Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!mit-amt!mjkobb
From: mjkobb@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael J Kobb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: System Error Handling (Was: Mac interface bashing
Summary: Yes, but
Message-ID: <1643@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 16 Feb 90 03:41:10 GMT
References: <3453.25d9361c@vax5.cit.cornell.edu> <1630@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Feb16.005707.16822@NCoast.ORG>
Reply-To: mjkobb@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Michael J Kobb)
Distribution: comp
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 39

In article <1990Feb16.005707.16822@NCoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>As quoted from <1630@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> by mjkobb@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Michael J Kobb):
>+---------------
>| which some people view these machines.  The machine should work like a
>| toaster, and I don't know of any such thing as a toaster consultant.
>+---------------
>
>I don't know of any toasters that bomb with System Errors.

  You've never burned toast?  At least the Mac tells you nicely that it's dead,
instead of ruining your breakfast.  :-)

  My point was that people should be given as much information as possible.  If
it's simply impossible in the Mac ROMs to give a friendlier error message,
then Apple should certainly include a list of System Error codes and Sad Mac
codes somewhere in their docs for those people who want to know why their Mac
is crashing (it would be a great help in diagnosing problems; maybe they
should add them to their troubleshooting checklists:  "Bomb with System Error
ID=2 indicates...").

  Consulting on computers is a delicate thing.  It's ultimately more helpful to
the user if you don't "just fix it for them," but if you fix whatever problem
they're having, and show them how you did it.  Then they can help themselves.
It's sort of like Third World hunger: ultimately, it doesn't help as much to
send food as it does to teach them how to grow it (and provide any tools that
are lacking; maybe those of us who do this kind of thing should keep xeroxed
lists of error codes around to hand out...).

  I've seen too many people driven screaming from UNIX by the cliques of
knowledgeable people who know how the system works, but are unwilling to
empower other users with that knowledge (Case in point:  There's a legend of a
person who, when asked for help, would recite the following keyboard
incantation:  "unset lineedit; <fix whatever>; clear; set lineedit."  For
those of you who don't do UNIX (I can't imagine that that's many of you), this
prevents anyone from looking at what he did to fix the problem!  What a
jackass!)  I'm not saying that any of the folks in question here do stuff like
that, but we have to guard against a priesthood of Mac gurus, or we'll be the
only ones using this machine, and I think that that would be a shame.

--Mike