Web Excursions 2022-08-02

Last Week on My Mac: Obfuscating errors

• Hiding under that thin veneer of ‘it just works’ are systems which have become less accessible,

  • to the point where any bug reported to Apple now has to be accompanied by a full sysdiagnose,

  • containing almost everything there is to know about your Mac and what it’s been doing recently.

• It’s a trend that pervades other professions.

  • When I was learning the practice of medicine over forty years ago, the emphasis was on diagnostic skills.

  • We learned how to take a relevant history, how to examine patients from top to toe, and how best to choose special investigations which could confirm our provisional diagnosis.

  • These days it seems simpler (and often more profitable) to bleed and scan the patient until you find something abnormal, then try explaining it.

• While I understand the value of a sysdiagnose to an engineer on the other end of a Feedback report,

  • that’s not how an advanced user or sysadmin should be working to diagnose everyday problems.

  • One of the first places they should be able to go to is the log.

  • It’s now almost six years since Apple unified the log in macOS Sierra, a move which should have made the diagnosis of errors and problems far simpler.

  • Yet over those six years the sole utility in macOS to browse the log has only advanced from version 1.0 in macOS 10.12 to 1.1 in macOS 12.5.

• Error codes are another example of neglect.

  • Although Apple has recently revamped its developer documentation, there’s still nowhere to look up what a numeric (or text) error code might mean.

  • Most errors remain documented only in header files and specific sections of API documentation,

    • and there’s still no global search comparable to that provided by third parties such as OSStatus.com,

    • although even that now seems to have fallen behind Apple’s relentless proliferation of codes.

• My biggest concerns, though, are the errors that aren’t reported to the user.

  • Some only come to light days or even months later, usually when the user runs a third-party utility to check something they thought had been working fine.

  • Several of my own software tools have been developed in response to such problems:

    • when Time Machine in Sierra silently stopped making automatic backups,

    • a batch of Macs was delivered to users with SIP turned off,

    • EFI firmware in high-end versions of iMacs were left without updates for a couple of years,

    • iCloud still keeps getting stuck while trying to sync specific files, or

    • downloaded security updates fail to install.

• Many of these are recorded in the Unified or another log that will pass unnoticed, or flash past in the steady stream of notifications.

• Just as the devices we can attach to Home can do this for where we live, so macOS should do the same for where we work and play.

  • That is, perhaps, the final irony, that many now have a better idea as to whether anything’s amiss at home than in their Mac.

An update on review scoring

• We know how much weight each score has on the perception of a product and how much conversation there is about Verge scores.

  • Reviewers pitch scores to their editors and those scores are often hotly debated before we publish a review.

• As time goes on, our average score for a category of product tends to gets higher, something we call score inflation.

  • That’s partially because of positive progress in the industry — today’s devices are better than yesterday’s — but score inflation can also change the meaning of a score.

  • A rating of six on our scale is actually a good score — it means a product is better than average but still might have a few issues — but if readers only ever see sevens and eights, they will assume that a six is a much harsher score than it actually is.

• To tamp down score inflation, we’ve started using more of the scoring scale as we’ve rated devices.

  • That translates to seeing lower scores on reviews more frequently than you might have in recent years and devices that are better than others getting lower scores than they might have in the past.

  • In fact, we’ve already been doing this for the past few months

• We’ve also moved to a 10-point, whole number scale, which we feel is simpler to understand and encourages using more of the scale than when we used a 20-point or 100-point system.

  • Now, when we’re debating between two scores, we often will give the tie to the lower score as opposed to using a half-point compromise.

• This does mean that some more recent scores will not align directly with older reviews.

  • Our scoring is always a snapshot in time that compares a product to other devices that are available at the time of the review.

  • Older devices likely would not receive the same score were they to be reviewed again months or years later.

The Grammarphobia Blog: ‘Got a screwdriver?’ … ‘I do.’

• Fowler’s Modern English Usage (4th ed.) says that in answer to a “have you got” question,

  • the “do” reply is a familiar feature of both British and American English.

• Question: Have you got a spare room? Answer: Yes, we do. 

  • This apparently illogical use of do, replacing have as the auxiliary verb, arises because the question implicitly being answered is ‘Do you have a spare room?’

  • It is a common pattern in AmE and causes less surprise to British visitors than formerly, since it has also become a feature of BrE.

• In ordinary usage, rather than in the idiom, “have got” is the present perfect tense of the verb “get,”

  • with “have” as the auxiliary (as in “I have got infected”).

  • But in the idiom we’re discussing, the OED says, “have got” functions as the present-tense equivalent of “have.”

• And “have” in the idiomatic “have got” is the main verb (not an auxiliary).

  • So both grammatically and semantically, “I have got” = “I have.”

  • In fact, the question  “Have you got a screwdriver?” could be rephrased more formally as “Have you a screwdriver?”

• (We might add that many speakers find a sentence like “Have you a screwdriver?” to be excessively formal.

  • Americans in particular seem to prefer questions phrased with “do” when there’s a direct object:

  • “Do you have a screwdriver?”)

• there are two theories about the likely origins of this usage, which dates back to Elizabethan times.

  • One is that the verb “have” began losing its sense of possession because of its increasing use as an auxiliary.

    • Thus “got” was added as an informal prop.

  • The other theory is that “got” was originally inserted because of the tendency to use contracted forms of the verb “have.”

    • So if a sentence like “I’ve a cat” felt unnatural or abrupt, one could use “I’ve got a cat” instead.

• We should mention another familiar idiomatic use of “have got”—the one that means “must.”

  • Here too, the “got” is not essential to the meaning.

  • “I have got to leave” = “I have to leave” = “I must leave.”

  • And again, a “do” reply to this variety of “have got” question is perfectly acceptable: “Have you got to leave?” … “I do.”