Hi Boaz, > I guess you tried putting a zero at first char and it breaks everybody? It works with some devices, but with many it doesn't. A space followed by a nul works with quite a lot of devices, but not enough (the last patch used a space followed by a nul). I went to a large electronics store and told them I wanted to buy devices that didn't work with my computer. They were very helpful, and as a result I was able to test a lot of devices. That is what led to the design of this patch (plus the feedback from people like Jan and his IOneIt MP3 player). > I guess (35^6)*8*7 is not that bad yes, but luckily For the WinXP bluescreen the probability of the crash is actually much lower than that figure would give. With the same modelling assumptions of WinXP memory slots for 8.3 entries that Paul used for the last patch, it comes out as less than a 1 in 10k chance for a full directory (ie. 32767 long filenames). For 100 files in a directory it is around 1 chance in 10^11. I'm sure Paul will do the full expansion and modelling if anyone wants more precise numbers. For the chkdsk rename, the probability is much easier to calculate as it is just the usual birthday expansion (see wikipedia for simple formula for that). That is what gives 0.5% for 32767 files in a directory, and 4.8x10^-8 for for 100 files. Basically it won't happen very often. In each case the probability is rougly 75x less than it was for the last patch. > What if we had a user mode utility that does these short-names > renames that a user can optionally run after umount? since it > only writes the (random) short-names it's also safe. While I will defer to John Lanza if you want a more complete legal view on this, I think it is likely that separating the steps of the patent between programs within one system is not a safe enough legal strategy to be used. Please do keep thinking about it though. There could well be some simple combination which is legally safe and also technically completely satisfactory. If you think you have hit on a winner, you may wish to discuss it with John Lanza in private first though, so it can be fine tuned before being presented publicly. Cheers, Tridge -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html