_rolf

As you can imagine, the developers learned of the issue almost immediately. Within literally five minutes they had submitted a fixed version to the Play Store. Unfortunately for them, app updates only go live after they've been reviewed by Google. One hour later, the app was still in the review queue. The developers reached out to Google multiple times saying it's an emergency. It took 36 hours for the update to get released.

By the end, the app had been bombed by thousands of 1 star reviews and lost most of its users. Many users who had paid for additional features were demanding refunds. I doubt I can even imagine how frustrating it must have been. How stupidly they sabotaged themselves, and how there was nothing they could do for their users even though the code was fixed in 5 minutes.

This is an unfortunate story. These folks had been working on Smart Launcher 6, a major update, for over a year. It was quite well received on release and worked well... for about a week.

Some developer (let's call them Greg) had intentionally put a "kill switch" into the app for alpha testing purposes. You see, Greg was worried that some testers might keep a buggy alpha version on their phones, or even leak the build. Greg's idea was that exactly 30 days after the build date, the alpha will stop working and tell the user to download an official release. Greg submitted this code about a year ago and never dreamed it would stay in for the public release.

On January 30th, the kill switch activated for every Smart Launcher 6 user. The app stopped working and told users to download an update from the Play Store. But this was not a coordinated thing. There was no update.

I should explain what this app is. It's a launcher app, meaning it replaces the entire home screen and app menu on the phone. When the kill switch activated around 4 PM, people suddenly couldn't get to their home screen or launch any apps. Their phone just kept sending them to the Play Store and was practically unusable. The one thing they could do was uninstall the app, and of course they did.

Yeah. "Perfect" in the way it can tell the difference between two photons or three photons over a period of time, but almost useless for anything else.

If I understand the paper correctly, this is a very poor technology for "normal" photography in its current state.

On the pixel level, there are no shades of grey. You get fully black or fully white pixels only. You have to calculate an average from a bunch of neighbouring pixels and blend together multiple "exposures" to get more data.

Because each pixel can only count at most one photon every millisecond, even the dimmest candlelit room at night would completely blind the sensor.

If you could have like a thousand times more pixels and a thousand times more samples per second, maybe it could be developed into a camera. I guess that would be way too expensive and wouldn't offer a significant benefit to most buyers.

This post looks funny in the Digg RSS reader: https://i.imgur.com/TNASB3p.png

Probably best if you recreate the document from scratch and "in your own words".

I might buy one.

Well yes, I would expect five shirts to be women's, and if I'm lucky, perhaps one shirt belongs to a fellow gay man. Often zero.

Contact us didn't work.

Reporting very poor performance on what seemed like a basic challenge: http://i.imgur.com/Q8pFCtE.png

Came out as rmm 1.247 mm 111.513 am: 9.99: 3959 4.349 at was Luna L000 9.; n.nnn n.nnn n.nnn Rmavgorh xv: v Rnlalrms u.nnn n.nnn n.nnn M m....;r..=:.....

But a lot of times "literally" literally means "literally".

Why would you get all arrogant and superior over other people's use of language, then implement such an obviously broken concept? Literally the dumbest thing I've seen all day.

It does not change. It never has. It still says "First edition 2012".