On 5/18/2011 8:28, Invisible wrote:
> - File permissions. None of this chmod 664 nonsense. You can set arbitrary
> combinations of permissions for any number of users and groups.

Yep. And the same permission framework works on every resource, not just 
files. So you can say "this group can read the attributes of processes but 
not write them, and that group can append to error logs but not read them." 
There's a handful of things you need to have "administrator" privs to do 
that you really should have a separate permission for (like reading the UNC 
journal), but not much.

> [But then they tried to retro-fit permission inheritance, which doesn't
> actually work how you'd think it works. And don't even get me started on the
> whole Active Directory thing with three different sorts of security groups
> that nobody understands...]

That is the basic problem with complex permissions. :-)

> - The registry provides a unified place to store configuration, whether
> per-user or per-system. (Just a shame that there's no real interface for
> managing it yourself - e.g., if you want to revert your MS Word
> configuration to how it was yesterday.)

Yeah. It's kind of a big bag at this point.

> - File types [or, more accurately, file extensions] are associated with
> programs. (Shame there's no CLI access to this.)

Like the "assoc" command?  Primitive, but you can also fronk the registry if 
you need something more sophisticated.  The nice thing about it is that it 
*is* centralized.  No more groping around in the web server's configuration 
to figure out such stuff.

Even better, of course, would be having it in the actual metadata of the 
file, like the Mac's OS tried to do, except they did it before MIME was 
around, so it didn't work out as well as it might.

> ...and here I was thinking that's what the ThreadGroup class is for...

That too.  I think the real point of that line in the documentation is that 
the runtime doesn't *check* that the name is unique.

> Right. So a variable doesn't come into scope until after it's defined?

I believe that's correct.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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