iPhone Alarm Bug Leads To Mass European Sleep-in 487
nk497 writes "A flaw in the alarm clock in iPhone 4s gave Europeans a bit of a lie-in this morning. While the Apple handsets automatically adjusted to daylight savings time, a bug in the alarm system meant many were woken up an hour later than they should have been, after clocks rolled back over the weekend. Annoyingly, Australia was hit by a similar problem last month, but Apple failed to fix the problem or even warn users. American Apple fans, consider yourselves warned. The iOS4 bug can apparently be avoided by using one-off alarms, rather than pre-set regular wake-up calls."
Not just iPhone 4s (Score:4, Informative)
my girlfriends 3gs (running iOS 4.x) had the same bug this morning.
Fortunately, my $99 android phone woke us up at the right time
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If it were subsidised, I would like you to say it.
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not subsidised, it was 99 euros prepaid at vodafone
the vodafone 845 nova (or huawei 8120 "joy", as it is know in china), is a pretty basic little phone, QVGA resistive touch screen, 128mb ram, android 2.1
I love it though, in a few days i'll upgrade to an htc desire, but even with the added features, i am not sure i wont be dissapointed. the 845 is just excellent bang for the buck
Re:Not just iPhone 4s (Score:5, Funny)
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If you're screwing android rather than girlfriends ... that would explain a lot!
Re:Not just iPhone 4s (Score:4, Funny)
Screw the android... I wanna know how he got a girlfriend...
There's an app for that.
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unfortunately not..
When we got together she actually had sony *shudder* vaio *gag* laptop running vista *pukes*
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note to self: next time add "oh yeah *whoosh*" to end of post when replying seriously to a joke to ridicule a meme
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Re:Not just iPhone 4s (Score:5, Funny)
my girlfriends 3gs (running iOS 4.x) had the same bug this morning.
Fortunately, my $99 android phone woke us up at the right time
I am sure that Apple will fix it shortly, then patent alarm clock apps for mobile phones that adjust automatically for daylight savings.
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Too late, my Desire adjusted automatically and woke me. Prior art? :P
There's a workaround (Score:3, Funny)
Just use Apple Time Machine to get to work on time.
Or at least it would have... (Score:5, Funny)
If the battery had not died overnight.
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If the battery had not died overnight.
Fortunately, before the battery went flat, my N900 had powered itself off when there was still enough juice on the battery to wake up for a few alarms... :p
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"Your calendar looks pretty full, you've been working too hard lately.
I've pushed today's schedule back an hour so you can sleep in and get some rest."
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Let me guess: yet another stupid programmer who decided that "french language means France"?
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Funny, MY android phone woke me up one hour early.
Gotta fix that bug this evening.
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My $19.95 Alarm Clock also woke me up this morning...
Best part is that it's better than an android or iphone as it never need recharging. I simply replace it's 9V battery every time I replace the fire alarm batteries. Plus I have a snooze that can easily be triggered without even opening my eyes, another feature that is impossible on an iPhone and Android, or any other cellphone from what I discovered.
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I have a Samsung star 5233 and I put it face down on my bedside table. The two call buttons on the front protrude just enough that I can snooze it by pressing on the back of the phone, no accuracy needed. Just a good klap on the back and it is back to dreamland...
Re:Not just iPhone 4s (Score:5, Funny)
If you and your girlfriend aren't careful, you'll get Baby 1.0. That'll wake you up very early, and without fail.
No, they're as safe as houses. They use the iPhone rhythm method app for contraception so what could possibly go wron.... oh wait.
Re:Not just iPhone 4s (Score:4, Insightful)
If you and your girlfriend aren't careful, you'll get Baby 1.0. That'll wake you up very early, and without fail.
No, they're as safe as houses. They use the iPhone rhythm method app for contraception so what could possibly go wron.... oh wait.
You realize there's a name for women who use the rhythm method...
Mommy
Another day (Score:2, Insightful)
and another ridiculous Apple story makes it to the front page.
Re:Another day (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, its a ridiculous story.
Get a proper alarm clock for redundancy if you're in a job so sensitive that oversleeping once will get you fired, even with no history of tardiness.
If you're really paranoid, make it a wind-up clock so you don't have to worry about losing power.
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the first solution that came to mind for power-loss problems was a UPS for me.... (actually, most electronic alarm clocks i had featured a bay for a 9v battery to keep it running in case of a power failure)
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actually, most electronic alarm clocks i had featured a bay for a 9v battery to keep it running in case of a power failure
Same, but they didn’t actually work while the power was out. They just kept time. The display went dark, though, and the alarm wouldn’t go off if the power was out.
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There is an abomination of an AC clock silicon that has been on the market for 2+ decades it seems. The time keeping is synchronized to the mains when mains is present. When there is no mains, there is an RC oscillator that runs fast. Why? Because some harebrain put those values on the application circuit in the datasheet. Everyone uses that silicon, and they all copy the app circuit verbatim without ever bothering to check how fast the RC oscillator works. Thus all those clocks behave like that. Moreover,
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Re:Another day (Score:4, Funny)
Oh come on, don't you have a soldering iron and a disregard for warranties?
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A buddy had a UPS with the beeper that you couldn't shut off. We found a wood screw and jammed it in the speaker hole. As he turned in the screw it got quieter and quieter until it finally quit. If you back the screw out, it will beep again.
Re:Another day (Score:4, Informative)
Those 9v batteries tend to run down quickly. Luckily I have a 300watt UPS lying around, which can power that device for fucking ages.
However, my iPhone is what I generally rely on. Until iOS 4.2 comes out with the patch, I just set my alarms forward 1 hour (I'm in the souther hemisphere, with the opposite problem).
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We all know that forgetting things leads to Post-It Note Nightmare [cybernetnews.com] No, this is not a solution.
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Note that I said "get a proper alarm clock for redundancy" - redundancy being the key word there. If you're relying on a single device and your job is *so* sensitive that being late to work once, with no history of tardiness, will get you fired (this was the scenario the troll I responded to suggested), the sensible thing to do is to NOT rely on a single device to make sure you get up on time.
I actually do have a wind-up alarm clock (momentary power drops occur frequently-enough where I live that it's an i
Re:Another day (Score:5, Interesting)
The clock is bad implementation. It should use the incoming radio signal to determine when DST is in effect, not a preset table. Sigh. Things are so bad that NIST had to come up with implementation guidelines [nist.gov] for designers of those clocks. It is an interesting read -- most of the cheap WWVB-controlled clocks miss most of the recommendations. Case in point: my wife's clock. The things it got wrong:
1. Use of a satellite icon to mark when it's synchronized: check.
2. Insufficient signal consistency checking: yep -- every 2-3 months it completely garbles its time during synchronization.
3. Synchronization at wrong time of day: check -- time should depend on the time zone *and* time of year. The default of midnight is poor.
4. No way of turning off DST: check.
5. Display delay: check - up to 1.5 seconds off right after sync is way too much.
6. Signal quality display -- none: check.
7. Doesn't allow selection from the minimum of 7 time zones (HAST, AKST, PST, MST, CST, EST, AST): check.
I'd also add to it that since the clock has a fairly accurate temperature sensor (to within 0.2C from 10C to 50C -- I checked myself), it could easily temperature-compensate its oscillator. Moreover, it could also compensate longer-term drift of its oscillator against the WWVB, thus easily improving unsynchronized accuracy by say two orders of magnitude. It's all in the firmware, so there's little per-unit cost other than having to amortize NRE.
I haven't checked how it's implemented (MCU vs. custom silicon), but these days implementing such a clock pretty much means that you use some low-power, cheap-in-quantity MCU and do the demodulation and decoding in software, and that can be quite elaborate since the bandwidth is so low. Heck, such a clock could easily interface with pretty much all LF time code stations anywhere on Earth -- they all are in the 40-80kHz band.
Sheesh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sheesh (Score:5, Funny)
You know... that sounds awfully familiar...
Are you saying that it's not, in fact, a bug?
And that it could be, instead, a feature?
Re:Sheesh (Score:5, Funny)
No, rather that it's a problem that all cell phones have because of the nature of the technology.
Re:Sheesh (Score:5, Funny)
First post! (Score:5, Funny)
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Old Man Withers!
Real bug: changing the time (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well that's what we get for coming up with this nonsense that the Sun doesn't rotate around the Earth!
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Daylight savings saves (hence the name) billions every year in electricity costs. I live in a country that doesn't implement daylight savings, and while it's nice not to have to worry about changing clocks, it's utterly stupid becuase in summer it gets light at 4:30am and the sun goes down at 7:30pm at the latest. Moving that hour of light from 4:30-5:30am and tacking it on to 7:30pm-8:30pm saves a lot of utilities and has all sorts of beneficial effects like reducing car accident rates. The British in W
Re:Real bug: changing the time (Score:5, Insightful)
The British in WWII set their clocks two hours ahead all year long to save on scace resources in order to defeat national socialism.
So why not just leave it that way if you can save resources?
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So why not just leave it that way if you can save resources?
Going forward a time zone permanently would waste resources in the morning during the winter. DST is designed to make dawn closer to constant.
Re:Real bug: changing the time (Score:5, Informative)
Daylight savings saves (hence the name) billions every year in electricity costs."
Incorrect, DST causes more electricity to be used. It is bad for the economy and the environment. [physorg.com]Hint: Air Conditioning uses more power than lights.
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If you could get 1 hour through the hottest part of the day before doing that, the AC will run better and require less power to bring the house back down to the desired temp. Of course, if you don't use a programmable thermostat, it doesn't matter.
Re:Real bug: changing the time (Score:4, Interesting)
If they aren't at home, the air conditioning or heating costs will be elsewhere.
Incorrect. If they are elsewhere, it is frequently the case that the "elsewhere" continues to cool the building regardless if the person is there or not. Schools continue to cool for teachers staying late, factories often work 24/7, retail places are open well after people would be home.
If by bullshitting the numbers you mean writing down factual electric meter readings and performing simple math (as TFA said), then I'm curious to hear how Mother Nature does her math. This wasn't a guessing game, the sum total electric use in Indiana increased at the same time DST was introduced. They even used the counties that were already on DST as a control group (for weather, more TVs, whatever), so don't even try to go the "correlation is not causation" route.
Re:Real bug: changing the time (Score:4, Informative)
I call bullshit on the billions. Every study I've seen on DST has mixed results on electricity savings, and often shows losses in other areas like farming. It also costs money to design time-sensitive applications and devices around DST. The sleep schedule disruption also causes issues with workers, and has been shown to increase workplace injuries. While the increase in sunlight exposure is mostly healthy, it also increases the risk of skin cancer. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has a nice section on this with sources.
Also, while in WW2, DST might have saved on some resources, power usage is now far different. DST mainly affects power usage by residential lighting, which is no longer the primary use of electricity (especially now that incandescent bulbs are being phased out).
Re:Said by somebody... (Score:4, Informative)
This is annoying not only on iPhone (Score:3, Insightful)
Note to engineers everywhere: if your gadget DO change the time, please use some kind of notification that it did so. Otherwise, we can presume that time is wrong, and that we have to manually adjust it
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Well, with all the fancy gadgets, there's an easy solution:
Just set all your gadgets to the time the majority of them show.
Now, I knew there was a reason why I had that many gadgets.
FYI, the only clocks I had to set this weekend was my old, non-networked alarm clock and the time of my (also non-networked) digital camera. Everythin else knew what to do and did it.
Not The Whole Story (Score:3, Informative)
The story fails to mention several key details.
1. The problem only manifests if you have a recurring alarm set.
2. The alram goes off an hour late if it was set before for DST switch.
3. The alarm goes off an hour early if it was set after the DST switch.
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That makes a lot more sense. I was wondering why this story wasn't about a bunch of people who woke up early instead of late.
daylight savings time (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone remind me please what we're saving? It's not electricity, because we use lightbulbs before sunrise and after sunset in summer and winter.
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But that don't take out the blame from the software. DSTs are around since a century ago, so you have to deal with them. And is something usually well handled by software, unless you have badly defined the timezones or have a c
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Not one comment yet about the real culprit here: daylight savings time. If we didn't have it anywhere in the world, then programmers wouldn't have to worry about when DST happens in different timezones (or which places have DST and which don't), or worry about what to do with log files or anything else when time jumps an hour.
Someone remind me please what we're saving? It's not electricity, because we use lightbulbs before sunrise and after sunset in summer and winter.
DST does save energy. It may not happen in the place you live but the times for sundown/sunrise does change significantly where I live depending on the time of year. It could be 8pm with the sun still out one part of the year and 5pm in darkness another time of the year. The culprit here is the phone, with auto DST there's no reason for this bug, shame on the programmers. It's a completely silly bug.
Re:daylight savings time (Score:5, Insightful)
Not one comment yet about the real culprit here: daylight savings time.
This sounds an awful lot like: the real problem is that you're holding it the wrong way.
!opensource (Score:2)
Under a thousand eyes, you won't oversleep.
Hows this bug work? (Score:2)
While the Apple handsets automatically adjusted to daylight savings time, a bug in the alarm system meant many were woken up an hour later than they should have been, after clocks rolled back over the weekend.
How does this bug work?
OK lets work it inductively and assume the phone stores all times internally as local time and trusts the time the cellphone providers send out. So, "spring forward fall back" so your 5am wakeup remains at ... 5am.
Well lets try option 2. Maybe they store it all internally as UTC and get local time from the cellphone tower. So your 5am local daylight time is X UTC. "fall back" to regular time and that wakeup is now X-0100 UTC. The alarm program reads the local time, converts to UT
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I don't use my phone as an alarm clock but I do leave it on the charger overnight.
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The other oddity is people use their phone as an alarmclock? A smartphone with a battery life measured in hours, probably dead by wakeup time? I'm with the modern generation in that I haven't worn a wristwatch in over a decade, but is it a generational thing that people don't own/use alarm clocks? What do you glance at, at 2am, when you just want to see the time if you momentarily wake up, etc? Get the tiny little phone, unlock it, put on the glasses/contacts, and read the time?
Yes. You plug it in first. Unlocking a phone can generally be done by touch after you've owned it for more than a couple days. And bringing it to your face is a lot easier than sitting up to see the alarm clock if you don't happen to have the right furniture for placing your alarm clock in a better position, which is quite common when you're a 20-something in a cramped apartment. No need to put on glasses, though. At least not for me.
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The other oddity is people use their phone as an alarmclock? A smartphone with a battery life measured in hours, probably dead by wakeup time? I'm with the modern generation in that I haven't worn a wristwatch in over a decade, but is it a generational thing that people don't own/use alarm clocks?
I'm from your generation, and I used a pocket watch when everyone else used wristwatches (could never stand those things, although I wanted a calculator watch for the geek cred). I have a couple clock radios, but I use them as clocks. My alarm is my phone because it's always around, and the charger is on my nightstand, so it won't run down. I can set my next day's wakeup time at any time during the day, and choose any noise. Maybe the younger set don't even own clock radios, but I think they probably ha
Is this real? (Score:2)
Jim Furyk (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, Jim Furyk's iPhone made him oversleep and he still won the FedEx cup worth 10 MEEELION dollars, so quitcher whinin!
DST? Which century are we living in? (Score:2)
Not to excuse the iPhone bug, but I never knew about it until I read this story, probably because I live a place without this whole DST business.
But really, which century are we living in here? Why would anyone still wants to adjust their clocks twice a year, and what are we "saving" here exactly?
Re:DST? Which century are we living in? (Score:5, Informative)
People's sanity. :-P
I live in a place with DST -- basically it means in the summer, we get extra-long days so it's light until late into the evening (almost 9pm around the solstice). It shifts the hours of usable daylight into hours people might actually use during the summer instead of it being light out at 5am or something stupid.
It also makes up for the fact that in winter it's dark when you get up and leave for work, and dark by the time you leave for home after work. In winter there's a good 1.5 month period where you don't get to see much daylight -- as short as about 8h42m of daylight. DST doesn't fix this, but it gives us some of it back in the summer.
Much like you can't fathom why we have it -- if you grew up with it, you can't fathom why everyone else doesn't have it.
Re:DST? Which century are we living in? (Score:4, Informative)
We have, and it involves daylight savings time.
We're not making you do a damned thing. If you don't like it, don't do it. You'll just have to keep track of what time we're operating on if you need to be calling us. (And, if we need to be calling you, we need to track that.)
Are you under the impression that you are forced to have DST just because (you think) we said so? Even within North America, there are places that don't do DST.
If your own government makes you do this, bitch to them. We don't care if you change your clocks. Heck, I don't care if you even have a clock.
Hate for DST aside, how does this bug even exist? (Score:5, Interesting)
I see a lot of posts with hate for DST.. that's fine, I'd be happy if it were abolished as well.
But now back to there being a bug in how the alarm thing is handled on the iPhone. How does that bug even exist?
If the alarm is set for a particular time, say "7am".. then what does it matter whether or not the clock went back an hour at 3am?
I can understand the alarm app going a bit batty if the clock went back at 8am (essentially the alarm going off -twice- that day), but given the actual circumstances... how did the alarm decide that it should instead be going off at 8am? The clock, presumably, does give the correct time.. so it's not like its internal time functions don't know what time it actually is. I'm confused. Is this just some manner of shoddy coding going on?
What's worse is how Apple is handling it... i.e. 'not'. Most of America (some states ignore DST already) is up for its DST change next week. I guess most people are now warned by the media attention (where was that when it was NZ / AU?).
Re:Hate for DST aside, how does this bug even exis (Score:4, Insightful)
I see a lot of posts with hate for DST.. that's fine, I'd be happy if it were abolished as well.
But now back to there being a bug in how the alarm thing is handled on the iPhone. How does that bug even exist?
If the alarm is set for a particular time, say "7am".. then what does it matter whether or not the clock went back an hour at 3am? I can understand the alarm app going a bit batty if the clock went back at 8am (essentially the alarm going off -twice- that day), but given the actual circumstances... how did the alarm decide that it should instead be going off at 8am? The clock, presumably, does give the correct time.. so it's not like its internal time functions don't know what time it actually is. I'm confused. Is this just some manner of shoddy coding going on?
I'll venture a guess:
Applications, especially ones using phone APIs, usually aren't running 24/7. At a high level, what they will do is, in some manner, register for an event with the operating system. They will then idle indefinitely until that event occurs, at which point the operating system will give the application execution time and it will respond to that event. The event can be several things, including "when the user taps the screen" and "if the phone is powered on", and notably (for this discussion) can be based off of time, such as "8 hours from now".
My guess is that, when an alarm is set, the alarm calculates the amount of time in the future until it needs to be sounded, then registers with the OS to be woken that much time later (probably via some form of nanosleep iOS API derivative). If the alarm fails to factor in DST when calculating that time difference, then it'll get its event later (or earlier, or whatever) than it was expecting, and sound (and then probably calculate the next time difference and sleep until then).
On the surface, an alarm application could register for more periodic events (clock ticks, UI update loop iterations, or just sleep for seconds at a time) and evaluate if it should sound periodically. This would have easily avoided the DST issue. The problem here is that each time the event gets dispatched, the phone has to wake up to handle it, and such periodic waking would cost unnecessary battery. In fact, the OS knows how / when / for how long to sleep based on scheduler details derived from some form of these event registrations. Applications in general (and especially on battery-consuming devices) should attempt to register for the least number of events as possible, hence (I'm guessing) why they chose the time delay calculation option instead of a periodic one.
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On the surface, an alarm application could register for more periodic events (clock ticks, UI update loop iterations, or just sleep for seconds at a time) and evaluate if it should sound periodically. This would have easily avoided the DST issue.
Not at all. The problem here is that if you want an alarm at 8am every morning, that's always 24 hours after the previous time, except one day where it is 23 hours later, and one day where it is 25 hours later. How you measure the time is irrelevant, as long as you know that on this one day the alarm must come after 23 hours and not 24.
exagerated - most Europeans have a holiday (ex.UK) (Score:3, Informative)
as Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Cap Verde, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Irland, Italy, Liechtestein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the Vatican have an official holiday.
I do not know about the US. But the author of the original message must be pretty Con-European!
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I'm starting to think it would be easier to keep track of when Europe is NOT on holiday, rather then when they ARE.
"yes we have 7 fixed working days every year, and 3 floating work days."
Re:Is this story for real? (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, companies like iHome [ihomeaudio.com] make clock radios and the like that are meant for it. They even make a nice app for i(Phone|Pad) which allows for multiple alarms with sleep music and wake music.
When I traveled on business last, I was pleased to discover that both hotels I stayed in had these and I could use my iPod in the hotel, as well as my iPad propped up on the nightstand. Charging your iPhone and using it as an alarm is fairly easy with t
Re:Is this story for real? (Score:4, Funny)
Why am I picturing some crazy Rube Goldberg device which hangs a snow collection device out the window that sinks down as it fills with snow and then sets some crazy machine motion that turns on your alarm clock? ;-)
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I had no idea millions of people used their phone as an alarm clock.
Works better than my clock radio because it's always nearby, easier to set, I can change the alarm noise to something jarring if needed, and I can set it in the middle of the day when I find out I need to get to work early the next day (instead of waiting until I get home and hoping I remember).
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Re:Is this story for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You obviously don't know me.
However, unlike the iPhone, my alarm clock does adjust itself for daylight savings.
Re:Is this story for real? (Score:5, Funny)
Alarm clock? I haven't needed an alarm clock for almost 4 years.
I'm sure it's merely a coincidence that my eldest child is almost 4 years old now.
Re:Is this story for real? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hi, nice to meet you, now you do.
I USED to use my phone as an alarm clock when I was in-between houses and couch-jumping from friend to friend - all of which who still live with their parents.
All in all though - I'm terrible at getting myself out of bed. Sleep is like a drug, my semi-conscious self in the mornings will battle it out mentally on whether I can spare another 5 minutes with my eyes closed or not. My phone, being a touch device, can dismiss the alarm with a simple mash, and that'll be the end of it.
Whereas my alarm clock, even with the snooze button, will continue to go off every 9 minutes at least. I've used this to my advantage though - since I know It usually takes me hitting the snooze button 5 times before getting out of bed, I just set my alarm 45 minutes early. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in actuallity I get less sleep this way, but it works for me.
Point is though - phones today don't cater to this rather niche area where I want to be able to look over and see what time it is whenever, and not have to pickup my phone or anything. Likewise, I want a large snooze button, and a simple way to turn it off but not so simple you can do it without some focus.
And in before someone says "Why don't you just put your alarm clock (or phone) across the room, forcing you to get out of bed before you turn it off?"
I have tried this, and it results in me falling back to sleep on the floor and not in my bed, which isn't pleasant to wake up to.
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Oh also, I get to set rules, such as wake me up at this time on Monday to Thursday. This time on Friday, this time on the weekend. And once off at this time. All with different ringers.
Never had such a valuable alarm clock.
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It's true. I use my mobile phone as an alarm every day, and I've been doing so for about 5 years now.
Re:Is this story for real? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is this story for real? (Score:4, Funny)
"I wonder why the iPhone bug went the other way?"
Apple - Think different.
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Cut caffeene and go to be earlier. That fixes the "very heavy sleeper" problem. IT did for me and my wife.
My buddy fixed it by spending 3 years in Iraq. he used to sleep as if he was dead in college... now a fly farting in his room has him awake...
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I worked rotating shift for 12 years. 1 week 1st, 1week 2nd 1 week 3rd, back to 1st... etc... and YES making sure you get a solid 9 hours of in bed time and cutting out caffeine completely made a huge difference.
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Some of us like our Macs (or other Apple products) but get annoyed by the people who criticize anyone who uses anything else. Why the hell some people care so much about what kinds of compu
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The problem isn't that iOS is not open source, the problem is that Apple didn't fix the bug after it appeared a month ago in Australia.
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Yep, and then we could wait for months while the carriers fart around rolling out an update for your particular phone's version of android. If they ever do get around to it.
I mean, "Yay, android and open source. Boo apple."
(am I doin it rite?)
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I only ask this because a while back Apple said that they had already paid out $1 billion to developers. Considering that not all apps cost money and that this doesn't include data from Android phones, which have (or will in the near future) similar numbers of sales, it would appear as though there is a lot of software that people want to use.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It is not, as being expensive does not make anything immune to fatal flaws (think spacecraft [latimes.com], Therac-25 [wikipedia.org]). Actually more of the code than on an OS may have been written by people predominantly trained in fields other than computer systems engineering.
While allusions to Homer Simpson's workplace could not possibly be taken seriously, in fact trains are stopped for an hour and ERP systems are shut down t