Comments on: Dave Winer and Mac crashes

By: Fed’s Bolsoblog » Blog Archive » Dave Winer e i supposti Mac crash

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 09:37:18 +0000

[...] Una bella risposta su Betalogue alle lamentele di Dave. [...]

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 11:58:08 +0000

I seem to remember seeing a different dialog a few times in the past after I had a kernel panic and had to do a hard reset. That would be a dialog that would say something like, “The computer was not shut down properly,” and invite me to send a log/report. But I don’t remember the dialog being phrased that way (“Mac OS X has unexpectedly quit.”). And I certainly haven’t seen this dialog recently. But then I really don’t get a kernel panic very often…

By: ssp

ssp — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:02:40 +0000

The box has been around for a while. It’s like the ‘this application unexpectedly quit’ dialogue just for system crashes. Clicking that extra button will let you easily send a panic.log to Apple, just like crash logs get sent by the application crash dialogue.

It may be that you need to have the Crash Reporter Preferences set to Developer mode to get the extra button… but I’m not sure. After all kernel panics seem to be an area that Apple actually make an effort to fix, so they may try to get everybody to send those reports in.

I haven’t had a proper kernel panic for a while, so I can’t really test this, but I think there are crashes as well which will not general a panic.log. And in those cases perhaps the dialogue doesn’t come up as there is no information to send away anyway.

By: skylarp

skylarp — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 19:55:38 +0000

Hmph… well, then I have no idea where the box came from because I don’t use the “restart automatically” options either. Though it wasn’t actually a kernel panic, strictly speaking. (No dark shading of doom and friendly message in several languages.)

Anyway, my Macs also certainly don’t crash on a regular basis. Now, my girlfriend’s Dell, on the other hand… ;)

By: Pierre Igot

Pierre Igot — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 19:51:47 +0000

I have 10.4.7 on this machine and I actually had a kernel panic not long ago, with 10.4.7. I still didn’t see this alert box. So maybe it’s laptop-specific, or only occurs if you have some kind of option to restart the machine automatically after a failure.

Anyway, like I said, I am sure the alert exists. I still don’t think it’s evidence of a widespread problem with Macs crashing on a regular basis. :)

By: skylarp

skylarp — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 19:24:56 +0000

FWIW, I have recently seen this window pop up following an experience where I had to force my PowerBook to shut down by holding down the power key. Upon starting her up again and logging into my account, the window popped up. It’s very similar to the window that (usually) comes up when an application quits unexpectedly, right down to the ability to send a copy of the crash log to Apple.

I believe that it was added in a recent system update (10.4.7, perhaps?), because prior to last week I had never seen it before and I do occasionally have to force my Mac to shut down (though certainly not every day!) — most often when I forget to eject a SMB share before sleeping it and unplugging it from the network at school.

Anyway, Winer still comes off as a whiner. But he certainly didn’t make up the warning box, and I’m not surprised that you’ve never seen it before. I expect you’ll see it eventually.