On 5/18/2011 14:14, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> There might be a tiny few things which really are hard-coded to
> Administrator (the user) and/or Administrators (the group), but I haven't
> run into that.

The only one I know of for sure is manipulating file system stuff. 
Partitioning a disk, reading the UNC, marking a file system dirty, etc. I 
don't know what privilege it is - maybe you actually can assign it.

>> That is the basic problem with complex permissions. :-)
> I assume that comment is directed at AD.

Well, all complex permissions systems.

> ...except that it's still implemented the old way.

No it isn't.   Well, maybe with XP, but I don't think that's the case any more.

> Which means that changing the parent's permissions has the intended effect,
> but if the parent has 80,000,000 children, it still takes forever to set the
> permissions, because you literally have to touch every child and update its
> ACL on disk.

Maybe if you're doing it thru the explorer?

> Oh yeah. TRWTF is 8.3 names.

What about them?

>> Like the "assoc" command?
>
> I usually go through the GUI. I don't know how to change it from the CLI.
> But basically, the part where every file that ends in ".txt" opens Notepad
> when you double-click it, while anything ending ".html" opens Internet
> Explorer.

That's the "assoc" command.

> Like I say, it's a shame you can't use this feature to launch stuff
> programmatically. (At least, not without linking to C.)

Well, what are you going to launch? You can't launch *anything* without 
linking to some sort of C code.

> how it's implemented. (I have a sinking feeling it's a type database for
> each file manager, rather than something that arbitrary applications can use.)

I wouldn't be surprised.

>> 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.
>
> Is that the whole resource fork / data fork thing? I never heard how that
> actually works. (Other than "it doesn't".)

No, it was the Creator/Type thing, each a four-character code. So a text 
file made by MS Word might have a creator/type or MSWD/TEXT or something.

Mac files had two forks. One was the data fork, which is just like a UNIX 
file. The other is the resource fork, which had structured blobs, each 
defined by a type and a size, maybe a name, etc. So what you see in a 
Windows executable as a "resource" file was actually the resource fork of a 
Mac application or data file.

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

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