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HFS+ is crazy

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1–10 of 211 posts

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#2
TLDR: Mac filesystems have resource forks. I guess the author has not used Macs too much, as they have been around since the 1980's.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#3
This is why it was really disappointing that Apple had to abandon ZFS. ZFS is one of the best file systems available and because Oracle owns it it is virtually unusable in most contexts.

I wonder if Apple can afford to buy out Oracle at this point, take ZFS and wind up the useless parts.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#4
Isn't the point of resource forks to store structured data; like a font bitmap? The pictured font looks like a third party font, suggesting whoever exported it for release chose to export in such a way that data was only stored in the resource fork, perhaps as a lazy-man's DRM

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#5
post #2

TLDR: Mac filesystems have resource forks. I guess the author has not used Macs too much, as they have been around since the 1980's.

The utility of such a feature relative to its security, integrity and astonishment costs can be debated, however. ADS in NTFS has long been a subject of pain, for instance, though I'm unaware of its present status.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#6
post #2

TLDR: Mac filesystems have resource forks. I guess the author has not used Macs too much, as they have been around since the 1980's.

The utility of such a feature relative to its security, integrity and astonishment costs can be debated, however. ADS in NTFS has long been a subject of pain, for instance, though I'm unaware of its present status.

I think it is chiefly used by malware developers at this time.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#7
post #3

This is why it was really disappointing that Apple had to abandon ZFS. ZFS is one of the best file systems available and because Oracle owns it it is virtually unusable in most contexts. I wonder if Apple can afford to buy out Oracle at this point, take ZFS and wind up the useless parts.

Apple abandoned ZFS when Steve Jobs was still alive. Larry Ellison has frequently described Steve Jobs as one of his best friends whom he frequently went on walks with. The idea that Steve could not have gotten Larry to license ZFS seems crazy to me.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#8
post #3

This is why it was really disappointing that Apple had to abandon ZFS. ZFS is one of the best file systems available and because Oracle owns it it is virtually unusable in most contexts. I wonder if Apple can afford to buy out Oracle at this point, take ZFS and wind up the useless parts.

Apple abandoned ZFS when Steve Jobs was still alive. Larry Ellison has frequently described Steve Jobs as one of his best friends whom he frequently went on walks with. The idea that Steve could not have gotten Larry to license ZFS seems crazy to me.

Did Jobs really know/care about technical details like what filesystem OS X used?

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#9
post #2

TLDR: Mac filesystems have resource forks. I guess the author has not used Macs too much, as they have been around since the 1980's.

The utility of such a feature relative to its security, integrity and astonishment costs can be debated, however. ADS in NTFS has long been a subject of pain, for instance, though I'm unaware of its present status.

I agree that they could probably be deprecated and removed nowadays. There used to be a transition time when people ran old Mac OS applications on OS X.

Re: HFS+ is crazy

#10
Nobody else really uses them to the extent Apple does, but this sort of thing isn't unique to HFS+.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes

You can do the exact same thing on Windows (on an NTFS volume), just go to a command prompt and run "notepad hello.txt:secret" and see how DIR and Windows Explorer deal with it.

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