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Irony: iPhone 5S Users Reporting Blue Screen of Death

Posted by timothy on from the ok-this-feels-intuitive dept.

MojoKid writes "It's been a long time since many have seen a dreaded 'blue screen of death' (BSoD), but it's back and in the most unlikeliest of places. Oddly enough, some Apple iPhone 5S owners are reporting BSoD errors, though they're a little different from the ones you may remember seeing on Windows desktops. Rather than spit out an obscure error code with a generic description, some iPhone 5S devices are suddenly turning blue before automatically restarting. The Numbers app in Apple's iWork suite, a free program with new iPhones, seems to be the primary cause, though BSoD behavior has also been observed in other applications, according to complaints in Apple's support forum."

9 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Well by The+Cat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is a great deal of evidence to indicate we are no longer capable of advancing software.

    It has been remarked that if we built buildings the same way we build software the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

    Take a look around. The government apparently spent $165 million on a web site that doesn't work.

    There's no discipline in software development. It's slapped together to meet an artificial deadline. It's considered done if it compiles. It's shoved out into the marketplace so everyone can stuff their pockets and then all the developers are fired to make way for the new employees who will design the next piece of shit.

    The only measure of how good software is depends on how shiny and "innovative" the user interface is. What the software actually does is utterly irrelevant.

    1. Re:Well by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Arguably, the sheer lousiness of software is more striking because it (still, despite decades of work and the amount of money riding on some of it) crops up in the face of well heeled customers, whether retail buyers of expensive personal electronics or enterprise/gov buyers who are willing to spend nearly unlimited amounts on their pet contractors...

      With buildings, there is plenty of construction that's roughly on the standards of software (Just do an image search for 'Shantytown' if you doubt me...); but structural quality is mostly stratified economically. If you want a building that works, and you have the cash, you can have one. With software, the cities of the world would be a nearly random assortment of mostly shacks, some incrementally nicer than others, with a scattering of structures that were built in 3,000 BC and are in perfect condition, buildings that are constructed from graphene and carbon nanotubes; but have doors made of soggy cardboard stuck to the frame with chewing gum, and other such oddities.

      That's the odd thing. Plenty of kinds of engineering are hard and expensive, and sometimes subject to unexpected cost overruns and such; but we've gotten it to the point where if you live in a country with a functional society and fire codes and things, you can buy good buildings, aircraft that don't crash, and other nice things.

      With software... your mileage may vary.

    2. Re:Well by Xest · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's got nothing to do with software engineers, it's the classic project management triangle:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

      We know full well how to write good solid software, developers can do that just fine, it's a well researched area that's pretty well understood.

      The problem is that no one is willing to pay for or wait for that software.

      You can't blame software engineering for the priorities society and project managers have decided to prioritise. It's not the fault of software engineering if users want a new shiny every year rather than a perfectly secure and stable shiny every 5 years.

      Some buildings are built quickly and cheaply from kids wendy houses and tree houses, to a tramps cardboard box or buildings in a shanty town. None of which last particularly well in the face of a bomb or natural disaster because none of which are engineered to.

      It's just the way project management works, the issue you take isn't a problem with software engineering and everything to do with the project managers and the priorities forced upon them by society and business needs.

      I'm not even sure it can actually be classed as a problem though anyway, if society has pushed things this way then it just means you're in a minority that has been outvoted by society at large in wanting something stable and secure rather than something new and shiny ASAP. It just means most people have different priorities to you and so the market has bent that way, that's all. Effectively it's just working as intended, unless you're suggesting software engineers should be responsible for somehow warping reality and laying waste to the project management triangle, something no other profession has ever managed to do, and in that case you're just being unrealistic.

  2. also an apprenticeship system where you learn from by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    also an apprenticeship system where you learn from pros in the field with real work. Not some professor reading from a book and / or loads of theory.

  3. Re:According to SJ... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Dude's been dead for a couple years now... it might be time to find a new meme.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
  4. Re:Obvious... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I would dispute that. I don't recall MS-DOS ever crashing itself. True, programs were allowed such low level access to the PC hardware that they could cause a crash, but MS-DOS itself was rock solid and even program crashes were rare. I'm remembering all of the old demoscene stuff that used weird, undocumented functionality and were still stable.

  5. Re:Apple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apple is worse than Microsoft. People like to slam Windows 9x for being unstable, usually rightfully so, but they forget that the Macs of the time were even worse. By the time OS X came out, MS had Windows NT 4, 2K and XP out, which were all very stable. Since then, every MS OS has been stable, including Vista.

    On top of that, Apple freaks out when people want to customize or doing something "out of bounds" with their Mac. Microsoft has always encouraged people to do what they want with Windows.

  6. It's official. by MouseTheLuckyDog · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Apple is the new Microsoft.
    Just with a shinier surface.

  7. Re:User apps are allowed to do real multitasking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you notice, the app keeps speaking until he brings up the new (annoying, IMO) running app overview screen. It then stops despite obviously having text left to speak, he touches the app to bring it in the foreground, and it crashes. My money is on the text-to-speech stopping when the overview is brought up causes a bad state, then when the app comes up it probably checks whether it's running or not, gets bad info, and then goes BOOM. I would put good odds on it being either in the text-to-speech API or in the audio API.
     
    In my own work, I found iOS 7 introduced a major flaw in the audio where it no longer acts appropriately in a particular situation in the background and I had to write a workaround -- a hack, really, but it's the only solution that doesn't require months of work -- in order for my app not to get in a bad state where it can no longer run audio again.