Funny Adobe CS4 crash reports

You will LOL and potentially ROTFL at these highlarious Adobe CS4 crash reports. (Thanks, Jeff Cross!)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Xenu

The meta-story is that using Photoshop all day drives one to insanity.
Crashproof

I see the “shutting down is hard” replies have already been written so I don’t have to do it too. Some of these can be nasty to track down, can be wrong for months until one little seemingly unrelated change shuffles the order of initialization around, and when they *are* known tend to be the lowest priority to fix.

I’ve often wished there was a Windows API call to just say “shut down cleanly if you can but die quietly if not.”
Anonymous

well, apple have for a long time been the fisher price of computing, why would you expect their machines to perform as well as a pc with any serious application?
Anonymous

I write Mac software for a living. One of the most common types of crashes I used to get under Carbon, in the days when I was programming for MacOS 8, 9, and the early days of MacOS X, was crash on exit. Of course Photoshop until very recently was still a carbon app. Things are better in Cocoa, but still crash on exit is common.

So many things to shut down in just the right order – and those bugs are always the lowest priority to fix. I can sympathize.
kpkpkp

Most likely the app is attempting to free an unassigned object.
flashdadi

A close look at the reports reveals the common thread that is at the heart of the users problems.
Anonymous

I’m going to be a bit sad and explain that cleanly shutting down an application is not as easy as you might think. There are normally a lot of runtime dependencies that have to unwind in the proper manner. If you have threads running then their shut down must be properly synchronized with the main thread.

The good news is that usually a crash on shutdown won’t cause any ongoing problems unless it interferes with some data persistence.

End of geeky talk ;-)
- Anonymous
  
  #13: Shutting down cleanly is indeed often difficult to do. It’s also mostly a waste of CPU, trawling through memory and fixing up data structures that you’re about to abandon. OSes nowadays are pretty good at releasing allocated resources if you just call “exit(0);” — the problem is that conventions and architectural abstractions we tend to use in C/C++ make it difficult to prove to ourselves that stopping in the middle of execution won’t cause trouble.
  
  Of course, once we’re all using garbage-collected languages it will be normal to just drop everything on the floor and let the OS and runtime pick up the pieces — right? Please? Can this day come soon? :)
Red Leatherman

Love it, and for anyone that forgot about Donnie..
The series was extended to 20 episodes
You Suck At Photoshop
Chuck

It’s like smashing your guitar at the end of the concert.

CS4 is punk rock.
Anonymous

I’ll stick with Gimp, thanks.
Anonymous

Exiting a desktop application is actually very complex. That is the point at which the program has to answer for everything it has done while active. Each process thread created must be shut down in proper order. Any memory and resources taken by each process must then be given back to the system in a systematic way. Additionally, any errors that may have already occurred but went unnoticed while the programing was running will show themselves in the worst way possible upon exit.
teapot

That’s funny – I use Photoshop CS4 on a daily basis for work but mine has never crashed…

Must be this crappy Windows XP I’m running.
- Matt J
  
  It’s not the fault of the operating system, it’s the fault of Adobe for writing crappy software.
  - teapot
    
    Pretty quick to defend there, Matty. Do I smell the pungent aroma of a fanboy?
    
    Let’s compare-
    CS4 on XP: no crashes.
    CS4 on OSX: all these screenshots.
    
    I’m gonna stick with my ‘uncool’ but effective PC, thanks… The hourglass is infinitely less annoying than that god damn rainbow wheel!
    
    PS I’m not just a hater.. I have used the CS suite on both OSX and Win. The time lost on OSX crashes drove me to such insanity that, despite liking the flow of OSX better than XP, I resolved never to use it until I am able to comfortably work for an hour without stressing about a crash. Maniacal Rage has simply reaffirmed my choice.
ToddBradley

So how come with Mac apps it isn’t as simple as just calling System.exit(0); ?
Zhiva

http://futurestack.com/jump/aebugs/Picture%201.png
Anonymous

Ha! I bet that guy made an Adobe engineer’s day.

At my office my lead collected a list of “favourite crash reports” a while back, pretty hilarious although most of our users aren’t quite so eloquent…
BookGuy

I like it, but is there more than one? The headline and caption seem to indicate multiple reports.
notpeter

I assume this is the link you meant to include:
http://log.maniacalrage.net/tagged/cs4cr
- David Pescovitz
  
  Added the link! Thanks!
Anonymous

Is this the missing link?
Pantograph

Would be even funnier with a link to said reports.
Manooshi

Definitely LOL’d! Thanks for sharing!
Anonymous

http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ is another good place to go for a few snickers at Adobe’s expense.
btb

“You’re fired!”

“No way, fuck you, I quit!”