Ludicrocity Heard Around the Web
I spent a fair bit of time in a doctor’s waiting room today, and that meant surfing the web on a UMPC. I ran across a few articles that point to recurring ludicrocity that I have to comment about. Sit back and enjoy the ride, and let me know if you find these things as silly as I find them.
Retweet — the new retweet function that Twitter has rolled out was seemingly in every third tweet I’ve seen lately. Let me be straight — I am interested in reading smart things that folks have to say, on Twitter or anywhere else. I do not care that 1,300 people also found them interesting enough and retweeted them. We don’t need more noise on the web, we need more focus.
Droid Auto-focus Bug — the Android development team has admitted there is a bug in the auto-focusing API that caused all of the Droid’s bad camera experiences, and then fixed them automatically. There’s a time-stamp error in the API that causes it to work poorly for 24.5 days, and then properly for 24.5 days, ad infinitum. Time-stamp? In a camera focusing routine? You’re kidding me, right?
Microsoft Exec Ray Ozzie — smartphone apps don’t matter, developers will port all apps people want to all the platforms. Apps are not a differentiator among phone platforms. Spoken like a company in denial. Sadly, Ozzie is Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect. Let that sink in for a moment.
Windows 7 Starter Edition on Netbooks — Joanna Stern of Slashgear points out that 23 of 28 netbooks on sale at Amazon currently are preloaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition. Ms. Stern also points out the basic functionality that is missing from the Starter Edition, such as desktop wallpaper customization, that makes Windows XP a better value for netbooks than Win 7 Starter Edition. It’s like we have taken a step backward in the Windows world, yet again.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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> Time-stamp? In a camera focusing routine?
You’re surprised? I’m guessing that either (a) you have never developed a camera-function API or (b) when you write native code for a Fortune 500 company’s premier product, it is always 100% bug-free.
> You’re kidding me, right?
Uh, no. I’m not. Nor am I kidding when I suggest that this prosaic rounding error might be behind other, seemingly unrelated, reports of Droid glitches.
Let’s hope the dev team(s) in charge of testing v2.1 are more open-minded and progressive – at least, less prone to bouts of huffy vexation – than you. ;)
Isn’t this post just a “retweet”? No offense, just pointing out the irony.
Those that have been in the software development game long enough know that bugs can crop up in the most unexpected places and have very unusual consequences. What I question is why no one charged with testing the Driod prior to introduction noticed the issue.
There’s a very old joke: “What do you call a Microsoft beta tester?” Answer: “a customer.” It looks more and more the answer is becoming a CE industry standard.
Ray Ozzie – what’s the first step on the road to recovery?