Can I be the first to say:
HA ha!
GJC
Apple's FaceTime application has been fingered for randomly placing calls, identified as coming from friends and causing more than a little concern when the call fails to connect. The calls are reportedly happening at roughly the same time first thing this morning - waking up Brits around 2.30 in the morning by all accounts - …
Remember reading a long time ago about someone changing the compiler error messages, and can't help thinking of one in particular every time a new failure (feature?) is reported with the iPhone:
"let's duct tape this gerbil of a program"
Apple - Stop bodging the fixes and do it properly!!!
Modern technology is a wonderous and powerful thing, and many people now use it to stay in touch with the disabled, elderly and infirm. It gives people independence safe in the knowledge they can summon help in an emergency.
You clearly don't have anyone in your life that you care for enough to be available 24/7.
[Sarcasm turned up to 11]
So leaving aside the disabled, elderly and infirm, what about the other 90% of the population? Oh, you actually meant you! I guess it makes you feel important that you "care" enough for someone to not turn you phone off. Such an effort you've made there. What DID we do before mobile phones? All those disabled, elderly and infirm getting murdered in their bed's 'cause they couldn't phone YOU. Get over yourself.
Right, rant over. This is actually a pretty good example of a very limited case being used to justify self indulgent behaviour. I want an expensive toy so I'll justify it by claiming it's for the benefit of someone else. I've come to suspect people who use this sort of reasoning genuinely believe their own BS.
For the record, my phone is usually turned on overnight because I forget to turn it off. Number of important phone calls at 2AM in the last 10 years: 0
"For the record, my phone is usually turned on overnight because I forget to turn it off. Number of important phone calls at 2AM in the last 10 years: 0"
I'm out of that environment now but it used to be my job to wake up the on-call tech if there was a problem I couldn't fix myself - usually because it required physical access to a server in the Californian data center.
After a pre-defined delay I would also wake my manager in the USA if a global issue remained unresolved.
Likewise I would expect to be woken if there were problems in APAC.
In all cases the party woken up was grateful for the call. We all had busy working days and preferred to lose a couple of hours sleep from time to time and then go in to work for a routine day than to roll into work and find nothing working except the telephone which was glowing hot with calls from users' managers who believed that shouting down a telephone at someone who is busy would somehow speed up problem resolution.
And using only a cellphone for wakeup calls meant my wife was not woken up for no reason if I was called while travelling.
...they might miss out on a tweet or something.
I only experienced the full horror of combined iPhone/social networking addiction when we had a gathering recently and a friend we hadn't seen in a while stayed overnight. She spent most of the night on the fondleslab, which was never once out of her hands, then announced she was tired and off to bed at midnight-ish. It was later discovered that she was tweeting till 4am, then back at it again from 8am before appearing for breakfast at 11-ish.
It's sad, and I don't mean that in the 90's school playground slagging way. It's sad that someone who used to be the life and soul of the party is having it sucked out of her by such a meaningless waste of time.
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Why don't you go and re-read the article pal?
It would seem that you missed the bit about the lad with the iphone that was turned off and in his bag, and the lad with the mac that was turned off at his home, while he was staying with his doris 16 miles away.
Apple bag-o-shite-a-rama IMO.
"Quite what this poster expected to achieve on arrival at his sub-zero house we're not clear"
Maybe the guy wanted to stop his mac from being stolen?
"I panicked thinking someone was in my house"
Or maybe he was worried that if they could get in to his mac, the aforementioned house-invader might be on his Facebook writing something embarrassing about his love for otters?
This seems to be a central server issue, not the device randomly dialing on it's own. I'm sure this will be a bug hunted down quite quickly. it seems to be very limited in scope.
that said, I've not only received random calls from random phones before on actual cell lines, worse, many, many times I've gotten voicemails or texts hours and sometimes days after they were sent/left. Typically in the wee hours of the morning. I have to have the phone set to continuously alert if i get a message because I'm on call, and sometimes don't hear the first page. Since i also have GV texts duplicated to the wife's phone from some people, as well as voicemails sent to e-mail, her phone often goes off too (in case mine is dead). If AT&T or Verizon delay a voicemail, or the the mother-in-law texts the GV number instead of my wife's number, and it gets delayed, i might have both phones go off within 10 minutes at 3AM. This happens at least once a month, sometimes more (and often from a wrong number).
A sporadic, server side, and evry random issue that Apple will vigorously hunt down and stop i can care less about. SMS systems and voicemail taking days to deliver messages and choosing to in the wee hours of the morning, especially when they were IMPORTANT, or time sensitive, that's bad. I'll take a little face time bug any time.
The HTC Desire has an unfortunately soft-touch "On" key, and the subsequent screenlock involves only a tiny downward stroke (instead of, say, iPhone's long left-right stroke). Result - it's trivially easy to accidentally turn the device on (ie you brush the "On" button when putting the phone in your pocket, or when later extracting cash from said pocket, or...) and for the screenlock to then be negotiated by leg-friction as you walk along.
After that, well, it's whatever random leg-engendered screenpresses the device detects as you're walking along / being vibrated by the tube / whatever. So when I extract my HTC from my pocket I sometimes find it's auto-editing my Phonebook, or that it has dialed a now-confused friend.
("Firm On/Off button" should be part of Mobile Hardware 101, IMHO, FWIW.)
I have to admit, I have never switched on my HTC Desire by accident, but mine doesn't light up until the top hard button is pressed (I assume by soft button you mean one on the touchscreen). Plus its capacitive, so it requires bare skin, a trousered leg won't do, then you have to sweep it down to switch it on, then hit phone, then hit a contact. And anyway, scraping anything down the screen when its in your pocket is asking for scratches. Just how much wiggling do you hands do in your pockets?
@Hayden Clark - thanks for the tip (will do), though my HTC really ought to do the right thing out of the box. Normal folks likely won't find this workaround...
@Bunglebear - yes I did mean the hard button at the top - not difficult to brush it with enough accidental force when eg trying to extract something else out of the same pocket. And yes, I thought that the "capacitive" nature of the screen should mean this doesn't happen, but it does - and you can test it yourself. Get to the lock screen, then brush lower half of screen gently on your jeans... have a few tries - it really does work (well, for me it does).
@AC - I would turn the screen around, but it'd encounter keys and coins - not good.
Apple have local facetime servers in each large market. Makes more sense than routing every call halfway round the world, given that most calls will be to friends who will usually be in the same country and quite likely in the same area of same.
The wee hours of the morning are the obvious time to do any maintenance, upgrades and such.
If it's necessary to pull a server offline, when it comes back up it polls its registered devices to see what's up and about.
There's a glitch in iOS that causes the handset to interpret the poll as an incoming call, the poll has no caller infromation and it flags it up as being from whoever last called as that's what's sitting in memory from the last use.....