HFS+ is crazy - <AUTHOR> http://liminality.xyz/hfs-is-crazy/ <comment><USER3> Alternate parts to the main file are present on several platforms, and have the same problems. They are called resource forks on Mac.

On Windows/NTFS they are called alternate data streams - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(file_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_\(file_system\)) \- to use specify a colon and name after the filename (eg example.txt:myads).

On Unix, Linux, OS/2 etc you can find extended attributes - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes) \- which allow storing key value pairs on a file. Restrictions exist and vary.

As for an example of them being helpful - on Windows when you download a file from the Internet using a browser an extended attribute is used to mark that. Trying to execute the file from Explorer then explains that it was downloaded and asks if you really want to proceed.

On Linux selinux can store labels in the extended attributes.

Older ignorant tools aren't going to know about this, but don't substantially harm anything. Modern tools do know about them and do the right thing. (eg copying a downloaded file elsewhere on Windows will still give the warning). The Linux GNU cp command does require a --preserve xattr flag to copy extended attributes and does not do so by default. Dropbox does support them by default and cross platform.

<comment><USER4> You wouldn't put the entire content of a file in an extended attribute, would you?

<comment><USER5> On Mac Classic, if you wanted to ship a custom font with your application, you'd put it in the Resource fork in a resource of "FONT" type.

So why wouldn't a stand-alone font file consist of a Resource fork with a single resource of "FONT" type? Otherwise, the OS engineers have to develop two entirely different ways of reading in font data. Why duplicate the effort?

The system made perfect sense, both then and now. It bothers me that so few people know anything about Mac Classic, it really was an amazingly well- designed OS for its time.

<comment><USER6> > an amazingly well-designed OS for its time

It had a few interesting ideas. But no desktop OS based on cooperative multitasking can be called 'well-designed', almost anything could hard-lock the entire system at any time.

<comment><USER7> AmigaOS was a lot better designed and had full preemptive multitasking, etc. Too bad Commodore sucked at marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's amazing how garbage like this always rockets to the top of HN. This guy doesn't know anything about file systems or about the operating system he's using. But he sounds confident, so that's evidently good enough for a lot of people.

If you think it's crazy that a file system supports multiple data forks/steams, then you don't know very much about file systems.

If you think it's crazy that an operating system maintains backward compatibility with an older system, then you don't know very much about operating systems.

If you arrogantly make these pronouncements on your website then you look like a complete idiot.

<comment><USER9> People don't know what they don't know. Talking down to people who think something is strange for being the way it is, instead of explaining to them why it is, is so counterproductive and serves no purpose. Everyone has things they don't know, just provide an explanation instead of an arrogant comment.

He even says "I'm sure there's an Apple-y reason for the existence of this feature, but I can't imagine what it might be." That's literally a "i'm not sure why this is" right there!

<comment><USER10> This _isn 't_ about what the author does/doesn't know. The author managed to figure out that this was about resource forks, meaning that clearly they'd done some footwork and had found the right thread of information to follow.

But GP's point gets to how the author handled that new knowledge: post an essay of cranky, self-assured tone to their website instead of following that thread to understand how and why OS X resource forks came to be. I.e. they followed the path of "anything I don't already know must be wrong":

 _I 'm sure there's an Apple-y reason for the existence of this feature, but I can't imagine what it might be._

It's hard not to bash this kind of rhetorical mess. "I took the time to research everything up to here, then _EPIC FLOUNCE!_ "

If you're going to write an article critical of HFS+, perhaps making an argument for a successor, _great!_ It's a topic I'll get wholeheartedly behind. But this article is just lazy bitching on the internet, which certainly doesn't deserve to be voted up.

<comment><USER11> Well, both points of view have a point.

The central idea of Unix is that everything is a file. Files are just streams of bytes on disk. Most happen to be text. Text is just streams of lines. And then you write a bunch of simple tools that handle files, bytes, and lines, and they will combine really well for more complex tasks.

However this was (and in many corners still is) a radical idea. The natural tendency in virtually every other system, from the Macintosh to IBM mainframes, was to store data in various structured records. Whether we're talking resource forks or records, you always, always, always add structure of various kinds. The idea of just scanning through bytes to find, say, the end of a record is shockingly inefficient.

So we have the point of the article. HFS+ breaks Unix. If you don't see that, then you don't actually understand Unix. The filesystem ignores one of the founding central concepts, with the result that the entire Unix toolkit and way of thinking about the world doesn't work. Standard utilities, scripts, etc don't know that resource forks exist, and will do the wrong thing with them. If you walk into OS X and are told, "It's Unix under the hood", well that is a lie. It really isn't. You can work within it and only do Unix things and it will work, but as soon as you access things from elsewhere in the Apple ecosystem, things break in ways that they wouldn't in, say, Linux.

But we also have your point of view. There are very good reasons that HFS+ works the way it does. And it is integrated into the UI in ways that date back decades. And THIS is true. OS X was an attempt to put a Macintosh UI on a fork of Unix. And preserving central concepts of Unix really were not as important as making the UI work right. With the same features. With data being reasonably easy to port between the two systems, and programs not unnecessarily different.

Both points of view are valid. Which one matters depends on what you're trying to do. Furthermore it is natural, not stupid, that a person who has just had a major plank pulled out from under their way of understanding the world tends to have a strong emotional response.

"OMG, you broke everything! The tools that I rely on don't work and I have no idea what else is broken!" This is an extremely common response. This is one of the reasons why it can be hard for programmers to switch languages and environments.

As it happens, I personally understand both points of view. I have over 20 years of experience with both Macs and Unix. This is typed on an Apple laptop. But fundamentally I agree with the article. Apple broke Unix. I recognize that there is no solution at this point, and I mostly confine myself to living within the Unixy parts of the system. But HFS+ got it wrong and is not well integrated with the command line. I mean look at this. If you have myfile you can look at myfile. Then ls myfile/..namedfork and get an error. Then ls $file/..namedfork/rsrc and see more stuff??? And I can only know to do this if I know it is there to be seen???

That's just broken.

<comment><USER12> I was under the understanding that Apple never originally really intended people to use the Unix side of OSX and that the whole command line standard Unix utilities became commonly used in spite of Apple's design. I could be wrong.

<comment><USER11> I have no idea if there was a conscious choice either way. However the goal was certainly, "Our cooperative multi-tasking system where any bad application takes out the operating system no longer cuts it, migrate to a preemptive one." And building on Unix was the shortest path there.

There were many disconnects between the two systems. See [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix2000/invitedtalks/...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix2000/invitedtalks/sanchez_html/) for some of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _Applications — even basic filesystem tools — aren 't aware of the > additional content. How do you deal with a file with two sets of data? I'm > sure there's an Apple-y reason for the existence of this feature, but I > can't imagine what it might be._

G.K. Chesterton on the matter:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease.

<comment><USER14> I prefer the less verbose version:

"Don't just do something. Stand there."

\--Marvin Minsky

<comment><USER15> [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/22/stand- there/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/22/stand-there/)

<comment><USER14> Thanks! I've wondered about that from time to time.

Here's a link to Minsky's Law (actually two):

[https://edge.org/response-detail/11644](https://edge.org/response- detail/11644)

If I recall correctly, it's also mentioned in The Society of Mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This would have been a lot more compelling if it basically wasn't just somebody stating the existence of resource forks and acting like that's a surprise. If someone knows just one thing about HFS+, it's that it's kludgey wrapper around the ancient Mac OS filesystem which added POSIX behaviors and other more modern niceties that no one at Apple was thinking about in the '80s. If someone knows just two things about HFS+, the second thing is the existence of resource forks.

There are wide, deep, rich, fertile fields of HFS+ criticism to be had- low hanging fruit just dripping with potential for hundreds if not thousands of snarky blog entries about problems with HFS+ for people to post to HN. This is not one of them. The filesystem situation on OS X has such a long, tortured, and widely documented history of technical and human failure that even the Cleveland Browns should feel sorry for it.

There is at least one extremely old, legacy font file format supported by OS X in which the entire font is in the resource fork. Other than that, resource forks themselves have been deprecated for the entire existence of OS X. This is like stumbling across some ancient vestige of DOS compatibility in Windows and treating that discovery like a smoking gun gotcha moment that you're certain is going to blow everyone's minds.

</comment><comment><USER17> HFS+ isn't so much "crazy" as it is "really friggin old". It's not much more than a coat of paint on top of HFS, which was introduced in 1985 (!), and thus is missing out on the last three decades of filesystem research.

I might be too optimistic, but I've been assuming that Apple started development on a replacement for HFS+ as soon as the ZFS deal collapsed. I know that was years ago, but filsystems take a looooong time to get right. It's coming, guys, I promise!

<comment><USER18> My hunch is that they've got something brewing that is optimized for a post- SATA, SSD-only world, and they won't release it until that describes most/all of their product line.

<comment><USER19> F2FS or YAFFS2 would be cool replacements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 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.

<comment><USER21> TLDR: all standard applications for working with files are unaware of resource forks. This is confusing, and hurts new computer users. #consideredharmful

<comment><USER13> In 15 years of working with Macs (as a programmer and as a semi-pro DAW/NLE user), I've never been confused once by them.

So it sure might be confusing (and I see how) but it's absolutely not very common.

<comment><USER22> > In 15 years of working with Macs (as a programmer and as a semi-pro DAW/NLE > user), I've never been confused once by them.

Gosh, are you saying that the common use of ADS was a common mac pattern and people very familiar with the history of macs would understand this well?

Do you really think that refutes the point that they're confusing to everyone else? While many OSs have implementations of ADS, almost no one uses them.

<comment><USER13> > _Gosh, are you saying that the common use of ADS was a common mac pattern > and people very familiar with the history of macs would understand this > well?_

It was quite common, yes, and even more extended in the past, but I'm saying something else: that noticing it and having issues with it wasn't that common. It's a leaky abstraction, but you don't often meet that leak.

Case in point TFA's issue. He has a zero-sized font file where all the data are in the resource leak. All fonts I've dealt with in OS X have been proper files, you can copy over to other FS normally.

> _Do you really think that refutes the point that they 're confusing to > everyone else?_

No, as I wrote: "It sure can be confusing (and I see how)".

But it's not that often that it has a chance to be confusing (at least in my experience -- but I've also not seen much discussion in support forums, questions from friends/colleagues with Macs etc about such as issues, whereas I've seen for many other issues).

> _While many OSs have implementations of ADS, almost no one uses them._

Wouldn't that make them even MORE confusing in those OSs, the times they're finally used? As opposed to an OS that regularly uses them?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 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](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.

<comment><USER24> "Alternate Data Streams." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28file_system%29#Microso...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28file_system%29#Microsoft)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Resource forks were pretty cool, actually: they were a simple database attached to every file, which could be used to store metadata or other information. It was pretty common for applications to store fonts, icons &c. all in their resource forks.

Back when I was a kid I used to use ResEdit to change application & file icons, fiddle with GUI controls, change menu structures and so on. Happy days!

<comment><USER26> I remember back in the day I would hack on mods for a series of games called Escape Velocity. And these mods were entirely created using resource forks for everything from game logic to flavor text to images. ResEdit was the closest thing we had to an IDE. Compared to source control that would allow us to collaborate, or even SQlite databases that could be trivially backed up, it felt like we could lose our work at any time. But at the end of the day, that was part of the fun.

More info on how it worked: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug- in_(Escape_Velocity)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug- in_\(Escape_Velocity\)) (why this is a relevant article in Wikipedia, I have no idea.)

Note to anyone reading this, though: If you're designing a system from scratch, don't even think about using resource forks to store data. Just say no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you'd like to learn more about resource forks on the Mac, which were a very clever solution to a difficult set of problems, please read this, written by the person who created them:

[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=The_Grand_Unified...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=The_Grand_Unified_Model.txt)

If you want to know more about the invention and early history of the Macintosh in general, there's tons more at [http://www.folklore.org](http://www.folklore.org) (or in the book based on it, Revolution in The Valley, by Andy Hertzfeld).

</comment><comment><USER28> 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.

<comment><USER29> 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.

<comment><USER30> Did Jobs really know/care about technical details like what filesystem OS X used?

<comment><USER31> At one point it was a significant bullet point in the list of features being added to OS X Server. It was a big deal. I'm sure he was aware of it.

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-announces-zfs-on-snow- leo...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-announces-zfs-on-snow-leopard/)

<comment><USER32> I used OS X Server in 2008. It had major quality issues that seemed to only get worse with subsequent releases. Several advertised features accessible from the UI didn't work or straight-up broke things. I doubt Jobs paid much attention to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Resource forks aren't anything new - it's existed since the dawn of macs - <USER2> you haven't known about resource forks while working with macs maybe you should learn a bit more about the core of the platform.

That said, I agree, it's a horrible design - but it's existed for 20+ years already.

For me, this is just like saying "hey people! FAT is horrible, it only allows 8 character + 3 character extension file names!"

<comment><USER13> > _That said, I agree, it 's a horrible design - but it's existed for 20+ > years already._

Actually there's absolutely nothing horrible about resource forks/extended attributes in theory.

We use way worse ideas like "sidecar" files and metadata stored centrally for the same use cases, which are worse ways to handle the issue.

The real problem is the lack of agreement/interoperability in handling them across FSs (and perhaps tooling).

<comment><USER5> The problem is that *nix tools only support technology that existed in 1972. Anything newer than that is screwed.

Mac Classic's death knell was the increasing popularity of the Internet. Run by servers that couldn't possibly store Mac Classic files correctly, because guess what? Resource forks/alternative data streams/whatever didn't exist back in 1972.

And yes I am still bitter about this.

<comment><USER13> That's an important point. I think however elegant for its time the 70s/early 80s UNIX design, it holds us back in many ways.

It's amazing that we still widely use a language without a string type and memory safety like C for example, instead of something like Rust, Swift and co -- with occasional excursions to unsafety maybe for speed/interoperability with older libs, but not as the default for the whole goddamn codebase. And don't get me started in stdlib and co.

Other stuff too. A common "file resources" standard. X11. All the way to Makefiles and permissions (with stuff bolted on, like ACL). Oh, and the horrible conventions of file paths (dumping everything in /usr/bin and co, splitting an installed app into 5+ different directories for man files, resources, etc).

It's amazing how even a simple improvement like systemd gets tons of negativity from admin types and people who think 70s designs should be set in stone.

<comment><USER34> > It's amazing how even a simple improvement like systemd gets tons of > negativity from admin types and people who think 70s designs should be set > in stone.

That is misrepresenting (perhaps to the point of straw man) the systemd complaints.

<comment><USER13> > _That is misrepresenting (perhaps to the point of straw man) the systemd > complaints._

Maybe, but not the one's I've seen. Can you point to some collection of systemd complaints that go beyond "this is not how things used to be done"?

<comment><USER34> [http://without- systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_...](http://without- systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd)

<comment><USER13> Most of these are either of the "it's not how it used to be done variety", bug complaints (which can and do get fixed), and "straying of the unix way" (as if that is a technical argument.

Sometimes you DO need to stray off the UNIX way to improve things, namely any time "does one thing well" comes to the detriment of "needs overall overview and cooperation instead of a disparate set of things that can't be glued properly for the task based on a motto meant for simple text-based input/output programs".

There are some valid concerns too, but nothing that's a show-stopper -- which also explains why the show didn't stop.

<comment><USER34> OVerview and cooperation, sure. But everything in one ball of code because of "APIs"?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm sorry, OP, but NTFS has resource forks as well, and they have value. The fonts are probably in resource forks because you are prohibited by copyright from copying or transferring them, but in other situations, they represent data that is only valuable to Mac OS, so that, say, if you rsync a bunch of files to a UNIX/Linux machine, you don't get things that are OSX-specific.

That said, it is a fairly non-transparent and mysterious bit of functionality.

My favorite thing about HFS+ is that about ten years ago at WWDC, I sat in with the Darwin Filesystem Birds-of-Feather, and asked them why it is case sensitive. They gave me a very simple answer:

      Microsoft Office.

Office, like basically apparently all Microsoft software, aggressively takes any filename string you give it and sends it through a rube-goldberg machine of forced uppercasing and lowercasing at several levels of the application, and therefore does not reliably open "Something.txt" as "something.txt" or "SOMETHING.TXT", but will absolutely never open "Something.txt".

So, on my personal Macs, I actually run HFS+X, which is case sensitive and was designed for OSX Server. Homebrew works, all Apple apps and native Mac apps work. Office will almost definitely still not, but LibreOffice will.

<comment><USER36> FYI - Steam requires a case-insensitive filesystem. :-(

[https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8601-RYP...](https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=8601-RYPX-5789)

<comment><USER37> So do Adobe products.

[https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case- sensiti...](https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-case-sensitive- drives-supported.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Ignorance of the past may lead one to incorrect conclusions.

Resource forks were a clever way to keep things like icons, fonts, text messages and dialog box definitions bundled within a single program file (remember - on Macs the install/uninstall procedure is usually dragging an icon).

Many times I've customized programs this way.

HFS+_is brain-dead for a multitude of reasons. This is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER39> _" I'm sure there's an Apple-y reason for the existence of this feature, but I can't imagine what it might be."_

I know this feeling well but I don't really get how it causes some people to think "I'll write a blog post complaining about this" rather than "I'll do a quick search for this and find out the answer, which might be nuanced, historically contingent, and/or revelatory."

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd like to see Apple adopt the HAMMER2 filesystem from DragonflyBSD. It's a very full-featured filesystem, with snapshots, file history, and hashes for integrity checking. Snapshots could integrate with Time Machine, and file history with Apple's file versions feature.

It doesn't have as many features as ZFS or Btrfs, but it's much better than HFS+. Plus it's BSD-licensed and unencumbered by patents, so Apple could do whatever they want with it.

<comment><USER41> That would be sweet, indeed. How far along is HAMMER2 these days?

<comment><USER24> Not far enough for Dragonfly to use it. There's a greater chance of Apple adopting BTRFS (i.e., not a snowball's chance in hell).

<comment><USER40> If they need something in the short term they could use HAMMER 1, it's been stable for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > I'm sure there's an Apple-y reason for the existence of this feature, but I > can't _be bothered to read the Wikipedia article that I linked to in my cuh- > ray-zee blog post._

</comment><comment><USER43> 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

<comment><USER44> It's a font in the old Suitcase format from classic Mac OS-- it's not a lazy- man's DRM; it was the way fonts were supposed to be stored. Fonts were resources, so their data went into the file's resource fork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> HFS+ is a crap filesystem for many reasons. Resource fork is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER46> Interesting that it is HFS+ getting accused of being crazy, rather than the (blatantly deficient) POSIX-style tools!

<comment><USER47> > Interesting that it is HFS+ getting accused of being crazy, rather than the > (blatantly deficient) POSIX-style tools!

That's UNIX parochialism for you.

<comment><USER48> I guess there really are more things under heaven and earth than dreamt of in the unix philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is likely just my ignorance speaking in regards to the deeper workings of filesystems, but having used OS 7-9 and OS X since release, the issue brought up in the article has never been an issue for myself, my colleagues and friends as we sent data back and forth, or even something I was aware of as I used various Macs.

Is there a specific reason that this becomes problematic to even most power users outside of specific files being read differently by older tools? Reading the Linus rant on HFS+ I can understand to some degree and appreciate where this becomes a problem, but it just seems like the author found a small outlier issue with how an old font was handled with HFS(+) and condemned the entire system.

</comment><comment><USER50> Another fun issue in OS X HFS+ happens due to unicode normalization; any filename containing an ignorable unicode character is first normalized:

cat /etc/passwd`python -c 'print "\xe2\x80\x8c"'`

This led to a security issue with Git ([http://git- blame.blogspot.com/2014/12/git-1856-195-205-214-a...](http://git- blame.blogspot.com/2014/12/git-1856-195-205-214-and-221-and.html)) and one in Apache a few years earlier.

</comment><comment><USER51> >Applications — even basic filesystem tools — aren't aware of the additional content.

That's not actually true. Most if not all Unix utilities have been updated to deal with resource forks, and they have been integrated into the Unix directory hierarchy by treating the actual file as a single level directory.

The fact that the resource fork is invisible by default is the most reasonable way I can think of. Other options such as concatenating all the forks together or treating the file itself as a single level directory by default _would_ actually break everything.

The solution that they found is to have this interpretation (the file is really a single-level directory) accessible, but make one fork (the data fork) the default "bag of bytes" for most of the Unix tools.

For example:

       file  /tmp/Euclid/..namedfork/rsrc
       /tmp/Euclid/..namedfork/rsrc: MS Windows icon resource

Well, wrong answer, but correct access to the file.

That was a copy of a resource-fork based font I created by typing:

        cp Euclid /tmp/

The `cp` command copied the resource fork just fine. tar was also updated to handle resource forks and other metadata. I know this because long ago I created `hfstar`[1] to do just that, because the tar that came with the OS hadn't been updated yet. Today, hfstar is no longer necessary.

[1] [http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/9405/hfstar](http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/9405/hfstar)

</comment><comment><USER52> So, based on reading the comments (and I tend to agree), the issue isn't that HFS+ is _bad_ because it supports Resource Forks, many file systems support similar concepts.

The question becomes _why is OSX storing font data in the Resource Fork rather than what everything else understands is the actual content of the file itself_? On other file systems that I'm familiar with, alternate streams are for storing metadata. There's important information there, for sure, but I'm not aware of other cases where the metadata stream stores the data in absence of the data being present in the part of the file that everything understands is _the file 's data_. In this case, it appears OSX stores _the font_ in this alternate stream. This seems like an error in design when coupled with the fact that other, normal applications, can't understand the file in a way that makes doing normal file operations on it possible (attaching it to an e-mail or sending it via Skype).

I'm sure there's a reason the content is stored there that my lack of OSX experience would explain. The part I have a problem with is that reading that file provides an inconsistent experience within the operating system. Finder can see the file. 'cp' not only sees the file, but when copying it, renders a copy with the contents in the data, not resource fork[1]. It smells like an API problem; the wrong method is being used to read the file by these other programs (like grabbing a pointer to a symbolic link instead of grabbing what it points to), but I don't write software for OSX, so does anyone know the specifics of _why_ this design was chosen for fonts and other resources vs. storing the data in the actual part of the file that other programs would expect to to reside?

[1] I'm basing this statement only on the author's description of what happened. I do not own a Mac, myself.

<comment><USER53> Mac OS was severely resource constrained. Applications typically had less memory to run in than the screen and audio buffers together used (32 kB)

Also, the CPU Mac OS ran on did not support virtual memory.

To make such a system run, applications were split into several code segments. For example, no sane program would load its printing code into memory before the user actually tried to print, and individual MacPaint commands might be located in independently loaded pieces of code, too. Resource forks and their standardized format allowed that.

Once that code was in place, using it for all kinds of other data that wasn't always needed such as fonts, drivers, or desk accessories became the logical thing to do.

It just was easier, and put less of a constraint on memory to access a font as a set of resources than to write a similar, but separate piece of code for handling the reading of fonts from regular files.

See [http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Font_Manager.txt) for a description by someone who worked on this.

For me, the only weird thing is that they chose to use alternate forks. They could just as well have stored the resource fork data in the only data stream in a file. My guess would be that they did that so that they had the freedom to also write portable file formats to files that also contained resources (it certainly wasn't so that they could write secret messages in the System file. That happened way later, with system 7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The file is compressed.

Info here: [http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/96491/why-does-du- re...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/96491/why-does-du-report-a- size-of-0-for-some-non-empty-files-on-a-hfs-partition)

The last answer (marked for 0 points of course) is probably correct in this case. The file fits in the extended attributes.

</comment><comment><USER55> Not to mention case insensitivity... Ugh!

<comment><USER56> HFS+ can be case sensitive, it's just that many Mac applications will not work if it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wow, a font suitcase? Use a font format from the '80s and you deserve everything you get I guess ;)

</comment><comment><USER58> The kids today - know nothing about resource forks. Probably have never seen ResEdit either.

How do you even build applications?

</comment><comment><USER59> I miss ResEdit...

</comment><comment><USER60> Wouldn't it be cool if Apple just picked up a standard file system from somewhere else? Ext4 for example.

<comment><USER13> They would still keep something like resource forks. Most modern filesystems have them. Here's the man page for Ext4 and co on them:

[http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man5/attr.5.html](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man5/attr.5.html)

<comment><USER61> Heck - at this point, resource forks are exposed as a "com.apple.ResourceFork" xattr with a large binary value. The primary remaining visible quirk is that they're also accessible via a magic path ("file/..namedFork/rsrc") -- the fact that the file system has a special way of storing them is irrelevent to userspace.

<comment><USER62> Ah, that explains why people in this thread are so confused between alternate forks/streams, and extended attributes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> HFS+ is "modern".

</comment><comment><USER64> OH I miss the BFS

<comment> shawn-butler I think its "mostly" implemented in Syllable. Not sure what Haiku did.</comment></comment>


Drawing Eyes on Cow Butts May Ward Off Hungry Lions - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/drawing-eyes-on-cow-butts-may-ward-off-hungry-lions-1783744270 <comment><USER3> > The African lion is a vulnerable species, with numbers dropping from over > 100,000 in the 1990s to between 23,000 and 39,000 today, according to the > Botswana Predator Conservation Trust (BPCT). Much of that decline is due to > these kinds of retaliation killings because farmers have no non-lethal > strategies for protecting their herds.

The root of the problem is animal agriculture. We see similar dynamics in the United States, where wolves, coyotes, and even wild horses are culled to protect cattle.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health- science/gover...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health- science/governments-kill-of-4-million-animals-seen-as- anoverstep/2014/06/06/1de0c550-ecc4-11e3-b98c-72cef4a00499_story.html)

[https://www.thedodo.com/why-is-the-government-killing-the- la...](https://www.thedodo.com/why-is-the-government-killing-the-last-of- americas-iconic-wild-horses-1508214057.html)

<comment><USER4> >farmers have no non-lethal strategies for protecting their herds

I assume there's a good reason, but why not fences? Isn't chain-link fence really cheap?

<comment><USER5> \- Chainlink fence cheap

No, not cheap even by western standards.

Probably cost swaps labour for material when going from rich to poor. But not cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > stamping eyes on one-third of a herd of 62 cattle. When the cattle returned > each night, they took a head count to see how many had survived. Only three > cows were killed by lions during this period—all without the painted eyes on > their rumps. And all the painted cows survived.

This is really cool work! And fantastic that they are using a rigorous approach to study this.

Getting more data will be important. I calculate a P value of 0.23, giving a pretty big possibility that they're finding results this extreme (0% of cattle lost from the eye group vs 7% of cattle lost from the no eye group) by chance.

</comment><comment><USER7> Similar tricks have been tried it with tigers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarban...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarbans#Precautions) Apparently tigers figure it out fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER8> If fake eyes on butts are so useful, why didn't they evolve by themselves?

<comment><USER9> Humans bred cows, they did not evolve.

Nature's cows (buffalo etc.) live in very, very large herds for protection.

<comment><USER10> Pedantic: cattle (cows be females).

The aurochs didn't really live in large herds. It was just huge and cranky, and had big horns.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs)

<comment><USER11> It's always nice, if you're going to go around saying "pedantic:", to have what you say afterward be correct.

[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cow](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/cow)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how this will affect the cattle's mating. Cattle don't do missionary; I wouldn't be surprised if eye contact totally kills the mood for a bull.

<comment><USER13> There would be no eye contact when the bull has mounted.

<comment><USER12> But would he even try to mount while he can see "eyes"? Or, would he try to manoeuvre around to the other side, after a little misguided foreplay?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love when making situations better involves almost ridiculously simple - <USER2> "outside the box" \- solutions. Not every problem has a technology-based solution. This made me smile wide :)

<comment><USER15> Maybe not every problem has a technology-based solution, but apparently this one did. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is the fundraiser from earlier this year:

[https://experiment.com/projects/i-cows-can-intimidating- eye-...](https://experiment.com/projects/i-cows-can-intimidating-eye-patterns- painted-onto-cows-reduce-lion-attacks)

</comment><comment><USER17> If all the cows have eyes on their butts, won't the lions just get more hungry and then eat them anyway?

<comment><USER9> I suspect they would eventually figure out that's eyes on cows are harmless. Painting the cows with camo pattern would probably also make the Lions nervous, for a while at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Okay, now try it with angry eyes.

</comment><comment><USER19> sometimes evolution isn't fast enough

</comment><comment><USER20> Does it work on people butts too?

<comment><USER21> Well, apparently, with respect to another big cat, tigers, on the backs of their heads, it does, or people believe, over in the sunderbans[1]. Same idea. See fifth image of the lot.

[1][http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia- india-26064591](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26064591)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The inspiration for the iCow strategy came while Jordan was based in a > village in Botswana, when two lionesses were killed by local farmers in > retaliation for preying on their cattle herds.

Letting lions starve to death is the only way to save them from angry peasants!</comment>


Andy Rutledge: Quiet Structure - <AUTHOR> http://www.andyrutledge.com/quiet-structure.php

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the kind of thing we emphasize at YC. Step 1 in web design: don't have irregularity by accident. Only make stuff vary when you want to draw attention to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> A very impressive and convincing presentation for letting graphic form follow function - letting the content rule.

<comment><USER4> _"... impressive and convincing presentation for letting graphic form follow function ..."_

It's not a bad article but barely scratches the surface ...

Typography:

The immediate example used (CNN) is pretty poor. Why? The number of different type faces (above 3), the very poor contrast (red on white has less contrast than say black on yellow or white on black) and the mixing of case (count the number of upper case, lower case and mixed case words).

Also the type sizes are all way to small for _'tired eyes'_ straining to read 8-10pt with inconstant type cases. This is exacerbated by the media. Though we do see chunking of data to allow scanning via headlines.

Colour:

See any use of green? Oops there goes your 10% of your male readers. Do you see lots of colour contrast & grading to indicate things - another No, No - Colour blindness makes it difficult to see gradations ( <http://tinyurl.com/2vwxj6> ) There are tools ( <http://tinyurl.com/62lz5> ) to improve colour design for colour blind readers (eg: alternative style sheets with colour-blindness limitations ). Do we see any in the examples of these constraints in mind?

Layout & noise:

This bit the article gets right. I've been looking at _print layouts_ pretty carefully lately and the article does a good job characterising easier to read layouts. It is something you can view every day looking at a broadsheet newspaper & their weekend magazines though.

Media:

And finally media. Your average monitor has nowhere near the resolution of a printed page. Yet we still try to design for on-line reading cramming as much information on the screen as possible at the same time failing to acknowledge the limitations of the media, namely the monitor.

Aesthetics at the expense of fundamentals & new media?

My chief bug with _'graphic design expert'_ articles like this one, is the attention to the aesthetics at the expense of some the fundamentals - <USER2> technical stuff they don't teach in your typical & atypical _visual arts_ based design courses (but more likely game design schools). Problems, that are historically solvable in print, but not electronic media. Like a square peg into a round hole, old _print hacks_ are highlighted as new media solutions.

Now an article I would like to see is how the author tackles 'craigslist'.

<comment><USER5> Why use the tinyurl's? It means I can't tell where the link goes without clicking on it.

<comment><USER4> _"... Why use the tinyurl's? ..."_

reduces readability using 'n' length urls ... but point taken, here they are:

\- colour blindness: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Red- green_color...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Red- green_color_blindness)

\- tools: <http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html>

<comment><USER6> I usually just put them at the end of a paragraph or sentence. So I could write about X, Y, Z, and put:

X: url

Y: url

Z: url

with extra line breaks here because of odd news.yc formatting.

<comment><USER4> hmmm did that & got crucified because it's _"so over the top"_ and _"too formal"_ \- I'll stick to what I'm doing ~ [http://www.google.com/search?q=sbootload++%22Reference%22+%5...](http://www.google.com/search?q=sbootload++%22Reference%22+%5B0%5D)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kim Dotcom's new Mega project - <AUTHOR> http://kim.com/mega <comment><USER2> I can vouch for Kim's positive traits. He also has negative traits, as do we all - but I don't know much about them.

However he was a customer of AdBrite (a large ad network I founded around 2000) and I spoke with him via Skype many times around 2002. AdBrite is kinda like AdSense in that you can run our ads on your site and make money. And he was running AdBrite on one of his sites.

I don't remember which site of Kim's it was, and I don't remember why we had to kick them out for T&C infraction.

Regardless, he didn't like the AdBrite logo (which I paid a lot for) and told me his designers could make a better one. They did, and Kim let me use it for free. AdBrite raised around $40M using the logo Kim & his team designed for us. And I'm grateful.

AdBrite recently changed logos again so it's not there now. But here's the original (my designer) [http://www.storesonline.com/members/963920/uploaded/adbrite_...](http://www.storesonline.com/members/963920/uploaded/adbrite_logo.gif)

And here's Kim's, that we ended up using for years: [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MsUpdWwPgms/UFOcvPMS74I/AAAAAAAAAW...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MsUpdWwPgms/UFOcvPMS74I/AAAAAAAAAW4/1q8BUYOvuIs/s400/adbrite- logo.jpg)

The differences are subtle but I believe it made a significant improvement to our brand.

And regardless if you think Kim is a brilliant entrepreneur or a criminal -- you can't deny that he makes very high quality products that people love to use. There's something we can all learn from that.

Thanks for the logo, Kim.

<comment><USER3> The logos are practically the same. Cool story though.

<comment><USER4> The logos were so similar that when I opened them in tabs, I began to question whether the original post was a joke. I'm still not really sure what's going on.

<comment><USER2> Here's an image of both logos next to each other.

<http://tinyurl.com/c32hw83>

Kim got rid of the 3D, made the colors more bold, and removed some of the outlines. The changes also had the effect of making the word "AdBrite" appear larger, even though (in this comparison) the images are the same size.

Subtle, but was meaningful to me. Because (a) I liked his version better, and (b) In all my years entrepreneuring, it's the first time someone -- unsolicited -- offered to improve my logo for free.

Who does that?

<comment><USER5> FYI, your link returns "Oops, we encountered an error.

Access denied. You have accessed a location on this server that is not available. You may need to Sign in to your account to access this page."

<comment><USER2> Aargh. It's some bug with the new Skitch. Is everyone getting the same error?

<comment><USER6> I'm getting the same error

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What sane organization would sign up to be a "hosting partner" in this situation? Let's see, most of his last venture's major unpaid creditors are hosting providers, previous hosters spent months after the indictments unable to use their servers and without an ability to bill. Not to mention that he apparently wants quotes with no capex component and requires full built and managed systems including space, power, cooling, data, management and operations on a fixed fee bid before the service launches for what will be impossible to accurately predict growth.

Oh, and by the way, he's willing to let you take part of your payment in ad inventory.

lol.

<comment><USER8> many will in eastern europe/russia. U.S is out of the question

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was neutral on this guy until I read the wired story, and then I became a fan.

He is a self made man (way more so than romney!), he suffers from persistent discrimination (overweight) and he has cycled thru the hero's journey.

I have heard a lot of these "major success stories", but they are people who have been put in ideal situations and then they made the best of it. That is just emotionally dead for me. Kim's story is more interesting because it is relevant to ME. I can imagine myself in the same spot, and it overlaps with my own personal history (timewise) a bit too.

Ultimately, I believe there is minimal legal differences between youtube in the early days (which was made successful via RAMPANT piracy), and megaupload.

Screw the government.

<comment><USER10> He's a career criminal.

He hacked for profit. He traded in stolen phone cards and turned in his compatriots for reduced sentence. He ran a "premium" phone number scam. He ran a pump and dump scheme to defraud investors. He evaded prosecution by jumping jurisdiction. He tried (and failed) to run a fake hedge fund. He sold pirated software. He committed insider trading.

He's not a self-made man. He's a career criminal and a con man.

I find it shocking that so many people are eager to lionize this sociopathic asshole.

Screw Kim Dotcom.

<comment><USER9> That was years ago when he was a teenager. Many people went thru an "illegal period", his was just... more successful than most.

As for sociopathic, so what? Didn't you know that most CEOs are sociopaths? I find that argument... not compelling.

Like it or not, sociopathy appears to be an integral/essential part of human organizations.

<comment><USER11> "Many people went thru an 'illegal period'..." What?

I think there's a pretty massive difference between the speeding, soft-drugs, petty vandalism and theft that characterise common illegal teenage behaviours and large scale fraud. Even sat behind a keyboard far-removed from your victims I'm sure the difference becomes readily apparent when the number at the bottom of your bank statement is a few digits longer than those of your peers.

<comment><USER12> That's the problem with the "criminal" term. Don't confuse moral and legalities.

Much better to comment on whether you think he's done something inexcusably wrong or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kim's personal vices/virtues aside, this seems like yet another iteration of a while loop that has been running for awhile:

      1) A form of piracy exists.
      2) Prosecute!
      3) A faster, more secure form of piracy has been created!

</comment><comment><USER14> I especially like the DMCA callout on the Hosting Partner's page:

 _Unfortunately we can't work with hosting companies based in the United States. Safe harbour for service providers via the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has been undermined by the Department of Justice with its novel criminal prosecution of Megaupload. It is not safe for cloud storage sites or any business allowing user generated content to be hosted on servers in the United States or on domains like .com / .net. The US government is frequently seizing domains without offering service providers a hearing or due process._

<comment><USER15> That's hilarious. The Safe Harbor works fine for Dropbox, YouTube, and numerous others. That's because they don't have people on staff specifically looking for infringing material in order to reward the up loaders and encourage more infringement, and their responses when they are properly notified of infringing material is to actually deal with it instead of just trying to hide it from the notifier so he'll think it was taken down.

<comment><USER16> So far it has not been proven that Megaupload has violated the DMCA, and it looks uncertain whether the cased against them will even survive long enough for the claims to even get prosecuted, so how is that hilarious?

Whether or not Megaupload violated the DMCA, the US government have effectively demonstrated that if they _think_ you've violated the right laws, it doesn't matter whether or not the courts agree, as your business will be dead before then.

<comment><USER17> Obviously it hasn't been proven, because the case hasn't been taken to trial. But the indictment is damning; the DOJ has MegaUpload's emails and lays the case out in Kim & Co's own words. For instance:

 _On or about April 23, 2009, DOTCOM sent an e-mail message to VANDER KOLK, ORTMANN, and BENCKO in which he complained about the deletion of URL links in response to infringement notices from the copyright holders. In the message, DOTCOMstated that "I told you many times not to delete links that are reported in batches of thousands from insignificant sources. I would say that those infringement reports from MEXICO of "14,000" links would fall into that category. And the fact that we lost significant revenue because of it justifies my reaction."_

And:

* When an outsider complained that MegaVideo's hosting of the Showtime pay-tv series "Dexter" had desynchronized audio/video, instead of taking down "Dexter", Kim Schmitz fired off mail saying that fixing the AV problem was a priority.

* Mega employees themselves uploaded copies of major motion pictures to the service, such as Luc Besson's _Taken_.

* There are Mega emails, on which Kim is apparently CC'd, in which employees enumerate the specific files uploaded to certain high-performing affiliate members, noting (approvingly) that they include copyrighted movies and TV shows. For instance, one line item in an accounting mail: 100 USD [USERNAME DELETED] 10+ Full popular DVD rips (split files), a few small porn movies, some software with keygenerators (warez)

There's a widespread misunderstanding of the DMCA on Hacker News and Reddit, and that misunderstanding goes like this: "to follow the letter of the law, you must somehow be responsive to individual takedown requests from rightsholders". That is in fact not correct; it only captures part of the responsibility of service providers under the DMCA. Another responsibility, clearly spelled out in the DMCA, is that you can't operate a service with knowledge of specific infringing content. You cannot know that Luc Besson's _Taken_ resides on your service at a specific URL and then simply wait for a rightsholder to request its takedown. If you operate your service knowing that there are specific pieces of copyrighted content on your site that you're "getting away with" having because nobody's sent you a takedown, and a prosecutor can show that (for instance, with an email obtained during discovery in which your staff does a line-by-line accounting of a promotional program you ran in which you _paid contributors to your site to upload copyrighted material_ , and in that email you specifically make a case for paying one such prolific uploader _more_ because _more of their material is copyrighted_ ), you forfeit safe harbor protections.

Finally, and orthogonally, let me just add that while we can't convict Kim Schmitz on the presumption that he is a scumbag fraudster, and the checks and balances in our system of government do require us to dot every 'i' and cross every 't' with regards to chain of custody of evidence, evidentiary standards, and cause for search --- so that if Schmitz escapes his inevitable imprisonment this time, I'll at least be comforted that our legal system takes those issues seriously --- Kim Schmitz gets no such pass in the court of public opinion. The evidence against him in that court is overwhelming. Unless you think the DoJ fabricated his emails, we _know_ he's a crook. You can pretend there's a controversy here, but if you do, my take is you're not allowed to criticize Zynga or evil hedge fund managers and HFTs anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Am I missing something? It's just a... landing page?

For anyone that can't get through here is the site:

<http://i.imgur.com/dGSRk.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/OQjt9.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/JZvWD.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/K5Xst.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/69pfL.png>

</comment><comment><USER19> Kiwi here and the rumour is that this new venture breaks his parole so back to the little jail cell with a mouldy mattress for him. We're not fans of people that try and bribe/blackmail our politicians here.

<comment><USER20> Also a Kiwi here and I think actually most of us are more concerned with the Police and Govt's apparent disregard for the rule and application of law.

Kim Dotcom is pretty funny and makes a good case for himself when he's given TV time, but the big story is how much damage the government will take over their buddy-buddy with the MPAA and all the insider dealings they've been up to. Dotcom has exposed a kind of corruption we didn't realise we had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Heh, I misread "Easy Privacy" as "Easy Piracy".

<comment><USER22> Haha same here. Cracked me up :P

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> An the new URL: <http://me.ga>

<comment><USER23> Also redirects to <http://kim.com/mega/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So why would any sane person try his luck with this sketchy company versus Dropbox, which provides same functionality for free already?

<comment><USER25> Dropbox has already demonstrated that they play it fast and loose with user privacy issues. While I use Dropbox for many things, and admire what they've built, we'd do well to be more realistic about it around here.

<comment><USER26> I appreciate your skepticism towards DropBox, but what makes you think that Mega is going to be the host-proof sharing nirvana?

I'm willing to bet that their initial client will be susceptible to MITB and various key leakages for the first year or two.

<comment><USER25> Nothing makes me think "Mega is going to be the host-proof sharing nirvana," because I don't.

Please, try to respond what people actually say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am interested to see how this goes. I am also rooting for the new myspace project. If you have not seen that check it out: ( <https://new.myspace.com/> ).

What looks interesting is the ability for the artists to interact with the fans like they would on FB/Twitter on the same medium they could sell their music (I don't think there will be selling of music on the Mega project though).

Right now we have FB/Twitter where it is very easy to keep in touch with the artists and build a relationship and maybe find new ones but no real way to sell things that well. Then their is iTunes where you can buy music but no real community aspect.

I think bringing them together will be interesting. I could see something like a Kickstarter aspect working as well. Fans doing something like we want to see Kanye and Bieber do a song together. People could then show support etc and help chose what gets made.

Ultimately though it has to really help new/unknown artists get started. It's great that Louis CK can sell his stuff online by passing the record companies but that is unrealistic for most people. I system that provides a great community with a great "discovery" aspect could really help this. Fans could be like "I want a song made about blah blah" and some random artist could deliver. Maybe if you are doing a show somewhere you also film it and throw it up on the site for people to watch. Random thoughts. But I hope these provide some exciting opportunities for artists!

<comment><USER28> I did not knew about the new myspace project, thanks! I like how they bring "a new dimension" to the whole newsfeed/timeline idea by allowing both vertical (not really, tho switching from one page to another could be seen as vertical scrolling) as horizontal scrolling.

Also lovely how nowadays sites and software seem to be getting more simple, clean.. less icons, buttons, modal boxes; and maybe more important, fullscreen use!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Multi-centric data warehousing"? I don't think Kim knows what the term Data Warehousing usually means.

<comment><USER30> It's a stupid term, kudos to him for using it in a way that makes more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just guessed the domain name, since they won't be using .com or .net anymore: <http://me.ga/> redirects to that page, I hope that is the domain that they use since its pretty short.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think maybe he shouldn't have stuck to the Mega brand.

I'm confused to who would subscribe to 'Mega' after the last product called that was raided and everyone lost their data.

<comment><USER18>
        I think maybe he shouldn't have stuck to the Mega brand.

I think the idea they're using is that the US government took them down before and now they're building their product to be immune to that and so because they've been victims before they know what they're doing and that is why people should trust them.

I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Seeing a lot of css/javascript screw ups on Chrome. Popups and hover effects look pretty 'janky'. Anybody else seeing that?

<comment><USER34> Yeah, it really irks me when developers replace an image with another on hover. Just combine the two images on top of one another and use:

background-position: top; and on hover use: background-position: bottom;

This makes the initial hover smooth with no flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thats a fast-paced comeback. And he will succeed again this time with a lot more knowledge how to game the gang in hollywood.

Will be hard for them to even win the case they have put on and at the same time fight him again.

And for all who dont believe it TBP is still around too.

<comment><USER36> "And he will succeed again this time with a lot more knowledge how to game the gang in hollywood."

Succeed for himself, though I doubt the venture will last.

He reminds me of a lower-classed Donald Trump, in that he's much better at selling his personal brand than he is in operating a business for very long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It would be very interesting if he decides to use bitcoin or something similar for this.

<comment><USER38> How volatile is the bitcoin right now? For example, what happens when the bitcoin raises 200% vs. the US dollar? Do you change your pricing? What happens if it then drops the next day?

<comment><USER39> History tells us that the US dollar is much more volatile than bitcoin can be.

Plus I do not think that Kim will want to have anything to do with that currency.

<comment><USER38>
      > History tells us that the US dollar is much
      > more volatile than bitcoin can be.

There have been at least a couple of recent periods where there was a bitcoin 'bubble.' I'm questioning how he as a merchant, would deal with that (if bitcoin was his main transactional currency)? His customers likely are all using a different currency locally, and would have to exchange that currency for bitcoins.

For example:

Let's say a month of service costs 3 bitcoins, and currently a bitcoins cost 8 rupees (24 rupees/month for service). What happens when the price of the bitcoin rises to 20 rupees / bitcoin? Does the price (in bitcoins) drop? What happens if this significant rise only happens in one market, but not another? What if one 50% of his customer-base experience significant exchange increases, but the other 50% doesn't?

It's a curious thing, because almost no one is being paid (salary/wages) in bitcoins, so they _all_ need to exchange the local currency to pay for service.

      > Plus I do not think that Kim will want to
      > have anything to do with that currency.

I was using the USD as an example. The same comments could apply to whatever the local currency is of his potential customers.

[ Also chances are that if the bitcoin is volatile against one currency it's not not necessary stable against all others. ]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Discussion apart, seriously slick landing page IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER41> Anyone else having trouble entering their email? I keep getting 404 on the POST:

{"status":1,"response":{"error":"Unexpected error"}}

</comment><comment><USER42> There is an extra <head> tag in their site, I hope that isn't indicative of their programming talent! :x

</comment><comment><USER43> Kim just misses his money and fame.

<comment><USER44> I'd miss my money too, were I in his shoes. Wouldn't you?

<comment><USER45> but he created trendax - the money making machine. I just assumed he had a never ending money supply after that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I like the design of the website.

<comment><USER47> Single-page app for something that really doesn't need to be?

Not even a <noscript> so you're not actually sure if the page loaded or not[1].

Gratuitous animations between slides?

Barest hint of content scattered across slides?

If I was there for informational purposes, I'd say it was a terrible site.

[1] Although I don't really expect people to cater to the miniscule audience that is NoScript/equivalent users[2], it's nice to see at least the tiniest thought towards those who can't/don't have JS.

[2] In fact, there are even some tech-focused sites now that actually ask you to whitelist them for js instead of 'please upgrade to Netscape 3+ or IE5'!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> He's soliciting for investors. Isn't that illegal? (Not that he would care)

<comment><USER49> In the USA it probably would be... he's in New Zealand.

<comment><USER50> Didn't stop the USA last time ...

<comment><USER15> The things he was accused of were illegal in New Zealand also.

<comment><USER30> Really? I was under the impression NZ didn't have the criminal conspiracy law the US was using.

(Copyright infringement is of course illegal in NZ, but that's a civil matter and not what he was supposedly arrested for).

<comment><USER17> Really.

        131    Criminal liability for making or dealing with infringing objects
            (1)    Every person commits an offence against this section who, other than
            pursuant to a copyright licence,—
                (a)makes for sale or hire; or
                (b)imports into New Zealand otherwise than for that person's private
                and domestic use; or
                (c)possesses in the course of a business with a view to committing any
                act infringing the copyright; or
                (d)in the course of a business,—
                   (i)offers or exposes for sale or hire; or
                   (ii)exhibits in public; or
                   (iii)distributes; or
                (e)in the course of a business or otherwise, sells or lets for hire; or
                (f)distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent
                as to affect prejudicially the copyright owner—an object that is, and that the
                person knows is, an infringing copy of a copyright work.

NZ copyright law isn't structured like US copyright law; it recognizes "primary" and "secondary" infringement like our law does, but its criminal law is is broader; for instance, creation and sale of circumvention devices is an offense directly under Section 131 of NZ Copyright Law, not some wacky add-on law like the DMCA.

Obviously, most countries don't have _exactly_ the same laws as the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The email field seems to be broken

<comment><USER52> It did not work for me in Firefox, but I switched over to Chrome and it then worked.

<comment><USER51> It doesn't seem to be working on Chrome either for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> accidentally read that as 'easy piracy' vs 'easy privacy' :)

</comment><comment><USER54> Jesus people. It is possible to acknowledge that Kim is a criminal, think he is interesting, be interested in Mega, find his criminal history abhorrent AND think that raid of Megaupload was wrong and probably illegal, all at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive and there's no reason for this to be an argument.

Why do Kim discussions always turn into arguments instead of discussions?

<comment><USER55> Cognitive dissonance [1]. It seems to happen a lot with discussions of Julian Assange as well. i.e. he could be both a "freedom fighter" and a sex offender, and the one person could have both very admirable traits, and abhorrent ones. See also Mike Tyson, Roman Polanski etc etc.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance>

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I guess it's typical but I've had this idea before. tptacek should stop by with his rant against javascript, client-side encryption.

The other trick to making this idea cool? Once you have the wiring hooked up to make Mega look like local storage (even though it's in the browser), you can wire that up to the PeerConnection Data Channel (once it's available) and literally implement peer-to-peer networks in your browser. There are limitations as you can't use aggressive discovery protocols like with a native socket, but it's still tantalizing.

</comment><comment><USER56> lame.

<comment><USER57> That's an interesting 5 letters reply.

Does that means you have something to show which might stand the comparison?

The guy did it, has a strong brand recognition and people who publicly expressed their sadness that megaupload was gone and their eagerness to give him their business again.

Now he is out there to get some.

I say good luck to him.

<comment><USER56> Yeah that's one way of looking at it and I once did so myself. I've seen various projects of Kim Schmitz (aka Dotcom, aka Kimble) since the late 90s and all of them ended up failing because they weren't sustainable in one way or another. But he always came back with something fresh... This time he is trying the same things twice. So my personal opinion: lame.

<comment><USER58> Do you think that mega ran into trouble the first time because it was lacking substance in some way?

<comment><USER56> I think mega ran into trouble because it was parked in a grey zone. Also didn't help mega that it was run by someone that in his previous venture ended up getting arrested, deported back to Germany and charged for embezzlement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Holes in herd immunity led to a 25-year-high in U.S. measles cases - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/holes-herd-immunity-led-25-year-high-us-measles-cases <comment><USER2> The Article doesn't clearly state how many of the measle cases occurred in people with vaccinations. The only reference was sort of vague and indicates about 28% of the cases were in people who were in fact vaccinated. That seems quite high.

In short, instead of bashing people who choose not to vaccinate, why aren't the authors looking into why there was -- apparently -- a 28% failure rate in the vaccines? That seems strange. Maybe there was a bad batch of vaccines? But, easier to criticize orthodox Jewish families than a pharmaceutical company, I guess.

Edit: it's not a '28% failure rate.' Not even close. But, I would like an article like this to at least provide some data as to the effectiveness of the vaccine in the first place.

<comment><USER3> That's bayesian statistics for you. Measles vaccine works about 97% of the time. But if 91% of the population is vaccinated skewing the number of people who catch the disease.

P(H) - You have a 91% chance of being vaccinated. [2]

P(H|P) - You have a 3% chance of catching measles if you are vaccinated and exposed. [3]

P(H|P') - You have a 90% chance of catching measles if you are not-vaccinated and exposed. [3]

P(H|D) - About 25% of the population that catches measles will be vaccinated. [4]

(1) [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/holes-herd-immunity- led-...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/holes-herd-immunity-led-25-year- high-us-measles-cases)

(2) [https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer- updates/vaccination-b...](https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer- updates/vaccination-best-protection-against-measles)

(3) [https://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and- diseases/measles/measles-v...](https://www.nvic.org/vaccines-and- diseases/measles/measles-vaccine-effectiveness.aspx)

(4) [http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/bayes/BayesCalc.htm](http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/bayes/BayesCalc.htm)</comment></comment>


On the Insecurity of Whitelists and the Future of Content Security Policy [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/de//pubs/archive/45542.pdf <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12408328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12408328)</comment>


Trouble with logarithms and partial fractions - <AUTHOR>

I'am in my 30's who's willing to relearn math from ground up and i really felt HN is the right place to get my problem solved so i've decided to post a couple of mathematical problems which i'am having trouble with. if log(a-b/4) = log sqrta+log sqrtb,show that (a+b)^2 = 20ab if x^2+y^2=8xy show that 2log(x+y) = log5+log2+logx+logy decompose the following into partial fractions 1) 3x-1/[(x+2)(1-x+x^2)] 2) 1/(x^3+1) 3) 2x^2-14x+8/[(x^2+3x-2)(x-3)] <comment><USER2>
       1) 3x-1/[(x+2)(1-x+x^2)]
       2) 1/(x^3+1)
       3) 2x^2-14x+8/[(x^2+3x-2)(x-3)]

In 1 and 3 are there supposed to be extra brackets? It's really hard to tell exactly what these are given that you've used no formatting.

Secondly, why are you trying to solve these? Where did they come from?

Solving the first one, assuming the numerator is supposed to be (3x-1), then we proceed as follows.

When we add fractions like a/b + c/d the result is (ad+bc)/bd. In these questions we assume we have the result of such an addition and try to compute all the terms.

Here we have a denominator of (x+2)(1-x+x^2) so we assume b=x+2 and d=1-x+x^2. that means we have the numerator formula is:

        (3x-1) = a(1-x+x^2) + c(x+2)

In this case a and c are potentially polynomials (in fact by looking at the degrees c must be a polynomial of degree 1 larger than a).

Now just try setting a and c to small polynomials, c being 1 degree larger, and compute what you get on the right hand side. Does it look like the left hand side? Probably not. What do you need to change? How can you make it better.

Jiggle it around a bit and see what happens.

Tell me, what if a=(x+1) and c=(x^2-2) : what does the RHS evaluate to? Why is it wrong? How can you change a and c to make it better.

With regards the second question, are you aware that x^3+1 factorizes? Find a value of x that makes x^3+1 equal zero. What does that tell you about factors of x^3+1?

That's enough for now. I've give you a lot of questions. Usually you don't answer them all, just ignoring all but one. I'll see what you do this time. Also, I have to go now - I'll be back tomorrow.

<comment><AUTHOR> in 1 and 3 those extra square brackets aren't necessary.

secondly i'am trying to solve this as it will help in working out laplace transforms in the future.

i went through the partial fraction tutorial in wikipedia and khan acadamy and i'am able to solve the following problems.

1) x/(x+1)(x-4)

2)3x+1/x^2-6x+8

it appears that the above problems are straight forward.all i have to do is solve for 'A' and 'B' after writing them as A/x+1 + B/x-4. but the problems which i have posted are not .i've tried to jiggle it around a lot of times and going no where.

with regards to the second question i really don't know how on earth to factorize x^3+1 that's in the denominator.

lastly i'll be really happy if you wanna test my ability in math.i'll answer your questions if i'am capable of so that you can suggest what needs to be done next. In fact i believe in learning math the hard way!!!

<comment><USER2> You've got real problems with brackets. Major problems that are going to cause significant difficulties down the line. I'll bet the square brackets are necessary, and you need more brackets for the numerator.

Your number 1 above you quote as:

      x/(x+1)(x-4)

I'll bet you don't mean that. When you have multiplication and division at the same level, you evaluate left-to-right. The above is the same as:

      [ x / (x+1) ] (x-4)

which is the same as:

      x (x-4) / (x+1)

which I'll bet is not what you intended.

The second - as you quote it - is:

        3x+1/x^2-6x+8

Division binds more closely than addition and subtraction, while addition and substraction are then read from left-to-right. What you quote is therefore the same as:

        3x + 1/x^2 - 6x + 8

which is

        3x + (1/x^2) - 6x + 8

which simplifies to

        (1/x^2) - 3x + 8

I'll bet that's not what you meant.

Now let's turn to the first of the ones you originally asked about:

        3x-1/[(x+2)(1-x+x^2)]

I'll bet you mean:

        (3x-1) / [(x+2)(1-x+x^2)]

and I'll bet the square brackets are necessary. And you are right that all you need to do is solve for A and B after writing it as A/(x+2) + B/(1-x+x^2).

So remembering that a/b + c/d = (ad+bc)/bd, what does

        A/(x+2) + B/(1-x+x^2)

equal?

<comment><AUTHOR> all right the brackets concept makes sense.

remembering a/b + c/d = (ad+bc)/bd

A/(x+2) + B/(1-x+x^2) = A(1-x+x^2) + B(x+2)/(x+2)(1-x+x^2)

correct??

<comment><USER2> Yes, except you forgot the brackets again. You should have:

        [ A(1-x+x^2) + B(x+2) ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

You probably knew that, but this is really, _really_ important. Not getting it right now will confuse you a great deal later.

However, now you have this as your numerator:

        A(1-x+x^2) + B(x+2)  [Eqn *]

Look again at your original problem

\- what do you want the numerator to be?

\- Expand out Eqn * to remove the brackets.

\- What values can you assign to A and B to make Eqn * be the numerator you want?

As a hint, A and B are not simply numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> first of all i don't know the significance of replacing the numerator with capital letters when decomposing partial fractions.i'am not aware of the practical implications of these problems.all i know is it'll come in handy when solving laplace transforms in the future which is used in physics/electrical etc.(that's what i'am after). and if you are curious to know why i wanna learn these..well i don't have a proper reason.i simply want to!!

i looked back at the original problem but i'am unable to figure out the values to assign to A and B.

<comment><USER2> OK, to recap. You want to decompose this:

        [ 3x-1 ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

into fractions. In other words, you want to find A and B such that:

        A/(x+2) + B/(1-x+x^2) = [ 3x-1 ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

Apart from getting the brackets wrong, you said (correctly) that the left hand side is equal to this:

        [ A(1-x+x^2) + B(x+2) ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

So now you need to solve:

[ A(1-x+x^2)+B(x+2) ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ] = (3x-1) / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

The denominators are equal, so you just need to make the numerators equal.

So tell me - what equation do you have to solve?

<comment><AUTHOR> i get A(1-x+x^2) + B(x+2) = 3x-1

<comment><USER2> Excellent.

\+ Expand B(x+2)

\+ Expand A(1-x+x^2)

What do you get? You need to _play_ with these sorts of equations and see what happens - see what you get.

<comment><AUTHOR> expand B(x+2)?? but how??

<comment><USER2> How would you expand 3(x+2)?

<comment><AUTHOR> 3x+6

<comment><USER2> Or, before simplifying, 3x+3.2 (using a dot for multiplication)

So how do you expand B(x+2) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bx+B2 ??? now it's getting funny!!!!!!!!

<comment><USER2> So going back, you need to solve: [ A(1-x+x^2)+B(x+2) ] / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ] = (3x-1) / [ (x+2)(1-x+x^2) ]

As I said, the denominators are already equal, so you need to make the numerators equal.

That means you need to make this:

        A(1-x+x^2)+B(x+2)

equal to (3x-1). Expand this - you already know that the second part becomes B.x+2B - and have a look.

Then think - what can you set A and B to be to make it equal to 3x-1?

What if you set A to be x?

What if you set B to be 2?

What if you set A to be -3?

What if you set B to be 2x?

Try those, try more, see if you can work out how you can get 3x-1. Here's a hint: when you expand you'll get one of the terms as Ax^2. How can you get that to cancel out?

Try things. Tell me what you see, tell me what you get.

<comment><AUTHOR> i've started out with calculus.(it;s been 30 hours now) and i'am enjoying it as i'am able to understand.so my plan is to continue this partial fraction problem when i reach integral calculus involving partial fractions and eventually laplace transforms. and you said my algebra skills sucks.well i partialy agree with you cause i wouldn't be able to solve limits and differentiate functions without a grasp on algebra(precalculus for namesake). as a matter of fact i've never been good at anything .i suck in everything that i do.!!!!!!!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> heh, come to think of it, so is the first one:

it is given that log((a-b)/4) = log sqrta + log sqrtb, thus (a-b)/4 = sqrt(ab), thus, ((a-b)/4)^2 = ab, thus, (a-b)^2 = 16ab, thus a^2 - 2ab + b^2 = 16ab. Adding 4ab to both sides, a^2 + 2ab + b^2 = 20 ab, giving (a+b)^2 = 20ab.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much.what about the rest??any idea??

<comment><USER3> the others are even easier than these. I think if you are really trying to get back into math you should not lose patience so easily and spend a bit more time trying, and don't ask for help even if it takes many days to get these questions - otherwise it will never click for you again (my own personal experience).

I also hope I have not given you full solutions to homework problems you were supposed to solve by yourself. The wikipedia page on partial fractions gives you good directions on how to solve it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> What have you tried? What do you know?

Rearrange 2.log(a)=3.log(b)+5 to find b in terms of a.

Answering that will give us some idea of your current status the better to answer your questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you so much for your response,actually rearragning the terms to find 'b' gives me 3logb = 2loga - 5 {upon subtracting 5 from both the sides}. this is where i need help.please look into my partial fractions problems as well if you got the time.

<comment><USER2> But you still don't have b as the subject of the equation. You need to get to "b=..." If you don't know how to do that, then at least tell us what you've tried.

Can you make x the subject of this equation: log(x)+3=2t ? In other words, if the equation log(x)+3=2t is always satisfied, what does x equal?

And I will look at the partial fractions, but I'd like to concentrate on this first.

Actually, what is your definition of a logarithm?

The last time we had a conversation I asked you some questions to assess your level of knowledge and you never answered them:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1107996>

It seems to me looking over other times you've asked questions that you claim you want to get into math, and you probably think you're doing lots of stuff, but in reality I've seen no evidence of you actually trying things.

Gaining skills is a matter of spending the time. In math in particular, if you haven't spent ages getting loads of wrong answers then you won't have any real intuition as to what to do. You need loads of wrong answers, from which you can start to identify "good wrong answers". From those good wrong answers you can build an intuition as to what might work, and you can start to find _excellent_ wrong answers.

Then the moment comes when you see how to convert an excellent wrong answer into a right answer.

With practice this becomes second nature, and after a time you wonder why you ever found it difficult. But until you've put in the hours of practice, it doesn't happen.

People think doing math is a matter of somehow finding the right process and then following it. "Tell me what to do" is the perpetual cry.

You need to try stuff. Try re-arranging the equations repeatedly into different forms until, maybe, one looks familiar. Don't just stare at stuff hoping inspiration will strike, and don't think there's a magic formula for finding the right next step.

That's not how it works.

So tell me, how many different ways can you rearrange the equation: log(x)+3=2t ?

<comment><AUTHOR> i completely agree with you sir and i really appologise for not responding to this thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1107996> to be honest with you i really don't know where i stand .what's my level of competence. i recently gained interest in math and physics because i regret not taking these two subjects seriously back in college.now i work for a bank which pay's peanuts.i don't intend to get a job which helps me build my math/physics skills,i just wanna learn it because i have a burning desire to learn it.it's as simple as that. yes.math requires hours and days of practice which i'am religiously doing but it's not enough for me as it's very evident by the level of knowledge/intellect that i possess. with that being said the number of ways arranging the equation log(x)+3=2t hmm.. log(x)=2t-3 am i right??hope i'am not bullshitting you.

by the way the only definition of logarithm that i know is 'log is inverse of exponents'

<comment><USER2> So what does that mean?

OK, here are some terms to simplify. In each case, what is a simpler way to write the expression:

      x^3 * x^5

      (t^3)^2

      u^(3^2)

Expand the following:

      (g+2)^2

      (z-3)^3

Now, if x=10^y, what does y equal?

<comment><AUTHOR> now i have the solution for y in x=10^y

here it is:x=10^y

subtract 10^y from both the sides

x-10^y=0

now subtract x from both the sides

-10^y = -x

divide by -1

-10^y/-1 = -x/-1

= 10^y = x

take log base 10 both sides

log10^y = logx

= ylog10=logx

y = logx/log10

<comment><USER2> Ah, very good. You've gone slightly the long way around, but you've got the right answer.

The first part you go from x=10^y to -10^y=-x to 10^y=x. Is it not clear that if x=10^y then 10^y=x? The point is that any time A=B, then B=A.

Next, you have ended with y=log(x)/log(10). If the logarithms are base 10, what is log(10)? Can you use that to make your result simpler?

Next question: if t=log(u) (where the logarithm is base 10) then what does u equal?

<comment><AUTHOR> i'am not able to solve t=log(u).not even a single step sorry

i'am assuming this would end up in some number called 'e' which i came accross somewhere in the past.please help..i'am not sure what that number means and how to get it

<comment><USER2> OK, I really don't know how to help you now using this medium. You claim to have watching the Khan Academy video, but this question is answered in that.

The simple rules are these:

        log(a.b) = log(a) + log(b)

      hence

        log(a^4) = log(a.a.a.a) = log(a)+log(a)+log(a)+log(a) = 4.log(a)

      Therefore

        if  a = b^z
        then log(a) = log(b^z)
        so   log(a) = z.log(b)

This is true for all bases. Then we have

        log_b(b) = 1  :  Log (base b) of b is 1.

        Hence log_b(b^2) = 2
              log_b(b^3) = 3

        and so on.

In all this the basic rule is this:

        if   x = b^y
        then log_b(x) = log_b(b^y)
                      = y.log_b(b)
                      = y

So if the base is 10, then we have:

        If  a = 10^b
        then log(a) = log(10^b)
                    = b.log(10)
                    = b.1
                    = b

So now, start with the equation t=log(u), assuming the log is base 10, and use the above rules to change it around. When you do that, see if you can get to saying u equals something.

Finally, you need to study sections 1, 2 and 3 of this page:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithm>

What's on that page will also help you to understand the questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> [http://www.google.com/search?tbs=ww:1&q=partial+fraction...](http://www.google.com/search?tbs=ww:1&q=partial+fractions&btnG=Search)

</comment><comment><USER3> the second one is easy:

it is given that X^2+Y^2=8XY, thus, X^2+Y^2+2XY=10XY (i.e, added 2XY to both sides) thus, (X+Y)^2 = 10XY. Taking log of both sides: 2 log (X+Y) = log 10 + log X + log Y = log 5 + log 2 + log X + log Y

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> i couldn't find any book that clearly explains logarithms and partial fractions nor khan acadamy was able to find a solution to this.

<comment><USER2> Did you try this one?

<http://www.khanacademy.org/video/introduction-to-logarithms>

Or this one:

[http://www.khanacademy.org/video/partial-fraction- expansion-...](http://www.khanacademy.org/video/partial-fraction-expansion-1)

<comment><AUTHOR> ya i've tried them</comment></comment></comment>


OPDS – Easy to Use, Open and Decentralized Content Distribution - <AUTHOR> https://opds.io/ <comment><USER2> The Website is really bad in communicating what OPDS actually is. "Distributing Content" can be anything, from ads, videos, images, websites, video games, ebooks, news, songs, etcpp.

But the drawings suggest that this is only about (e)Books and other text-form articles. They seem to actively avoid calling it what it is and instead using "Content". Is this some kind of special lingo?

<comment><USER3> My impression from looking at this a bit after seeing this submission is that yes, it's mostly eBooks in practice, but I think they use the general wording because it's not strictly limited to that - you could pack audio or video publications in the formats too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a neat idea in the way it works with very well-supported open web standards. It feels like it could fit within the Dat/Hyperdrive ecosystem as a means for syndicating content held within decentralized content distribution networks.

As one of the architects of Ara [0] I would be curious to know if proof of content ownership and/or intellectual property protections are offered by these protocols? This has always proven to be one of the more challenging aspects to decentralized content distribution, in my experience.

[0] [https://ara.one](https://ara.one)

</comment><comment><USER5> The image of literal sheep inside tiny barbed wire fences is a bit extreme but I do feel the same problem.

I want to be able to purchase something then access it reliably without re- purchasing it.

I think the main problem is that digital copy/distribution is so cheap relative to content creation that the existing model of bundling those costs to emulate the inherent properties of physical distribution naturally leads to walled gardens.

OPDS seems to address only a small portion of the problem by describing a how publishers should host their content in a standard way that makes it easier to access/index.

Am I missing something in the specification?

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a list of software/services supporting this somewhere? (It's an easy mistake to make, but I find that difficult with many "standards" websites - how do I judge if this is actually in practical use, and if yes in what fields?)

<comment><USER6> I currently use it across multiple devices:

KOreader supports it on Kindle,Kobo,Linux,Android

Foliate (great EPUB reader) supports it on Linux

On Android - MoonReader and a few other apps. Ubooquity app for eg.

On iOS- I use KyBook, and I've been planning to work on something that integrates this into the Files app.

The mobileread wiki has some more, but the page has some spam: [https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS](https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'd be interesting to see something like this built on podcasting standards, which has successfully filled these design goals for a couple decades now.

It'd require a handful of thoughtful RSS extensions, and possibly OPML extensions for "Shelf" interop, etc.

With OPDS, I don't understand what enforces the "buy" scenario. Or is it not enforced at all?

</comment><comment><USER8> OPDS may work fine to distribute free digital catalogs, but I find it pretty hard to integrate it with purchased material. You definetely won't have the same experience as a proprietary platform.

So your end - user downloads a random opds-enabled client, and adds your catalog. Let's say you want to make sure the client owns the material. You can't expect the client to redirect to a sign - in page, that's not part of the protocol. Purchases also do not work well (try the O'Reilly opds for example) . It's just a mess.

It's not clear to me what exactly opds is trying to solve. I found it such a stretch when they claim it's an alternative to proprietary book platforms. These systems have tons of people thinking about the entire user experience. What opds offers is just a tiny fraction of what's necessary to build that.

<comment><USER6> It only supports Basic Auth, so the client is expected to support some out of band auth to get a token?

I think the new OPDS JSON spec had some notes on OAuth, not sure if that resulted in anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is illegal content handled?

<comment><USER10> I think this is a centralized ecosystem "brainworm."

Every feed publisher would be responsible for providing a feed that does not include illegal content. This is just a protocol for cataloging and distributed information about content. So, it'd be like asking "how does TCP/IP" handle illegal content? It doesn't and that's not the purpose.

Now, publishers of feeds could indeed keep illegal content from being linked(in a naive way) by pairing this protocol with another protocol that can check hashes of file content against a database of copyrighted works signatures.

If copyright holders want to protect their works online they should be making it easy, by providing such a service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this supposed to be a supplement to RSS, or in what ways is it unique or different from another XML-like feed standard?

<comment><AUTHOR> It builds on Atom, and provides a collection-based vocabulary, with at least at the start was focused on ebook distribution.

<comment><USER3> According to the site, they're switching and the future work builds on JSON-LD (IMHO: _ughs_ ) and Schema.org (instead of Dublin Core)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are looking to run a lightweight OPDS server: check out elibsrv. The indexer is written in C, which writes to a SQLite database, which is then presented using a lightweight PHP script. And as a plus, it supports OPDS search, which most other implementations don't (such as Ubooquity).

<comment><USER12> Ubooquity does support OPDS search.

<comment><USER6> hmm, doesn't seem to work on either of the clients that I Use (Foliate/Kybook2).

<comment><USER12> As far as I remember, I strictly followed the OPDS specifications when I implemented search, so it should work with any OPDS client. Just in case,I just tested it successfully with Moon+ Reader on Android.

I can't test the clients you use as I have neither a Linux or iOS device at hand, but if you have any kind of error when trying to use them, I could take a look.

<comment><USER6> Might just be an issue with my install. I'll do an upgrade and report an issue if I still can't get it working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was using the superb Marvin on iOS for my own content. Unfortunately the OPDS app for NextCloud doesn't seem to work for a while now.

<comment><USER14> I'm the author of that app, it was made for a much earlier version of Owncloud and it would take more work to get it up to date with the current state of the platform than it would to start anew. It also was not made to support many of OPDS' more 'advanced' features like sharding and search. I've started to look into making a new version, possibly integrated with my other Own/Nectcloud app 'Reader', look for more info on that front in a few weeks.</comment></comment>


For $3100 USD You Can Have a Fast, Fully-Free-Software Workstation - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-workstation&num=1 <comment><USER2> Now, for work I sometimes have to do some quite data-intensive calculations. Having a desktop computer running POWER8 would make this a hell of a lot faster, considering you can actually max out most intel chips just doing a regular dvd rip.

</comment><comment><USER3> $3100 for the "CPU+motherboard+heatsink/fan" combo is very steep. I would seriously consider it at a third of the price.

</comment><comment><USER4> All of this is very confusing. There are a ton of chips on a motherboard, each one with its own firmware. For instance, I doubt you'll find an SSD or HDD that's production worthy and has open source firmware.

That being the case, I doubt there's much to this effort, if the focus truly is security.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's generally accepted in the Free Software community that right now we've still got a long way to go before we get free firmware for every embedded microcontroller. FSF will still certify a device as "Respects Your Freedom" if the only proprietary code on there is firmware for secondary processors that isn't intended to be updated regularly by the user.</comment></comment>