On normal days I'd just switch off that one after getting up, it was just backup. This was not so much due to technical failure but because the first clock was easy to turn off if you just intended to snooze, at least if you're dead tired and just want five more minutes. Also because if I first oversleep, I tend to oversleep a lot not like just one hour. With the iFail I had gone down to one since I could have two different schedules with different alarm clocks, as it should always have enough battery but I'll have to revise that policy for DST changes, year changes, leap years and whatever else corner case they didn't test.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm certain that the Macy's display case was deeply impacted by your "girlfriend's" tardiness.
.
.
BTW: Buying your plastic GF an iPhone is really over-the-top geekiness.
I use a normal alarm clock on 220V, with a backup battery
Pfft. A mere 220V? A real geek would use wye connected 3-phase power.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If only Apple had access to some sort of communication device to alert its users that there was a problem...
Seriously, a non-functioning alarm is a pretty serious problem, why no alert from AT&T?
Assuming the "mission" is wake me up in the morning, everyone I know excluding my parents uses a phone.
> > with a backup battery ...
> the alarm will not ring if the power is out at the time of the alarm.
Ha? Hence the backup battery. 5 Informative, really?
Yes, 5 Informative. Really. Most clock radio backup batteries only keep the time circuits going in the event of power failure, just like the clock batteries in computers. Alarm circuits are ignored (especially if the alarm is set to radio wakeup mode). If you want a totally reliable clock radio, you use a UPS or find one with one built in.
This and the infamous Zune bug of a few years ago could be easily avoided if the coders would UNIT TEST DATE FUNCTIONS WITH REAL DATES! it's not hard and avoids all those embarrassing articles.
And no friggin' daylight savings.
I like the fact that in the summer, the dawn doesn't start to break at 4 in the morning. Or that it gets dark later than during the spring/fall/winter.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
what's an alarm clock? seriously, my wife and I haven't had one in the bedroom for years. We've also never had issues like this with alarms on any previous cell/smartphone.
As for lots of key presses, that's a one time event on most phones. Unlike a bedside phone, I can set multiple alarms. say one for weekdays and one for weekends, and one for that day i had to get up really freakin early. Reusing an alarm is as simple as tapping the toggle from off to on.
I'm just amazed by the number of people on here that are acting like it's the users fault this very basic fucntionality doesn't work. Oh, just don't use it. WTF? Of course when it's Apple, they get a pass on this kind of stuff. We're just holding it wrong, right?
I second that. My Nokia phones have never failed to wake me up, including my new-ish E65. From what I can tell, the clock isn't simply software, it's a dedicated chip (that wakes the software just for ringing and displaying the screen).
Dilbert RSS feed
Again, what if this was Microsoft, and Zunes stopped working because of leap year related issues. Would you have excused them? Or would you have posted "I have to wonder why MS's quality assurance department (don't laugh, they must have one) didn't try setting the clock ahead to see what happens?"
> In fact, why are we using our iPhones as anything other than a fucking phone?!
You use yours as a phone?! I tried that, but it was unreliable. Now I just use it as an i.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
New years day 2009 (two years ago) all first gen Zunes failed. For an interesting experiment, match up people defending Apple in this story with people who bashed Microsoft in that story. Or vice versa, I suppose
Your body's own clock works pretty well.
No, it doesn't. Not only it needs syncing (which might not always be possible), as it is highly affected by changing sleeping patterns and indoor light.
Just because your specific combination of biological clock, regular sleeping patterns and adequate light doesn't mean most people can rely on it. I certainly can't trust it more than a $3 alarm clock, it fails too randomly.
Dilbert RSS feed
Exactly. It's not hard to verify the correctness of these things, though it takes some effort.
I'm over 30 and though I have a regular radio alarm clock, I use my iPhone exclusively for regular alarms during the day and week. I'm reconsidering that position now.
I needed a one-off alarm for this morning. It didn't go off. Thankfully a fast-approaching cold front produced strong winds that knocked over things on my balcony and woke me up.
Failure to catch bugs in extremely basic functionality--twice in as many months--is inexcusable. Apple's inability to patch something like this without rolling out a gigantic 400+ MB firmware update highlights a massive shortcoming in their software release methodology--the DST bug was publicly known for weeks before it hit North America (having hit Australia first), but it wasn't fixed until some time after when it was rolled in with other updates.
This from an Apple customer of over 20 years.
"It doesn't work, but it sure looks sexy"
Yup, I was caught by something similar myself. It gets even more fun when you get to the other end of the year and you find out there's a day with 25 hours in it. :-) This led to one app I worked on declaring that October had 32 days in one particular menu, because a previous programmer on the project had subtracted the time_t() of 1st October from the time_t() of 1st November, then divided by 86400 to get the number of days in the month, then rounded up for some reason (probably because six months earlier he'd spotted that April only had 29 days, and rather than find out why, he just fudged it, the so-and-so!).
This was partly due to the Microsoft C V5 library (yes, it was that long ago, early 90s) handling DST stupidly; the same module in the V6 library fixed the problem. However we couldn't upgrade the whole library as it would have bust our memory requirements and caused other, now long forgotten problems, so we shut our eyes, crossed our fingers, and substituted V5's time module with the V6 version and, thank God, it worked perfectly without trashing everything.
We also rewrote our own code to do stuff a bit more cleverly than that. And at least we tested. Which is more than Apple seemed to have done. I wrote Y2K-aware time-handling code back in the mid-80s for some filling station EPOS machines, which damn well worked 15 years later, because I'd tested it.
To get back to the subject line, this is why I still use a real alarm clock, only using my mobile's alarm as extra backup for important things like catching flights. I've written enough time code to know how difficult it can be to get it done truly correctly, but you really would have thought Apple would have the knack by now.
While not excusing the pretty atrocious iPhone alarm quality, an alarm clock with battery backup is about 5 dollars, is always exactly in the same place, has big, simple physical buttons dedicated for alarm clock function, and is so damn simple that no one really screws them up (at least the ones that have no clue what day it is and don't do auto-adjust for DST and the like).
For the application of alarm for waking you up for bed, I would highly recommend that anyone who uses their phone instead of any alternative stop doing so. The complexity causes stupid risks like this and the interface is hostile to operation when you were unconscious seconds before.
There remains the case of daytime alarms that is problematic, but I don't know about the iPhone and how/if calendar notifications in their platform are affecting/make moot daytime alarms.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You my friend are sadly mistaken.
Several way to get into college without a GED or HSD:
1) Wait a few years and then go. The colleges like your money
2) Be fucking brilliant and the colleges will accept you before you can drive
3) Have a rich daddy. The colleges like his money
Time to go.
I got my hsd during first year of college; it was an early entrance program. You load up your first years of hs w/ adv classes (like by placing out), and spend your hs senior year in college as a freshman. I didn't have much of a choice--I polished off my required courses in my hs junior year, but lacked a few credits to officialy graduate; several colleges were interested in taking me early, and the h.s. took those credits (AFTER I PASSED, of course) and gave me by hsd.
That was in the 80s; it seems now more high schools offer a better range of AP and college-credit classes and/or are more open to letting juniors/seniors leave camput and take classes at local colleges. (Which is much better solution since it keeps you with your age group, imo).
Basset hounds.
More reliable and less work.
Sure... for an alarm clock. For a music player that happens to have an alarm clock, not so much.
Why shouldn't I use a phone as an alarm clock?
Did you not see the topic of this article? My plug in has never crapped out due to bugs. Looks like you can't say the same for that phone.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
You are nothing but a hypocrite and an apple fanboi. Your comment history does suggest that you were jumping up and down on much more trivial bugs than this when it was other companies who were at fault, but when it comes to apple, it 'just happens, and gets fixed'.
It's because of douches like you I stay away from apple. Go, Steve Jobs is waiting for his next blowjob.
I used cell as alarm mainly because of power outages, but really the idea of having fewer gadgets doing more work makes sense to me.
The one time I invested in a batt backup alarm, I wasn't smart enough to put it on surge protector, and lightening whacked the whole thing. (My fault, not alarm/batt backup.)
But my cell alarm's never failed me yet.
(Then again, it's not apple.)
Don't ditch the iPhone, ditch the woman instead! No more rushing.
Last year, IIRC, there was a problem with Playstations (or PSP's or some MS hardware product) with the change of date for the New Year.
That was with most of the old fat ps3's. As a clock failure they pretty much all refused to work on Feb 29th, even off line as they apparently were unaware of leap years.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
What is ironic, the last time I saw a time/date problem on January 1, it was the original Zune that went catatonic the whole day. It fixed itself the next day, and MS did push out an update so it would never happen again.
Yes, time and date stuff can bring errors, but isn't this something that there are automated tools to doublecheck? At least test critical days and times of the year (Dec 31, Feb 28, Feb 29, Jan 1, the Sunday where DST starts, the Sunday where DST ends, checking if a timezone change affects stuff, etc.) This should be part of regression testing as well.
Bugs happen. For a lot of people, no alarm on the first of January isn't a bad thing. However, there are a lot of people whose job might be placed at risk if they come late. There are also a lot of people who work shift work at jobs that often change schedule. These jobs, you just don't wake up naturally 15-30 minutes if the alarm doesn't go off... one may wake up 4-8 hours later, which at best means no hours earned that day (if on an hourly wage.)
Even if it isn't a job, there are people who use the iPhone as a travel alarm at hotels and expect it to wake them at least before check-out time.
Of course, this isn't something that is a world ender for most people. However, this isn't just a cosmetic bug either, because it has some impact on people's daily lives, but because there isn't a way for a third party app to handle alarms (well, assuming a non-jailbroken iPhone), Apple has more pressure in making sure their stuff works right.
You can't say that for the mobile computing device that Apple is selling - normal phones crap out as rarely as normal alarm clocks, i.e., never unless you hit them with a hammer repeatedly.
Most of the new degree students coming in have no knowledge of your explanation. People in their teens go into a CS degree thinking it is the ONLY path to get college-trained for Programming, for Information Technology. Few actually seek out CS fully knowing at their inexperienced ages about the definition of CS you gave. But incorrect choice of "Programmer vs. CS holder" training is only a small part of the systemic flaw. Most public and private colleges only have "CS," but like you said, it DOES train you on the other three.
People on /. who themselves are industry-savvy geeks worldwide that still mistake the degrees all the time, assume that ALL teenagers know to just research tradeschools for their sub career from your post. In reality, trade schools like DeVry aren't more renowned than MIT, and people may choose a more recognized name granting them more interviews even if they only offer the "wrong" field.
So people just grit their teeth and get locked into "CS." Sometimes they can't get accepted into their trade school. Right, you won't always make it into that well-researched school that does offer your CE or SWE or Prog program. And in spite of everything, only 20% of people are college-trained. Other disciplines tend to force the degree requirements while ours usually waves it off for 2 years of "equivalent" experience.
In any case, after my OP nobody cared that 80% of the people out there have no degree and still release code that is mission critical (for non-business values of "critical" where consumers are average Joes.) If I were to tell people on the current thread that 20% of their doctors and their president are certified by a degree, there'd be switching and complaining regarding the poor state of such "loose" and dangerous health-care and legal systems. This shows that defenders of the non-degree IT career path are field-biased. It's just more than a blessing for them to be in that 80% "unlicensed but perfectly employable" group when so many other fields ensure that equivalent mistakes as the Apple calendar bug are properly prevented, prepared against and systemically fixed to avoid disaster.
I use mine because power can go out for 6 hours and it will still work just fine, otherwise it's charging. My alarm, even on backup battery, still sounds quite loudly. Does your's even sound on backup battery or just hold time? I can set 4-5 alarms, hit snooze for hours, and use different tones to indicate that yeah dumbass THIS alarm is the one that means business get moving.
You've found an alarm clock that can do all that? If so do please tell us who made it and what model!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Because the iPhone is a toy, not for actual business use.
And a clock radio is for business use? It is substantially cheaper to make than an iPhone and yet they call usually make an alarm ring every day. Is a VCR/PVR a business grade device? No, but they can still record programs each week. And where the hell can you buy an alarm clock designed for business use?
For all the faults that I find with the iPhone, it still does some amazing things. Keeping a clock going and ringing an alarm would not be a task that I would consider amazing. It is trivial. It should not cause a problem for anything, even if it just looks neat and can play games.
I have used $15.00 prepaid Nokia phones when on outdoors trips (where I wouldn't want to risk a smartphone even in an Otterbox case.) When having to get up to make it somewhere in time, the cheapie device never failed me.
The issue here is that this is basic functionality of a device; one never thinks about a smartphone having time/date issues, and most people have not thought of these types of corner cases since they were stacking boxes of MREs in their bong shelters preparing for Y2K. People take a reliable alarm clock for granted.
The lesson learned from this -- if one has to be somewhere and it is a career changing/ending move if they are late, one should consider an additional alarm. Since the Nokia prepaid phone is so inexpensive, it is cheaper than a lot of travel alarms.
Their earlier iPhone was great, and their new iPhone's glassy facade gives me a woody every time I see it. But there seems to be one critical problem after another with this one.
Personally I think it's mostly the media having a field day blowing things out of proportion. I have the new iPhone, both my sisters have one, my brother-in-law has one and none of us have had anywhere near the problems that are being reported in the media. Sure, there's been a few minor glitches here and there but nearly EVERY device has those. We certainly haven't experienced any problems that were major enough to stop us from using the iPhone or consider switching to another device.
Sapere aude!
This is why, when I have something important, like a airplane flight, I always make sure to set multiple alarms. I mean on different devices. I usually use the iPhone for my alarms, but on important cases I add at least my old mechanical wind-up alarm clock. No power or battery or software requirements still makes that the most reliable, if you have something like an airplane flight or job interview.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Thank you. That's the one that lingered in my mind. So the time-bomb failures are
1) Sony PS3 leap-year bug in 2010
2) Microsoft Zune bug 2 Januaries ago
3) An iPhone DST bug for Europe in November 2010
4) The latest iPhone's January 2011 one-time alarm bug
All are large companies and don't account for the indie app bugs we don't get to hear about on the front page. This furthers my point that something is seriously wrong with developer training in the past 5 years, both degree-less and degree-holding.
To write re-usable, well-designed Objective-C on iOS takes a deft hand and you're right, there are a great deal of poorly written applications in Apple's App Store (Objective-C on iOS has no garbage collection and is much closer to, duh, C crossed with Smalltalk than anything else... there's nothing as raw as malloc, so it will allocate an appropriate amount of bits off the heap when the alloc message is sent, but you do have to worry about reference counting and telling the runtime that an object is safe for reclaiming. Very different from a mark and sweep type scheme where you can get away with not worrying about it, though that is bad too. Hell all the foundation classes still have a NextStep prefix!).
That, however (as is being pointed out by seebs et al) not the point.
At all.
This is not "App Store" code, this is code that is part of the OS... this would be like complaining about how unstable KDE is because KCalc crashes on you. Or, perhaps more appropriately, about poorly written VB apps (wink) in .NET when you have issues with Windows Media Player (a better, though still piss poor analogy).
I agree that it is far too easy for any joe (educated formally or not) to write rather shit apps, but that's just the way of things (to throw my hat into the fallacy of "appeal to authority" I've been "pro coding" since I was twenty and have the CS credentials trailing up to a Master's, but that doesn't make me right... or a good developer).
This is really a red herring, but to be fair, a good CS education isn't really an education in programming: it requires programming and touches on SE aspects of good design, but it is also an education in problem solving. Cyclomatic complexity, time complexity, good design, exposure to alternate paradigms (not just OO, but Functional and perhaps Aspect Oriented, etc), and a thorough awareness of important issues (tail recursion, memory management, etc) are things that one usually understands after having been through a decent program and, to be fair, I've met very few "self taught" or non-CS folks who understand all of those issues... but I have met some CS folks who don't know about any of them either. All that to say, that you could be a damn fine developer without a formal education, though that is much more rare.
As an aside, you will see a great deal of "I know JavaScript and Perl so I thought I had a good programming foundation" complaints in comments/reviews/discussions on iOS development. So there clearly are some chaps who are very confused about what, say, an O'Reilly book jacket means about "designed for experience programmers" and all that.
>>>This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. A normal alarm clock runs on 110V, everyone knows this.
A normal alarm clock runs on whatever voltage it was designed for. Usually, they are designed for the national grids of the countries where they are to be sold. Clocks to be sold in the US run on 110V, clocks to be sold in most other locations run on 220-230V.
Since the advent of switching power supplies, this distinction is usually moot as most electronics are now designed to accept any voltage between 110v and 230v with either 50 or 60Hz line frequency. Eliminates the logistics hassle.
You should put more effort into your sarcasm detection algorithm.
Yeah it's called the RTC (Real Time Clock)
Very simple!
Step 1: In 9th grade, take AP Calc. AP courses you do well in (got a 5 on the test) count as college credits.
Step 2: That summer, take an intensive language course at the state university. You don't need to be in any sort of program, or "accepted" to the college, to do so; you can just pay money and take a course.
Step 3: Then spend a year taking Chinese classes in China with exchange students who are in colleges.
Step 4: Apply to college citing the equivalent of a semester's worth of course credits including specific courses that they have students in.
Easy. I also got to skip over Calc 1 and 2, plus the entire foreign language requirement, and got out after summer school of my third year, because I'd made my credit requirements.
In short, you're wrong; people will accept anything that convincingly demonstrates that you're prepared to succeed in college-level work, including as a concrete example "has already done well in college classes".
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Fair enough, but it's still unrelated to the way in which app developers self-qualify. It's still someone hired to program, not just someone putting out an app which someone picks up.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I bought my girlfriend an iPhone, and the damn thing seems to set off the alarm at random times.
Well then why don't you just tell her not to?
If you replace the phone with an alarm clock you wouldn't have fixed the issue of daylight savings time which specifically requires you to change the time on your clock. So instead of the phone screwing up and making you late you have yourself forgotten to change the time making you late. In either instance you're still late regardless of how you keep the time.
I've yet to have any issue with my Android phone, but I do not trust -any- device to work in 100% of cases.
I work with control systems for oil rigs for christ sake, I know a little about failure rates... even of multi-million dollar systems.
I use my phone as a gentle wake-up noise at T-20 min, then a clock radio for T-18 (2x snooze :p) and Finally my server goes batshit at T-3 if I am not yet up and have hit the magic CGI page in firefox for the day.
It works, and I have yet to have any triple-failure of my system ^.^
Overly complex? Probably.
Do I like it as I have it now? Yup, which is really the only thing that matters.
Aaaah, the snooze button.
My nemesis....
My android phone alarm didn't go off this morning either... then I see articles about the iphone alarm bugs... any other android users have issues today?
Actually, dawn breaks even earlier at times. With DST even.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Tons of keypresses? You don't own an iPhone do you? I have 6 alarms on mine, 3-4 to help me get up in the morning with various tones and one for weekends plus another for random things. Adding or changing any of them takes me about 10 seconds. Oh, and NONE of them are working right now! I do have an alarm clock, there's a ton of reasons why I use the phone instead starting with being able to use different tones for different alarms and with the ease of changing them or setting them. I have yet to find an alarm clock with more than 2 different alarms and one or two tones. In short - the iPhone, when it works, makes for an awesome alarm that has no issues with loss of power. Bonus is that I own it for other things.
when will folks figure out this isn't "just a phone" and see that is a small multifunction computer?!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Well, all of them must have RTCs, I suppose, but Nokia's has an alarm feature built-in (maybe the iPhone also does, but simply doesn't use it, who knows).
Dilbert RSS feed
I counted 36 alarms on my iphone. Fortunately I still use iOS 3. Granted, the only reason I still use iOS 3 is because my computer hard drive failed and I'm afraid all my stuff will get wiped when I try sync to a new library on a different computer. Fucking apple.
This particular beauty is easy enough to set (you can go forwards or backwards..so not of that scrolling past the time business) and has 2 separate alarms. I have one that goes off on weekdays in time to get me to work--I never turn it off. The other one is set to work on any day; I leave it turned off most of the time and turn it back on when I need to get up early for some reason (or wake up on the weekend at some time other than the nebulous "the sun is now too bright-o'clock").
It always works, sets itself to the atomic clock, adjusts for DST, and cost a whopping $10 at target back when I left home for college. As an added bonus, I can look across the room and know what time it is.
This means I am free to to plug in my phone at night to charge on the counter (where my other chargers live), don't have to worry about a low battery dying in the middle of the night, and don't have a problem if I managed to forget my phone on my desk at work. I'll use the phone alarm if I travel or sleep somewhere else but when $10 gets you a perfect tool built for the job...why wouldn't you use it?
Of course, the fact that a better tool exists doesn't really excuse apple for making an alarm clock that doesn't work right. Especially since one-off alarms are the only thing you would use if you used a "real" alarm clock most days (and since New Years morning probably results in a lot of people waking up on couches/beds that are not their own)
Bottles.
> I doubt there's a programmer alive who hasn't made at least one mistake in dealing with time and dates.
*raises hand* Yup. I ran into an issue earlier this year where we were getting currency exchange rates from a webservice on a daily basis. Our dev and QA environments were in CST, and our production servers were in Pacific time. When tested in dev and QA everything was fine, but once deployed to production the rates never expired.
I was able to fix it, but it was subtle and difficult to track down.
Oh nonsense. This takes an especially high level of ineptitude. Seriously, basic date bugs? And this isn't even the first for them, wasn't there a similar issue last year?
It's like a bug in 'rm' that accidentally converted the '.' character into a '*'. I mean, seriously? A date bug? Apple is pathetic.
I suggest we adopt a 12 month 30 day calendar, with a five day holiday at the end of the year (six days for leap year.) And no friggin' daylight savings.
No international time zones would be helpful too; set everyone's clocks to the same time around the world. Sure it might confuse some, but I'm sure people would get the hang of it after a while.
Bollocks. Mission critical depends on the context. Would anyone use a phone for an alarm to launch to space shuttle or determine when a patient needs an insulin injection? No. At that level it's certainly not "mission critical".
Mission critical in the context of your cell phone might be waking up for work, knowing when to pick your kid up from soccer practice, whatever. Nobody's going to die, but it sure is a pain in the ass and is one of the more important things you use your phone for.
Really, mostly what I'm saying is I have a hypothesis that Apple sucks and I love stories like these because it confirms my theory.
Apple apologists are such smug douches, and than you for demonstrating that to the world.
How old are you? Do you know anyone under the age of 25 (number pulled from my arse) who doesn't use their phone for alarms? I mean nearly everyone I know doesn't have an alarm clock. Nearly everyone I know doesn't have a clock at their bedside either.
I'm 23 and have an alarm clock on the bedside table that plays a CD to wake me up. However I do also use my phone as a secondary alarm clock (partially in case I don't get up for the CD alarm and partially in case of a power cut which would re-set the CD alarm time to 00:00)
I remember a few years back I had a old (well, by today's standards) Nokia phone with me on a trip to Hungary. I set an alarm on my last day to ensure that I would be up on time to catch the plane (I had no other form of alarm, didn't bring too much as we were mostly backpacking around hostels). The battery died during the night, but we were up in plenty of time anyway (the plane wasn't early, but I still didn't want to risk missing it).
During the day, while we were getting ready to head to the airport, I heard a noise from my pocket; the phone (battery dead remember) had saved enough power to inform me that my alarm was going off (all that was displayed on the screen was 'ALARM' and the time, I couldn't relly do anything else apart from turn the alarm off). THAT is what I would call something that has been very well thought out, and a very useful feature, particularly in critical situations. I don't know if its a feature on new phones nowadays though.
What's interesting is the HUGE number of alarm apps in the iTunes store. tempted to get one to try, think it would have the same bug?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Good thing I'm still on version 1.02, my one-time alarm yesterday morning worked fine.
And where the hell can you buy an alarm clock designed for business use?
But maybe not in the sense that you meant.
http://www.promotionalmagazine.com/promotional-products/387-advertise-your-business-with-customized-alarm-clocks.html
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
From what I read, they have to be running in the foreground for the alarm to work. If one just flips to the app and lets it sit, that's fine, but a lot of people do E-mail, FB, and other things, then hit the home screen and let the iPhone remain on the Springboard, where the app can't do an alarm unless the device is jailbroken.
Oh, and of course, the Executive alarm clock:
http://www.americaninnovative.com/products/neverlate-exec.php
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Does the one hour really make a difference for you?
You mean unlike a bedside alarm, and I'll tell you you're dead wrong as I've got one nightstand alarm clock with alarm settings for EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I don't understand why you use a phone as an alarm clock.
- The phone sets itself, inluding daylight savings time.
- It charges next to my bed so I have a fresh charge the next day. This is a good idea anyway despite you're implied suggestion oterwise.
- I have it set to only go off on weekdays.
- I have it with me so I can set it right away if I have to work on saturday or go in earlier the next day.
- It can display a text message about why it's going off.
- Instead of setting the time, I can just tell it to go off in 3 hours because Im taking a nap.
- I have my alarm with me when Im sleeping somewhere other than home.
- Ive been doing this without fail for years. My stupid ass alarm clock, however, needed a lot more attention.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Sure it does if it starts to dawn at 4 in the morning. Or 3:30.
If you are supposed to get up at 7 or even 8, that is the difference between being half asleep for the last two hours of sleeping and being already wide awake an hour before you need to get up.
And if your daily rituals depend on being at a certain place at 8 or 9 (and not earlier) and staying there until 16 or 17 (and maybe later) - that hour of sleep MAY be somewhat important to you.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
1. I'm 28, the ones I have applied to will not take you without your GED or HSD.
2. I created a new field of science growing plants without requiring light at all. Every agricultural science college I've applied to has soundly denied me.
3. Apparently they don't like the money enough to allow me to enroll.
Their loss.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I can speak four different languages with the exclusion my native language, and I created a new branch of science in the horticultural field, and no college will accept me.
Oh well. Their loss.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I don't care what alarm you use...just get your ass to work.
My clock sets itself automatically (save for the time zone; it defaults to West coast time, and I'm on the East coast) once powered on.
SSC
Something similar happened to me. I store all my music on my (new) desktop, but have my phone synced to my laptop. For whatever reason, my laptop didn't connect to my shared drive, and as a consequence, all of the music on my iPhone was wiped after the upgrade. On the plus side, iOS 4.x is a pretty good upgrade.
SSC
I'm 21 and don't use my phone as an alarm; it's too quiet. On the other hand, I don't use any other alarm clock either. I do have a clock by my bed if I want it though.
SSC
i have 4 alarm clocks (cos i sleep thru 1) all set to the same time 1) bedside alarm 2) bedside alarm number two 3) cell phone 4) MacbookPro (With Alarm Clock 2 app)
I'm a Mac. Windows Vista was NOT my idea.
I think you misspelled "Android" in your final trailing sentence.
Apple bugs get huge attention on slashdot, Android bugs, like say the "SMS sent to random people" bug got a huge number of "I have never seen this bug, it's a non issue" and other such posts. It was funny to watch.
This alarm clock bug bit me this morning, but it was a lazy Sunday so I wasn't actually late for anything. Still, it shouldn't have happened and I assume there is some very screwy code in the calendar app which handles events like alarms, as seen by the odd bugs during BST/DST.
It didn't happen last year, so clearly something has changed and not enough QA testing was done to check for conditions like this (or perhaps it was and the particular condition was just not evident for some reason). It should not be in shipping handsets, so it needs to be fixed. Software bugs are a fact of life though - no complex software system is immune.
This particular bug? Only the iPhone at a guess.
On the other hand, iPhone doesn't suffer from the Android bug also just revealed, where it can send SMS messages to the wrong contact.
http://www.gizmocrunch.com/rumors/4584-new-year-iphone-android-alarm-sms-bug
Now for all the potential problems of an alarm not going off, I can think of some far more serious scenarios from messages getting sent to the wrong person from your contact list.
It's kind of one of those "without sin"/glasshouses/stones things.
iOS 4 allows alarm apps to work in the background. You'd want to check on the App Store description that a particular alarm app has been written to take advantage of this functionality of iOS 4 though.
I thought it only happens twice a year.
You have to adjust your wardrobe more times a year than that - and that doesn't get you more sleep time. And better too, as it gets you more "dark time" in the morning during half a year.
And me... well... me, I like sleepin'...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It does become a non-issue and really it's not a big deal but considering this keeps cropping up and not jsut with Apple. The Zune got hit by a new years date related bug too.
These are some of the biggest and richest companies do they not properly test date related applications? It'll require more than changing the date from Monday to Tuesday on your system.
I'm not excusing Apple but it appears to be horrible across the board. The Zune had issues and I'm sure there are many more applications that have as well. These are some of the biggest software companies. There is no excuse for something so basic to be so hard to get right for the likes of Microsoft of Apple. It's not like this is a brand new functionality that no one has tackled before. They should know exactly what they need to test for.
I'm not sure if it's a deficiency of prose or if you're actually proposing that people are falling back on MIT because they can't clear the bar at DeVry. Either way, the main thread has been lost, so I'm just replying to this:
...tell people on the current thread that 20% of their doctors and their president are certified by a degree, there'd be switching and complaining ...
In coding, when you fuck up:
The build breaks
It fails automated tests
The bug gets caught in peer review
It blows up in the lab
It gets caught by methodical QA review
And some small percentage of the time, the bug ships, so you patch it later.
When a doctor fucks up, people die or are crippled, and there often aren't second chances to fix a mistake made in the OR.
As for your basic premise that we need more degrees: Good work in almost every field correlates strongly with experience, and poorly with formal education. The counterexamples are usually where you're doing something new where no one has experience. In 2011, alarm clock software isn't groundbreaking, and doesn't require fresh minds to think up a way to solve a new problem. It needs experienced engineers who have seen all the ways it's gone wrong before, working methodically to prevent it from happening again.
This part of the problem with the fact software companies aren't held responsible for any fuck up they make. There is no incentive at all to test properly or even code properly.
It's not as if companies like Microsoft and Apple are poor and can't afford the best. They just don't want it and there is no benefit in doing it right the first time. They can push out something broken and no one really cares so they can patch it when they feel like it.
Software companies get away with a lot more than producers of physical products. I think that needs to change.
It does in the northern latitudes of the US, anyway. Just as we start to lose our evening daylight hours in the fall, along comes the DST change to rob yet another hour of usable light.
It's not the stupidest damn thing ever, but it's gotta be in the top 100, somewhere.
Unless the submitter is a lesbian I call shenanigans.
Right. Because if I set my alarm for 07:15 and it goes off at 07:15 and one second I'll totally miss my flight!
If things like that are hardcoded and only set for the following year or less the library is shite, and you're even more shite for using it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thanks.
On your question about what I meant about MIT, it is that people simply find schools with big names even if the school is not known for a strong program in our field and is inadequate for training a programmer.
The name MIT was a bad example for me to have used in the earlier post, since they have CS, Programming, CE and Software Engineering, probably. Let me fix that with another example... I had a choice between applying to DeVry and New York University more than a decade ago. IIRC, NYU only had plain vanilla CS and I had no idea programming required trade schools and non-CS degrees during those highschool years. NYU has more renown than DeVry, and I applied to it completely ignoring DeVry. The latter being a trade school, would have been better equipped with more than plain CS degrees, even if NYU has more fame.
By the 365th day Steve had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then Steve blessed the 366th day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
A bug is a bug, that's not an issue. All devices have bugs, but when bugs appear in both fundamental and basic functions then it starts wreaking of crap quality control.
As some people have pointed out testing cases for timing applications including the end of the year is programming QA 101. I would just chuckle if this was the first time this has happened. But this is the second time a major bug has screwed around iPhone users in the alarm application. It stuffed up daylight savings time too, which makes me think if they didn't review the code then, what's going to happen on Feb 29th? The question is will they actually review the entire code this time or just patch this flaw.
Also alarms not going off in a device which the company is actively pushing at businesses isn't a minor annoyance either. Neither is calls dropping out when the iPhone is held with the left hand.
This isn't Apple bashing, this is observation and other companies aren't immune to this either. In fact I would rate the Android bug of sending SMSes to the wrong recipient more critical than an alarm problem, but then I don't rely on an alarm anyway. I set it every night but always seem to wake before it goes off.
One mans minor annoyance is another's showstopper. I'm buying a Galaxy S next week (decision predates this iPhone issue so don't think this bug had any bearing on it, but I also didn't change my mind when I read about the sms bug). I know plenty of people who would consider that a showstopper.
HAHAH Nice. So do I (work on emergency shutdown for major oil refineries). I admit though that if I have something critical like a job interview or a flight I will set an alarm as a backup.
:)
My point would be that while my sleep cycle definitely doesn't have an integrity level rating why is it that we can't rely oh a phone for something as fundamentally basic as making a tone at a certain time. In the emergency shutdown world we pride on simplicity for safety. An if this then that type safety function has less failure modes then a complex sequence. So why is it that the device can do something as complex as digital communications but foul up something as simple as making a tone at the right time?
See in my view (I live in an area where power outages are quite common) I think my ancient phone actually has a higher reliability than my alarm clock which while it'll keep it's time during a power outage, doesn't actually sound if the power is out, which has happened to me before.
Maybe I should put it on a UPS
!!!! My phone scares the shit out of me when the alarm goes off. I've put a custom alarmtone that starts gentle and gets progressively louder on it because of this. May I ask what phone it is? My sister's is similar. She can't ever hear the thing ring.
No, why should it be compatible with a "sub-2 year old" laptop from the same manufacturer if the graphics card can't support it? A 27" LCD needs a reasonably powerful card to drive it effectively, and the base level Macbook from 2 years ago cannot do that.
Dell sells giant screens too, and also laptops from 2 years ago that can't drive them.
Your anti-Apple bias is making you say silly things, and look for conspiracies where none exist.
Well, I certainly wouldn't argue against replacing our idiotic calendar system with something sane. But that's really a different problem than getting computers to deal with date/time values correctly. I ran across an elegant explanation of the problem some years back, when I got involved with my first java project, and the first time we crossed a DTS boundary, the code's time calculations got all screwed up. I did a bit of digging online, and came up with the simple explanation from a writer who said, in essence: "Look at the java specs. They require that the clock routines store the date+time internally in local time. This is all you need to know to correctly predict that code based on these routines won't work, and will never be debugged. In particular, new bugs will always appear when going in or out of DST. If the basic, internal time representation is in local time, these bugs will always exist, and no programmer will ever be able to fix them. As long as java decrees local time internally, its clock routines will never quite work right."
The writer went on to explain why the only sensible internal representation of time is in a universal format that's the same everywhere. Such a time value can be translated to any "user-friendly" time notation desired, in the software's human-readable output. But translating the other direction isn't always possible, and even when it is, the algorithms are often so complex that programmers just won't get them right.
There was a further observation that, if you want to do date/time arithmetic (and you will), the universal format should be a single number in a format that the hardware can use directly. This will save you the cpu cycles needed to convert to a hardware format for calculations, but is otherwise immaterial. The number can be the typical second counter, as used in unix, vms, and other OSs. It can be the floating-point day counter used by astronomers. It could be the ISO time format. The exact form isn't material; what's important is that you can do arithmetic with it efficiently, and that it be the same inside every machine (whose clock is correct ;-). But if you need sub-second precision, it's nice if the representation can handle that.
I once worked on a project where the management decreed ISO timestamps - the long character string, like "20110102194617". We software guys groaned, but we quickly found an excuse of the form "one of our products uses Standard X, which requires the unix time value" to write the two appropriate conversion routines. From then on, we could use the unix time value during in-memory calculations, and the only cost was an ISO-utime conversion during input, and a utime-ISO conversion when writing to the database where it would be visible to non-programmers.
I've also worked on numerous projects where the management decreed local time. On those projects, we just admitted openly that the date/time calculations would never be correct, but we'd do our best to patch as many of the inevitable bugs as we could find time for. In a few, we arranged things so that managers could never actually see the internal data representations, and we hid the universal timestamps behind "format for display" routines to show the data in management's favorite format(s).
Actually, deflecting discussions of the internal time formats to discussions of calendar reform could be an interesting way of preventing management from learning how you're actually getting the dates and times correct. And if enough of us start doing it, maybe we can get some calendar reform.
Clock problems are a lasting source of geek humor ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
And I bet you think it's a scam.
It isn't.
I've already posted proof here before.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
... but how do you then deal with things like timezones? What if the phone's moved timezone since the alarm was set?
Some years back, shortly after I got my first cell phone whose clock synced automagically to the cell towers' clocks, I was on a trip to northern Arizona. The state of Arizona doesn't use DST; it's always in the MST (Mountain Standard) zone. But the Indian reservations, which are legally independent of the state and answer only to the US government, use DST. I found that, when driving around in the countryside, my phone would frequently jump back and forth between MST and MDT, depending on whether the tower it was talking to was on a reservation or not. When I mentioned this to locals, they'd just grin, and suggest turning off the time syncing while I was in the area.
I think some cell phones have gotten smarter about this since then. My current phone lets me turn DST on/off separately from syncing, so in boundary cases like this, it will stay consistent with itself. It also delays the syncing a while after crossing a time-zone border, apparently to make sure that you're really in the new time zone. But this is only a heuristic, and I expect there might be some situations that would confuse it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Holy crap, that's a riot! If I had mod points I'd want to find a way to give you all of them. Awesome!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Just as we start to lose our evening daylight hours in the fall, along comes the DST change to rob yet another hour of usable light.
One... THAT is not the DST. That is the "regular time" you are complaining about.
Two... If the DST was kept on the whole year round, the sun wouldn't rise 'till 8 or 9 in the morning in December-January.
And the night would keep on falling earlier and earlier anyway, all the way until the winter solstice when the day would start getting longer again - not that you would really notice the change until mid-February.
A fine thing that would be for the working people. Seeing sunlight only on weekends during most of the winter.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I mean, DST change and year change? It's some of the most obvious and basic corner cases that you write tests for, especially in an application that specifically deals with time! It's practically textbook stuff, or an interview question for QA position. And so it's extremely surprising when that kind of thing goes wrong in production.
Huh? I learned years ago that DST and timezone changes are exactly when you'd expect the code to be wrong. In particular, I always look for clock weirdness at a DST change -- and I've rarely been disappointed.
You might expect the companies that develop the software to thoroughly test such things. Based on experience, I don't expect this at all. I expect them to sell their gadgets, and only bother getting it right when they get over some threshold number of bug reports.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Huh? I learned years ago that DST and timezone changes are exactly when you'd expect the code to be wrong.
Precisely. Which is why, when you're writing an application that specifically deals with time, that's the very first thing that you test!
I mean, we're not talking about some Indian outsourcing sweatshop here. It's Apple. They're supposed to be better than this.
As some people have pointed out testing cases for timing applications including the end of the year is programming QA 101. I would just chuckle if this was the first time this has happened. But this is the second time a major bug has screwed around iPhone users in the alarm application. It stuffed up daylight savings time too, which makes me think if they didn't review the code then, what's going to happen on Feb 29th? The question is will they actually review the entire code this time or just patch this flaw.
As a programmer I can tell you that date and time calculations are among the most tricky ones that you have to do. It's so easy to get wrong with leap times (days, minutes, seconds, fractions of a second), time zones, local time adjustments, changing rules on how dates and times are calculated, various calendars, and so on. It's very easy for a tricky bug to get coded into the algorithms and to have it suddenly show up without much time to correct it.
Not that bugs, especially core ones in date and time functions, are acceptable. You do everything you can do to test the code and ferret them out. It's just one of those areas that bugs are likely since so many tricky rules are involved. I'm sure that Apple will try to locate the code that causes this bug and correct it. Hopefully that will be the end of the problems.
I agree that the Android SMS bug is also a bad flaw in a major function of a cell phone. Again, I'm sure that Android developers will do their best to correct it.
The fact is that modern computing devices are extremely complicated systems with tons of interacting components, many different developers, and plenty of potential for unintended side effects. You take your chances when you use such devices and it's up to each person to decide if they can live with any issues that pop up or if they want to take the chance on a different device. I've had a decent enough experience with the iOS devices that I can live with the bugs that have popped up so far, I don't think that it has that much higher or lower of a rate of bugs than similar devices by other developers.
Sapere aude!
Dunno where you live. In the US, take a couple of classes from the state university as "extension" classes (not part of a degree program) and you should be able to get into a college on the basis that you've already done college-level work.
At least, it worked for me. There is at least one guy out there (possibly now deceased) whose only academic credential of any sort was his PhD.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Yup, I really enjoy Apple's devices, but bugs like this and the remote execution bug that rooted iPhone 4 just by visiting a web page are inexcusable. This bug should have been fixed since the first time it was spotted.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
However, to be frank: These kind of bugs are unacceptable. If this were Microsoft, everyone would be laughing and scolding, but since it's Apple I'm sure we'll get excuses....
Why would anyone make excuses? This will revolutionize the way we think about being on time -- You anti-Apple zealots are so predictable.
Like every game-changer Apple creates, you'll ridicule this as 'stupid' or 'an inexcusable bug' until this unimaginably innovative concept starts showing up on your iPhone wannabe Android "smart" phones as other handset manufactures begin the next round of catch-up.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I think that the reason that these bugs bite them is that instead of relying in the iPod/iPhone’s internal real time clock the alarm app uses the iCal calendaring services and tries to be location aware. Normally, it would be a nice and powerful touch for the app, but there are too many corner cases to account in this scenario that the app becomes really prone to fail. However, if Android and Symbian manage to do this in a reliable way Apple can do it too; at least, you could set a preference in the app to make it “location/DST aware” or let it behave like a not powerful but reliable plain old mechanical clock.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Any particular reason you didn't write a similar version of this rant in the Android text-message story?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, why the fuck would I want to use a feature on a device that I paid quite a lot of money for? In fact, why are we using our iPhones as anything other than a fucking phone?!
(Note: For the slow amongst you, this post is laden with sarcasm).
For your consideration. 2011 Slashdot Insightful Awards
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Did he do this when he was in Mexico or something?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
That might not help, sometimes noise on power lines can interfere with some digital clocks, I've witnessed it myself.
sudo mod me up
I didn't see people writing "oh, it's just a bug, so what?" in that story.
I mean, we're not talking about some Indian outsourcing sweatshop here. It's Apple. They're supposed to be better than this.
I think you mean that their advertising leads you to believe that they're better than this. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I rely on my infant son to wake me up. Obviously that is useful to everyone?
Fwiw I really use my nokia phone for alarms as it's less loud compared to my bedside alarm, so it will be less likely to wake him or my wife up if I need to get going before they wake up.
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
Who needs to wake up before the 4th of January anyway? Today was a public holiday! Sleep through the long weekend
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
I do this too, then should I sleep in I would get woken by a set of alarming pants on the floor :)
As an embedded systems programmer I can tell you that date and time calculations are amongst the most well documented and easy to implement things I have done. I find programming a microcontroller to send a packet over a network far more difficult simply due to the fact that we have been using electronics for timekeeping since the transistor was invented. I would agree with you if we were in the late 80s but this is 2010, and a bug like this would be inexcusable.
Ultimately though this is beside the point. The phone never had a problem keeping time. The bugs were in the calendar / alarm apps which didn't come to terms with the fact that time may change slightly, and not with the underlying timekeeping code. Also of note is that iOS 3 wasn't affected. It sounds more like a lack of project cohesion between teams than anything. Especially the daylight savings issue a while back where recurring alarms would compensate for daylight savings despite the operating system already doing just that.
All the AC-with-battery-backup alarm clocks I've seen will sound the alarm normally when running on battery, they just won't light the display (so you can't see what time it is, but you still wake up). This goes for clock radios too.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I've heard about this new invention, it lets you continue sleeping even when it is light outside, I think it is called curtains or something.
If things like that are hardcoded and only set for the following year or less the library is shite, and you're even more shite for using it.
It's not hardcoded in the library, it's hardcoded in the rules the library is supposed to follow.
For example, about a week ago, it was decided that there will be no leap second in 2010 because the Earth rotated slightly faster than expected. Did your library handle that?
I'm not the biggest fan of Apple, but even I think you're underselling the iPhone by calling it JUST a music player. Ask any college student, an alarm clock is a critical feature of all cell phones.
I find your commentary strange and otherworldly.
My six-year-old Dell laptop can deliver 2560x1440 to an external display just fine, provided that the display has a VGA input. It's got nothing to do with how "powerful" the card is.
Single-link DVI and HDMI are generally limited to 1920x1200, whereas DisplayPort simply has more bandwidth available -- a lot more, in fact.
But being equipped with a DisplayPort connector doesn't mean that it's a powerful card -- it just means that it's got a DisplayPort connector. These are neither particularly new, at this point, nor particularly interesting (unless you're in an Apple universe where connectors change in incompatible fashions all the time*).
*: My PC has two dual-link DVI outputs, and can also deliver video over component, composite, or S-Video without hackery. I can plug DVI, HDMI, or VGA displays in with ease, using cheap and completely passive adapters, and drive whatever sort of display at native resolution. This connectivity is perfectly sufficient in my world, and isn't uncommon.
The Apple world sounds a whole lot more confusing for something that's supposed to be simpler. And nevermind this other abomination.
Kid-proof tablet..
I was thinking of the iPod Touch, but an iPhone is also not primarily an alarm clock. I'm not saying the bug is a good thing, just that I don't think it's reasonable to consider a temporary problem with alarms not going off a "critical" bug in a device which is primarily not an alarm clock -- whether it's primarily a music player or a phone.
I have a variety of times set as non-repeating alarms in both phones, and I turn those alarms on as needed each night before going to sleep. There are few alarm clocks that come with a more irritating sound than the iPhone's "Alarm" sound, so this works for me. Until this year.
On Jan 1, 2 and 3, the iPhone 3G worked as expected, but the iPhone 4 did not go off at all, even this morning, despite Apple's claim that the bug would fix itself. Out of curiosity, I created two new alarms, one repeating and the other not repeating, on the iPhone 4, and they both went off as expected. It seems you have to actually delete any alarms created before Jan 1 and recreate them if you want them to work.
I had an amusing moment on Sunday at 9:00 sitting in my office with my boss when one of my employees called and said he just woke up and had no idea why his alarm didn't wake him up:
My boss, who also has an iPhone, but apparently uses his 5-year-old son as an alarm clock, just stared at me. I'm sure the same scene will play out today because the bug did not really fix itself. Even though I have a device that's not affected and I understand what's going on, this is still going to impact me because other people around me don't... and some of them were told by me that it would "fix itself" this morning. <SARCASM>This totally undermines my credibility... the next time someone is missing money from their paycheck and I tell them it will "fix itself," they're not going to believe me!</SARCASM>
It's been tried, about a decade ago. They called it "Internet time." And no, it didn't catch on, in spite of being promoted by lots of heavy hitters (CNN included it in their online masthead.) I think the biggest problem was that Swatch let their ego go just a little too far, and they attempted to move the prime meridian to Switzerland. If they had aligned with Greenwich, it might just have caught on.
I mean exactly what I say - that the graphics chip on the 2 year old Macbook is incapable of driving the 27" display, even if you can adapt the mini-DVI port into a displayport / minidisplayport found on the new monitor.
The Intel X3100 just doesn't have the power to drive it, since it's not actually a proper GPU, just an integrated graphics chip sharing the main memory:
from here: http://support.apple.com/kb/SP5
Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor with 144MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory3
Extended desktop and video mirroring: Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 1920 by 1200 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors
While the 27" display can be driven at non-native resolutions of 1920x1080 and 12880x720, it's not going to look good unless you're feeding it 1080 or 720p video content, which is clearly what the non-native resolutions were designed for.
As it stands right now, I stand by my original assertion that the Intel inbuilt X3100 as installed on the 2008 Macbook is not powerful enough to drive the 27" display at native resolution. Something that anyone looking to make a $999 purchase should really check out beforehand, which brings us back to the very original point of this particular thread, featuring some moron boss who somehow represents all Apple users because he makes purchasing decisions without checking specifications first.
The 2008 Macbook cannot drive a 27" display. Subsequent Macbooks, with more powerful graphics cards, can. There's no rocket science here. That 2008 Macbook can plug into HDMI, DVI, VGA, S-video, Composite and other connections also "with ease" just like your laptop (there are cheap, passive adapters for all of these). There is also a less cheap active adapter if you want to drive an old Apple display that uses ADC, although there aren;t many of those left any more (Apple has not sold an ADC based monitor in some time). I see you linked to those cheap and passive adapters that seem to be ok in your Dell world, but somehow "a whole lot more confusing" in the Apple world.
What's that word I'm looking for? Hypnocrate... no, Cryptohit? Hypocrite, that's it.
I have 3. My olde alarm clock radio wakes me up between 5 & 6, depending on how often I hit the snooze. My wristwatch goes off at 6:15, telling me to get off Facebook and eat my breakfast. And my iPhone goes off at 6:30 telling me to get out the door.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I tried telling myself "wake up at 6". I woke up at 6PM.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
That and the earplugs so you don't hear the birds chirping in the morning - and you don't have to get up at all as you won't hear the alarm in time to get to work anyway.
The planet and most of living things on it don't give a fuck about OUR way of measuring time.
Daylight Saving Time is US adapting to our ecosystem in order to get more out of the deal - not the other way around.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I noticed that most smartphone users complain that their phone's alarm doesn't work when the phone is off.
I thought my friend was weird when he said that but then lots of people say the same. I don't get it. Why do you even turn off the phone anyway? If someone calls you in the middle of the night it's cause they really, positively need your attention. Or is it that most people actually have annoying friends who call you at any time?
I just turn off the sync option so 3AM spam won't wake me up, but the phone is on in case someone needs to talk to me.
Back to the RTC, AFAIK, RTC chips do have alarm (pull the IRQ line when the alarm is fired). Maybe phone designers think people will never turn off their phone so they don't use the RTC's wake up capability. I don't see why. The RTC is built-in in many processors actually, so it's just a matter of turning the phone on, fire the alarm, and eventually turn it back off.
The phone never had a problem keeping time. The bugs were in the calendar / alarm apps which didn't come to terms with the fact that time may change slightly, and not with the underlying timekeeping code.
Well, the proper way to handle this is to use NSDate and NSCalendar along with the Event Kit Framework. If you use these classes then they should handle all of the time changes for you, rolling your own code to do this is definitely not a good idea because there are so many issues with time changes and calendar idiosyncrasies.
Basically it comes down to either the apps in question are doing the calculations on their own and there are errors in those calculations or the frameworks themselves have these bugs. I think it's likely that the bugs are in the frameworks because Apple is usually pretty good about using the proper frameworks rather than taking shortcuts.
By the way, here's an excellent write-up of some of the issues as well as examples of how to do these calculations in an iOS app.
Sapere aude!
I was browsing around the management website of a Samsung telephone system once, saw the DST settings and thought I would take a look. There were about seven lines, with text boxes for the month, day, year, hour, minute, second that a DST change would occur. I thought to myself, "what happens when these seven years have passed?" Does the phone system update itself, or will our times suddenly be of because it has no entries for DST? Either way, that has to be the worst implementation of DST I have ever seen.
I thought my friend was weird when he said that but then lots of people say the same. I don't get it. Why do you even turn off the phone anyway? If someone calls you in the middle of the night it's cause they really, positively need your attention. Or is it that most people actually have annoying friends who call you at any time?
I just turn off the sync option so 3AM spam won't wake me up, but the phone is on in case someone needs to talk to me.
I have a landline, so if someone really needs my attention they can call that. Leaving the phone on is wasting energy, battery life and be subjected to receiving SMS fom annoying people who don't understand you have to get up in the morning (usually uni colleagues, but not really "friends"), or my phone company sending me alerts about some promotion they have going.
Besides, my Nokia alerts me even if it doesn't have enough battery to stay on, which is a very helpful features when I don't have a charger with me.
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I have had various mobile phones since about 1999 that have replaced my wristwatch alarm clock and PDA - the next model will probably replace the tv. However, I do have the more reliable http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Dalek-Talking-Alarm-Clock/dp/B000F44POS (sadly for all Dalek fans, apparently not currently available.) which wakes me up every morning at 6 am with threats of imminent extermination.
Even if the Nokia has run out of juice the Dalek does its job. Turns off after ten minutes or so ( at least I think it does, it must threaten the neighbours every morning when we are on holiday cos, I always forget to turn off the alarm!).
There is of course no real way to defeat the Daleks.
Apart from stairs.
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These little glitches aren't excuses for why alarms failed to go off at all. If a second was missed here or there, I'd understand. But the alarms failed to work. What does your code look like if these library updates are what causes this sort of problem? I expect a device to work as intended independent of these small anomalies. The device didn't know it would happen or that it did happen and no desynchronization in the Earth's rotation should cause the alarm system to fail. Nor would the desynchronization event affect the time system outside of being off from "official time" by a couple of seconds.
So let's be honest. The coders at Apple just fucked up hard.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Yeah, I tried to use a 3rd party app (FooBar?) to manage the music on my iPhone. It failed and now my phone isn't recognized by iTunes and it wants me to reset - I'm 2firmware releases behind. So, I get to lose a ton of info when I reset just to be able to update. F'ing Apple! At least I can use a file browser to pull pics off.
Oh and being tied to ONE machine to synch also sucks and I hate it. I've seen methods for synching multiple computers and a single library shared somewhere but I don't trust rigging it like that and some place like DropBox isn't going to be big enough for my music. Oh and no way do I allow iTunes to "manage" my music - hells no!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Yeah but are they broken too because of an underlying function that Apple borked or do they actually work? Supposedly the alarm would work today - it didn't. I know someone who has OLD firmware having never updated and theirs worked just fine. Go figure...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Apparently, it will fix itself by January 3
Apparently not.
Required reading for internet skeptics
It's an iPhone. The thing is just too puny for me. Maybe if I put on headphones / earbuds it would wake me, but that would be a smidgen uncomfortable.
SSC
Recetly with my new(Samsung) phone, I was on a trip and I drained the battery. I didn't have my power cord with me so it was without power for about a day. It didn't have enough power to boot up but the alarm still worked.
Thanks, AC.
Kid-proof tablet..
Clock and alarms from the cheapest thrift stores work incredibly accurate. People were expecting the same from iPhone iOS and were bitterly disappointed. I used to be expecting this from my Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, but this being Windows, I have no one to blame but me for relying on it.
But yes, I think programming related to time and date is simple. Not because because it actually is trivial - which it is not - but because it is probably the best known *non*-trivial subject. It is rubbed in in every course on programming that is worth its merits. All teachers and professors and books never cease to preach to their students on how difficult programming on sorting, searching, time and encryption is, no matter how deceivingly trivial they may seem at first to a naive beginner.
Most programs will have *something* to do with time and date, sorting or searching, which is the reason they are taught so extensively. Messing up these known-hard but well-researched subjects is a tell-tale sign that even a faintest hint from all these exhaustive material in academic and educational teaching has been ignored, forgotten or never heard or read.
Which means the programmer has blissfully ignored all the warnings he should have received in education or not received any education at all.
Either way, it marks an amateur who should not code production quality software for the flagship device of the largest publicly-traded consumer electronics company in the US.
A lazy tester and a broken testing process is just the icing on the cake here.
None of them should ever be allowed within five miles of companies who produce software for autopilots and nuclear plants.
Would switching ios to open source have caught this bug earlier? This bug is a huge one, since it is a critical system which is required to be 100% reliable with consequences affecting users on important things such as aeroplane trips. In my case I was lucky enough that my parents also set an alarm on their reliable alarm clock, I was wondering why mine didnt go off, but then again I remembered this bug occuring during day light savings time which was now meant to be fixed(i guess only for daylight savings not new years-lol). Obviously their TDD was lacking in this area. Being that Apple only makes money off their hardware, at least thats what they tell us. What is the crime in giving their platform to the community so that their hardware will feature the most reliable software due to communities involvement and bug fixing? I'm not very familiar with how much of android is actually open source but i suspect apple could be benefiting from a similar strategy.