Darren New wrote:

> Is that how it works? That's rather ... baroque. I'm going to have to 
> laugh next time someone tells me that having the source code is 
> necessary to understand how something works. :-)

It's also not necessary to understand how something works just to use it 
s public interface. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:35:16 -0400, gregjohn wrote:

> Ahem.  So did more than one person try out "some" live CD's and found
> several wanting as far as hardware recognition and drivers?!?!!?
> 
> Please write up reviews on your blogs! Let the world know!  Linux
> distros, even if they are free, are still in a "marketplace" for users.

Not sure why you wrote this back to me - I was just commenting that 
ntfs-3g solves the issues with native NTFS solutions in the Linux kernel.

Jim

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On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:34:01 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> ntfs-3g is what uses ntfs.sys - and that one is very stable and usable.
> 
> Is that how it works? That's rather ... baroque. I'm going to have to
> laugh next time someone tells me that having the source code is
> necessary to understand how something works. :-)

I believe that's how it works - much like how ndiswrapper can be used to 
use Windows WLAN drivers on Linux.

But using a closed-source driver doesn't mean you have any idea how it 
works, just how to interface with it - and that's what reverse 
engineering is for.

>> But there's *always* risk to using ntfs.sys even with Windows - things
>> can go wrong even in a native Windows environment.
> 
> What surprises me is that there's anything on the file system that can
> grow without bound. But as I understand it, at least the security
> descriptors (i.e., the ACLs) can get put in a hash table and never
> removed. Seems odd.

Yeah, I'd agree with that.

Jim

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