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Typing 'http://:' Into a Skype Message Trashes the Installation Beyond Repair
An anonymous reader writes: A thread at the Skype community forums has brought to light a critical bug in Microsoft's Skype clients for Windows, iOS and Android: typing the incorrect URL initiator http://: into a text message on Skype will crash the client so badly that it can only be repaired by installing an older version and awaiting a fix from Microsoft. The bug does not affect OS X or the 'Metro'-style Windows clients — which means, effectively, that Mac users could kill the Skype installations on other platforms just by sending an eight-character message.
It's hardly the only thing that causes Skype to crash, and work intermittently at best, and to be fair, it actually started before Microsoft bought them.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I showed that strip to a friend of mine that maintains the DB for a school district's enrollment system. She laughed. Then she got into the system and checked how that was coded...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's often not even ignorance. Sometimes there is a mentality of correctness over keeping it running.
Never is this more of a debate that in exception handling.
I've worked in places where it was against the gods if you simply had a catch( Exception e). You had to *know* which exceptions you are catching and then catch each one separately.
The keep it running in me is annoyed because there's always some possibility of a runtime Exception or that we miss something and then it crashes instead of just failing that one operation.
The reason given was it is better for us to find out the exception and then fix the code, than to mask it with a catch all.
To each his own, but it's definitely not as simple as ignorance.
I've fought a lot of battles writing the software. I can tell its often the case of correctness versus keep it running.
As a Sys Admin, and therefore your consumer, I couldn't care less if you fail hard or try to recover. But LOG THE GOD DAMN ERROR FOR WHAT IT IS FIRST! There is nothing more mind bogglingly useless then some dip-shit programmer who things "Duh, the user should just keep trying until it works. I don't need to prompt them with anything more then 'ERROR: An Error Has Occurred'". Or even worse is the crowd of useless knuckle draggers who think that catching an exception and doing absolutely nothing in the interest of 'keeping things running' is the right course of action everytime. I don't need to see your code, I already know it sucks. Otherwise it would have been too expensive for my employers to want to purchase. But at least tell us where it is failing.