Saturday, January 10, 2009

Microsoft and Silly bugs

Less than a fortnight back Zune30 leap year bug caused mass suicide of all Zune30 devices. Later on it was found to be simple looping bug in Zune's Clock Driver as shown here in the code to determine year part of the date:



year = ORIGINYEAR; /* = 1980 */

while (days > 365)
{
if (IsLeapYear(year))
{
if (days > 366)
{
days -= 366;
year += 1;
}
}
else
{
days -= 365;
year += 1;
}
}



Now today an old bug that prevents IE setting cookies if domain attribute is in upper case and has odd number of characters surfaced. Obviously this is not an indication of quality at Microsoft but it is certainly fun watching world's largest software company having such silly bugs in multiple products.

2 comments:

Ashraf Bashir said...

:)A funny bug :)
It's amazing that large companies have these silly bugs :)
I wonder, didn't they do tests for these simple cases ?!

Vijay Somu said...

I think we are the only profession where we get paid for creating bugs so that we can continue to keep our jobs.