Irony: iPhone 5S Users Reporting Blue Screen of Death 192
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."
How unusual... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Writing good software is an engineering task. As is building bridges, skyscrapers etc...
Unfortunately CS courses are not about teaching software engineering. They're all about teaching the latest fad in computer language and off you go into the marketplace. And lets not even mention of the sunday-day programmers that barely can put 4 lines of code in javascript right.
Put penal/civil responsabilites on those that code, and see how the whole industry changes for the better. Until that time you'll have shitty and not so shitty coders that write shitty code (hint just because it compiles doesn't mean it works correctly) because we ship code as is. It brings down your server room ? Not our fault. Just look at what software companies write in their EULAs. No other industry could do such a thing. We're not responsabile for anything. My ass you're not.
Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
There are people that can write solid, dependable, secure software and advance the state-of-the-art in this area. There are also people that can learn to do this with the right education. Both groups are small and highly intelligent. Most of them chose to go into careers where they actually have a career path, managers that do not tell them how to do their jobs and a salary in line with their talents.
On the other side, most people writing software today are incompetent, or at best, half-competent. I have seen teams needing several months to write software that I can create in a week with significantly better quality. I have reviewed business-critical software for large organizations, where the programmers did not even understand the very basics. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-programmer.html [codinghorror.com] does _not_ overstate the problem.
So we are very much capable of advancing software, but advancing software has been a game for competent experts for a while. Just look at what people are advancing other engineering disciplines, or mathematics or physics. More and more people of that quality are needed for software as well. But the culture is not there. Software is regarded as a solved problem, which is anything but true. But it drives down wages, cause bad working and career conditions and turns away many of the few people that have the required talent. Stupid.
64 bit CPU issues (Score:2, Interesting)
The crashes appear to only (mainly?) affect the new 64 bit CPUs. It would appear that some parts of the API/apps use code hardcoded to 32 bit applications. If this is really the case, then it should be a matter of time before bugfixes are released. It's not ok for a phone of that pricetag, but it isn't a complete disaster either.
I have seen people blame objective C as the culprit as some other programming languages have abstraction levels high enough to make the code immune to bugs due to CPU type. The thing is that C/C++/objC can write code with great performance, which translates to longer battery life. It is possible to write code immune to 32/64bit bugs in all of those 3 languages, but it takes more skill from the programmers and increase development time and costs. It doesn't surprise me if 64 bit considerations was skipped intentionally before Apple announced 64 bit phones. Testing 64 bit software before the 64 CPUs became available was naturally out of the question as well and 3rd party developers was given access to new phones possibly way too shortly before the release.
This excuse works much better for 3rd party software developers than for Apple as we would assume insight knowledge of new CPUs, but maybe it was secret inside as well due to risk of spies or leaks. It might also be a sign that the software was rushed a bit too much. People also complain about power usage in iOS 7, which also hints immature software.
Re:How unusual... (Score:4, Interesting)
You can effectively sandbox but for it to really work it requires a major change in system design and, a major commitment to a bug free OS, OS on chip. Offers far faster boot time, keeps the OS really secure but if it isn't bug and security issue free, then you have real problems. Software coders have always been as slack as hell compared to CPU engineers.
not only 5s or os 7? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is video of an older iPhone and os making exact same blue screen/restart.
Seems to take different actions to trigger, but not sure this is a new bug.
From the comments sounds like it wasn't too uncommon either..
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KjyQLlEHomQ [youtube.com]
Re:Well (Score:2, Interesting)
Thanks for posting... saved me the trouble of posting nearly the same thing. Nearly. Quoting GP:
Writing good software is an engineering task.
I have, and still take issue at this assessment, and believe that the term Software Engineering is just marketing-speak. Programming is programming is programming. There is nothing engineered as engineering requires something tangible, like raw or refined materials, to be engineered into something. If "Software Engineering" is a valid notion, then authors and journalists and poets are Sentence Engineers, some philosophers are Epistemology Engineers, statesmen and congressmen are Law Engineers, movie directors are Visual Entertainment Engineers, stylists are Hair and Makeup Engineers, I sleep and dream every night, so I am a Dream Engineer and the misapplications go on and on. Basically, the term Software Engineering waters down the meaning of engineer to the detriment of actual engineers and anyone that speaks a language in which the word 'engineer' has any meaning whatsoever.
Further, all that study true engineering usually take identical fundamental engineering courses for a couple years, and then course load begins to diverge as engineering students choose a specialty, such as civil, aerospace, mechanical, industrial, and the like. Then, after graduation, there is an engineering test engineering graduates must take in order to be licensed as engineers, in order to be able to legally work as engineeers. Software engineers do neither... they're not really "engineers."
The life's work of a "software engineer" doesn't have a shape, doesn't weigh anything, and only exists in representations of 1s and 0s... their implementations and deployments are like tokens (in a type-token relationship) the same as an implementation of an author's work, a novel, is a book... and the type itself is only a concept and only exists conceptually. No engineering subdiscipline is so gaunt in the physical world, but are always working with tangible things... something you can literally put your finger on.
Software engineering isn't even necessarily Computer Science, either, for the reasons you've already detailed (CS is a subset of mathematics, and programming... is not, no more than a cake recipe is math), and also because it isn't necessarily science. Software engineering is just programming, or coding, it is development of software, and no matter how complex or grand it becomes, it isn't engineering.