Why/how does MacOS get corrupted

[collin_]

on the legacy ms side, this is so common its been given the term win rot.

Anything mechanical (i.e. read spinning rust hard disk drive) will ultimately fail.

Electronics, assuming good clean power, once its ran for a couple of weeks is typically good for years and sometimes decades. From our shared Apple HW past, it seems that long term capacitors are typically the electronic component most likely to fail. But still, poor power, power spikes/hits, etc can cause issue and corruption.

We all love our Apple products here, but nothing is infalable. That is what backups are for, recovery when the worst happens.

Interesting. I have heard about this still being a major issue with Windows due to the registry.

As someone who lives in the lightning capital of the world, I think my Furman PST-8 may have saved my devices at least once. My cat once knocked over a glass of water that spilled directly into the Furman and its outlets. The "Extreme Voltage" light turned on and it immediately cut the power. Like 6 of the 8 slots were being used and every single device was okay. I think the Furman itself even survived, but I replaced it anyway because who knows what kind of damage that did to it. Thank god I splurged on my surge protector...

 

[ratsg]

Interesting. I have heard about this still being a major issue with Windows due to the registry.

As someone who lives in the lightning capital of the world, I think my Furman PST-8 may have saved my devices at least once. My cat once knocked over a glass of water that spilled directly into the Furman and its outlets. The "Extreme Voltage" light turned on and it immediately cut the power. Like 6 of the 8 slots were being used and every single device was okay. I think the Furman itself even survived, but I replaced it anyway because who knows what kind of damage that did to it. Thank god I splurged on my surge protector...

absolutely both on the surge protector thing, and true (not smart/standby) UPS.

I make no personal claim to having any ms expertise, those comments were from repeated observations from others. I spend my computer time on Apple/OSX and Oracle Solaris/SPARC equipment.

I'm glad that both your cat, and your hardware both survived in your story.

 

[artfossil]

Wow, this was incredibly condescending and unhelpful... It says a lot about how the culture at MR has changed that this is the first response to a humble request for help and insight.

You might want to recalibrate your “humor” setting.

 

[Gregg2]

Eh eh very funny So let's talk about the last part of your message. How do you even understand that there's a problem with the OS as opposed to the application misbehaving?

Thanks for your good humor. It's a truism that humor often is couched in truth. Sometimes that's what makes it funny.

The point is that computers are complex, and users need to use them. Sometimes the reason something goes wrong is so obscure that the time and effort for a layman to investigate it is not worth it, as the answer will not be uncovered.

I had a friend with a Windows laptop he was having problems with. He eventually was connected (by a Microsoft rep) with some brilliant guy at the Department of Defense. (Yes, I trust the story. My friend was a minister.) This DOD guy told him to run through a series of steps that seemed to be nonsense to him. So he asks the guy, "And what if this doesn't work?" He was told, "It will. But you can call me back if you have trouble." It worked.

Yes, I understand you want to know what causes a problem, and how to avoid it in the future. Unless you're a real nerd like this DOD guy, you're not gonna get there very often.

So, if one application is bonkers, and everything else seems alright, it's probably not an OS problem. So you do the basic troubleshooting measures, and if one works, now you can use the computer. That's the goal, isn't it?

 

[rjalex]

I can so relate. I worked for IBM from 1985 to 2021 as a tech person and this maybe explains my stubbornness in trying to understand more. I worked on mainframes, Unix workstations, PC, Mac, on at least a dozen different operating systems, programming in Basic, Pascal, Prolog, APL, C, Perl, Python, managing SNA networks first, then TCP/IP, networking, systems security, right now building ontologies, knowledge graphs and using NLP like there was no tomorrow etc etc. So have my good share of really tough troubleshooting. As an example what about a network of our national railways always collapsing at 10:30 AM on Fridays and after some huge effort finding out it was a specific train that had ill screened transformers which transmitted a square wave that broke the modulation on the data cables that ran along its pier? Old as a rock. So forgive me for my tendency to actually trying to understand the nitty gritty details I know it's sometimes useless but it's an old and perhaps obsolete habit and find it reassuring
Take care
PS Absolutely relate to humor being a wonderful conveyor of truths sometimes

 

[rjalex]

FWIW I wish to update all of you good people.

I experimented by creating a new (Jeffrey) user and under this userid the damn program works just fine (like it did for a couple of months in my real bob account).

I therefore suspect there might be a corruption of some plist or other settings file in the user directory.

Opened another thread to see if there are tools to help me identify the files used by the Java/App

Is there a tool to monitor which files get read/written by an app?

I am spliiting my brain to spot which file got corrupted by a Java program called Protegè by Stanford University. It's a Java application still running a Java 8 version. Support of the app is moribund if not dead. I have created a new user (jeffrey) on my 12.3.1 M1 Mini system and installed the...

forums.macrumors.com

Thank you all

PS Protegè support is dead or very very very sick

 

[BrianBaughn]

You can try to do what I did…figure out how to compare the two accounts' ~/Library folders for differences using the "diff" command in Terminal.

 

[rjalex]

That's an idea, even though my usual "bob" account is being used for several months now and a boatload of apps have written stuff there, while this sparkling new "Jeffrey" account has been created and used only for this damn Protegè software, so I fear there would be a huge number of differences ...

Thanks a lot, will try if nothing else comes to my mind.

 

[chown33]

You could limit the comparisons to just the Protegé files. That is, any files under "bob" that don't exist under "Jeffrey" could be assumed to not be relevant. It might not be true, but it's a working hypothesis.

Or you could copy the Protegé files from "Jeffrey" to "bob" (with the software not running on either account), and see if that fixes things. If so, then the problem was in the Protegé files alone. If not, then the problem is in some other files, or some combination of files.

Or try a progressive reduction in quality, where you copy files under "bob" to "Jeffrey" until Protegé breaks. At that point, whatever was last copied over is causing the breakage.

Finally, a quick glance shows that the software has a plugin architecture, so make sure all the plugins are the same, and any files they might use are also identical. Broken plugins is the bane of any plugin architecture, because correct operation is no longer just the domain of the main program; every plugin's developer also contributes to overall quality, effectively becoming co-developers.

 

[rjalex]

Yup cool idea, will pursue. Right now I'm losing my eyesight on the Filemonitor app output Thanks

 

[BrianBaughn]

Dissecting the list of differences looked daunting at first but I don't recall it being very hard to pinpoint what I was looking for. I did copy the list to a text file to check it there.

 

[mariuspui]

@rjalex - I am using Protege and Mac OS for creating an ontology. I spent 1 week trying to save an ontology in Protege using 'save as' but it didn't work. I reinstalled the software several times including older versions, installed Java 8, 9, etc, and many many other options. I searched for a solution to this problem everywhere until I found your posts (it was a long journey). With your solution, I just created a new user on my Mac, and 'save as' works in Protege. Thank you so much!​

How do I find your solution? I opened the "Package content" of Protege from Applications and run the JavaAppLauncher from the MacOS folder and while trying to save the ontology I got the following message in the terminal "The modal dialog has been suppressed to avoid deadlock." I searched it on google + Protege and I found your posts. Seems easy but it wasn't


PS: I created an account on this forum just to thank you!