An 8.3 filename^[1] (also called a short filename or SFN) is a filename convention used by old versions of DOS, versions of Microsoft Windows prior to Windows 95, and Windows NT 3.51. It is also used in modern Microsoft operating systems as an alternate filename to the long filename for compatibility with legacy programs. The filename convention is limited by the FAT file system. Similar 8.3 file naming schemes have also existed on earlier CP/M, Atari, and some Data General and Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer operating systems.

Overview[link]

8.3 filenames have at most eight characters, optionally followed by a period "." and a filename extension of at most three characters. For files with no extension, the "." if present has no significance (that is "myfile" and "myfile." are equivalent). File and directory names are uppercase, although systems that use the 8.3 standard are usually case-insensitive.

VFAT, a variant of FAT with an extended directory format, was introduced in Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5. It allowed mixed-case Unicode long filenames (LFNs) in addition to classic 8.3 names.

To maintain backward-compatibility with legacy applications (on DOS and Windows 3.1), an 8.3 filename is automatically generated for every LFN, through which the file can still be renamed, deleted or opened. The 8.3 filename can be obtained using the Kernel32.dll function GetShortPathName.^[2][3]

Although there is no compulsory algorithm for creating the 8.3 name from an LFN, Windows uses the following convention:^[4]

1. If the LFN is 8.3 uppercase, no LFN will be stored on disk at all.
   • Example: "TEXTFILE.TXT"
2. If the LFN is 8.3 mixed case, the LFN will store the mixed-case name, while the 8.3 name will be an uppercased version of it.
   • Example: "TextFile.Txt" becomes "TEXTFILE.TXT".
3. If the filename contains characters not allowed in an 8.3 name (including space which was disallowed by convention though not by the APIs) or either part is too long, the name is stripped of invalid characters such as spaces and extra periods. Other characters such as "+" are changed to the underscore "_", and uppercased^{[clarification needed]}. The stripped name is then truncated to the first 6 letters of its basename, followed by a tilde, followed by a single digit, followed by a period ".", followed by the first 3 characters of the extension.
   • Example: "TextFile1.Mine.txt" becomes "TEXTFI~1.TXT" (or "TEXTFI~2.TXT", should "TEXTFI~1.TXT" already exist). "ver +1.2.text" becomes "VER_12~1.TEX".
4. Beginning with Windows 2000, if at least 4 files or folders already exist with the same initial 6 characters in their short names, the stripped LFN is instead truncated to the first 2 letters of the basename (or 1 if the basename has only 1 letter), followed by 4 hexadecimal digits derived from an undocumented hash of the filename, followed by a tilde, followed by a single digit, followed by a period ".", followed by the first 3 characters of the extension.
   • Example: "TextFile.Mine.txt" becomes "TE021F~1.TXT".

NTFS, a file system used by the Windows NT family, supports LFNs natively, but 8.3 names are still available for legacy applications. This can be optionally disabled to increase performance in situations where large numbers of similarly named files exist in the same folder.^[5]

The ISO 9660 file system (mainly used on compact discs) has similar limitations at the most basic Level 1, with the additional restriction that directory names cannot contain extensions and that some characters (notably hyphens) are not allowed in filenames. Level 2 allows filenames of up to 31 characters, more compatible with Mac OS filenames.

During the Microsoft antitrust trials, the names MICROS~1 and MICROS~2 were humorously used to refer to the companies that might exist after a proposed split of Microsoft.^[6]

Compatibility[link]

This legacy technology is used in a wide range of products and devices, as a standard for interchanging information, such as compact flash cards used in cameras. VFAT LFN Long filenames introduced by Windows 95/98/ME retained compatibility. But the VFAT LFN used on NT-based systems (Windows NT/2K/XP) uses a modified 8.3 shortname.

If a filename contains only lowercase letters, or is a combination of a lowercase basename with an uppercase extension, or vice-versa; and has no special characters, and fits within the 8.3 limits, a VFAT entry is not created on Windows NT and later versions such as XP. Instead, two bits in byte 0x0c of the directory entry are used to indicate that the filename should be considered as entirely or partially lowercase. Specifically, bit 4 means lowercase extension and bit 3 lowercase basename, which allows for combinations such as "example.TXT" or "HELLO.txt" but not "Mixed.txt". Few other operating systems support this. This creates a backwards-compatibility problem with older Windows versions (95, 98, ME) that see all-uppercase filenames if this extension has been used, and therefore can change the name of a file when it is transported, such as on a USB flash drive. Current 2.6.x versions of Linux will recognize this extension when reading (source: kernel 2.6.18 /fs/fat/dir.c and fs/vfat/namei.c); the mount option shortname determines whether this feature is used when writing.^[7]

Directory table[link]

A directory table is a special type of file that represents a directory. Each file or directory stored within it is represented by a 32-byte entry in the table. Each entry records the name, extension, attributes (archive, directory, hidden, read-only, system and volume), the date and time of creation, the address of the first cluster of the file/directory's data and finally the size of the file/directory.

Legal characters for DOS filenames include the following:

• Upper case letters A–Z
• Numbers 0–9
• Space (though trailing spaces in either the base name or the extension are considered to be padding and not a part of the filename, also filenames with spaces in them could not be used on the DOS command line because it lacked a suitable escaping system)
• ! # $ % & ' ( ) - @ ^ _ ` { } ~
• Values 128–255

This excludes the following ASCII characters:

• " * / : < > ? \ [ ] |
  Windows/MS-DOS has no shell escape character
• Lower case letters a–z
  stored as A–Z on FAT12/FAT16
• Control characters 0–31
• Value 127 (DEL)^{[dubious – discuss]}

Code 0xE5 as the first byte (see below) makes troubles when Cyrillic KOI8 encoding is used, because it corresponds to Cyrillic capital letter "Е". Some operating systems such as ANDOS used to automatically change the letter to the similar-looking Latin one.^{[citation needed]}

The DOS filenames are in the OEM character set.

Directory entries, both in the Root Directory Region and in subdirectories, are of the following format:

How to convert a long filename to a short filename[link]

Sometimes it may be desirable to convert a long filename to a short filename, for example when working with the command prompt. A few simple rules can be followed to attain the correct 8.3 filename.

1. A SFN filename can have at most 8 characters before the dot. If it has more than that, you should write the first 6, then put a tilde ~ as the seventh character and a number (usually 1) as the eighth. The number distinguishes it from other files with both the same first six letters and the same extension.

2. Dots are important and must be used even for folder names (if there is a dot in the folder name). If there are multiple dots in the long file/directory name, only the last one is used. The preceding dots should be ignored. If there are more characters than three after the final dot, only the first three are used.

3. Generally:

• Any spaces in the filenames should be ignored when converting to SFN.
• Ignore all dots except the last one. Leave out the other dots, just like the spaces.
• Commas and square brackets are changed to underscores.
• Case is not important, upper case and lower case characters are treated equally.

To find out for sure the SFN or 8.3 names of the files in a directory

use: "dir /x" shows the short names if there is one, and the long names.

or : "dir /-n" shows only the short names, in the original DIR listing format.

See also[link]

• Long filename
• File Allocation Table - FAT
• File system
• filename extension

References[link]

This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (September 2011)

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality team in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.^[1]

Career[link]

Cutts started his career in search when working on his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. According to quotation in a personal interview with an operator of another website, Matt got his Bachelor's degree at the University of Kentucky and Master's degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In the interview he was quoted his field of study was computer graphics and movement tracking, then moved into the field of information retrieval, and search engines^[2] after taking two required outside classes from the university's Information and Library Science department.^[2]

Before working at the Search Quality group at Google, Cutts worked at the ads engineering group and SafeSearch, Google's family filter.^{[citation needed]} There he earned the nickname "porn cookie guy" by giving his wife's homemade cookies to any Googler who provided an example of unwanted pornography in the search results.^[3]

Cutts is one of the co-inventors listed upon a Google patent related to search engines and web spam,^[4] which was the first to publicly propose using historical data to identify link spam.^{[citation needed]}

In November 2010, Cutts started a contest challenging developers to make Microsoft Kinect more compatible with the Linux operating system. At the time, Microsoft had stated that the use of Kinect with devices other than the Xbox 360 was not supported by them.^[5]

Cutts has given advice and made statements on help related to the use of the Google search engine and related issues. ^[6]

In January 2012, on the news that Google had violated its quality guidelines, Cutts defended the downgrading of Chrome homepage results noting that it was not given special dispensation. ^[7]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• David A. Vise and Mark Malseed (2005-11-15). The Google Story. Delacorte Press. ISBN 0-553-80457-X. 

External links[link]

• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO – his personal blog
• Matt Cutts on Twitter
• Matt Cutts at TED Conferences
• 2009 BusinessWeek profile
• Philipp Lenssen (2005). "Matt Cutts, Google's Gadgets Guy". blog.outer-court.com, Personal Blog. http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-17-n52.html. Retrieved December 15, 2006. 

Amit Singhal is a software engineer at Google Inc., a Google Fellow, and the head of Google's core ranking team.^[1] Born in Jhansi, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India,^[2] Amit received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee in 1989.^[3] He continued his computer science education in the United States, and received an M.S. degree from University of Minnesota Duluth in 1991.^[4]

Amit continued his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and received a Ph.D. degree in 1996.^[4] At Cornell, Amit studied with Gerard Salton, a pioneer in the field of information retrieval, the academic discipline which forms the foundation of modern search. John Battelle, in his book "The Search" calls Gerard Salton "the father of digital search." He got interested in the problem of search in 1990 at the University of Minnesota Duluth. After getting a Ph.D. in 1996, Amit joined AT&T Labs (previously a part of Bell Labs), where he continued his research in information retrieval, speech retrieval and other related fields.^[4]

In 2000, he was persuaded by his friend Krishna Bharat to join Google.^[4] Amit runs Google's core search quality department. He and his team are responsible for the Google search algorithms. According to New York Times, Mr. Singhal is the master of what Google calls its “ranking algorithm” — the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user’s question.^[5]

As a reward for his rewrite of the search engine in 2001, Amit was named a "Google Fellow".^[6] In 2011 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.^[7][8] Fortune named Amit Singhal one of the smartest people in tech.^[9] In 2011, Amit Singhal was given the Outstanding Achievement in Science and Technology Award at The Asian Awards.^[10] He writes about UMD:

"UMD was the turning point in my life. Studying Information Retrieval with Don Crouch and then Don recommending that I move to Cornell to study with Gerard Salton, is the main reason behind my success today. Don gave me the love for search, I have just followed my passion ever since."^[4]

—Amit Singhal

References[link]

External links[link]

• Amit Singhal's homepage

Harold Lee "Hal" Lindsey (born November 23, 1929) is an American evangelist and Christian writer. He is a Christian Zionist and dispensationalist author. He currently resides in Texas.

Biography[link]

He was born on November 23, 1929 to Percy Lacy Lindsey and Daisy Lee Freeman in Houston, Texas. Lindsey suspended his course of study at the University of Houston to serve in the Korean War, then worked as a Mississippi River tugboat captain.

He entered Dallas Theological Seminary in 1958 (with the help of Lt. Col. Robert Thieme, pastor of Berachah Church in Houston, which Lindsey had attended) where he studied with John F. Walvoord, author of the 1974 best-seller Armageddon, Oil, and the Middle East Crisis. He graduated from Dallas with a Master of Theology, majoring in the New Testament and early Greek literature.^[1] With Jan, the second of his four wives, he worked with Campus Crusade for Christ and continued with them until 1969. He then helped a mission in Southern California which continued until 1976. He was also a frequent speaker and Sunday School teacher at Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim, California. In 1969, he wrote his first, and most well-known book, The Late, Great Planet Earth.

Published in 1970 by Zondervan, The Late, Great Planet Earth became a bestseller. Coming on the heels of the Six-Day War, the book fueled the popularity of Dispensationalism and its support of ethnic Jews as the "chosen people of God". Many of Lindsey's later writings are sequels or revisions and extensions of his first book. In 1994, he earned his Doctorate of Theology from California School of Theology.^[2]

Lindsey hosted International Intelligence Briefing on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and serves on the executive board of Christian Voice.^[3]

International Intelligence Briefing was removed from the air on TBN for the entire month of December 2005. Lindsey claimed that this was because "some at the network apparently feel that [his] message is too pro-Israel and too anti-Muslim."^[4] TBN owner Paul Crouch, however, contended that "TBN has never been and is not now against Israel and the Jewish people."^[5] Crouch said that Lindsey's show was pre-empted for Christmas programming. Lindsey countered that this was the first time his show had been preempted for the entire month of December. TBN later admitted that a secondary reason for pre-empting the show was that it "placed Arabs in a negative light."^[6]

Lindsey resigned from TBN on January 1, 2006, and indicated that he would pursue another television ministry. His new program, The Hal Lindsey Report, is focused on Biblical prophecy and current events, and is carried on the Angel One and DayStar networks. In January 2007, Lindsey announced that he would be returning to the TBN network. The Hal Lindsey Report airs on TBN under his own financing.^[7]

He wrote in an essay on WorldNetDaily that Barack Obama was paving the way for, and demonstrating the world's readiness for, the antichrist, "Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him — a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib ... The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance."^[8]

Biblical Interpretations[link]

In 1970, Lindsey wrote in The Late, Great Planet Earth that the biblical prophets identified certain nations that would ally with other countries to form four major spheres of political power during the same time era that Israel would be reestablished as a nation ^[9]. Lindsey wrote that these nations and their allies can be identified as: (1) Russia and its allies, (2) China and other oriental countries, (3) Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, and (4) an alliance of Western European nations ^[10].

Lindsey wrote that the Western European alliance is a revived form of the ancient Roman Empire, and is predicted in the books of Daniel and Revelation symbollically as ten horns or ten kings. ^[11]. Lindsey quotes from Time Magazine, July 4, 1969, that the goal of the European Economic Community, which preceded the European Union, was to establish a ten-nation economic community ^[12]. Lindsey concludes, based on this and other sources, that this alliance of Western European nations is fulfilling this prophecy and will ultimately be ruled by the Antichrist ^[13]. The European Union currently has 27 members.

Lindsey also noted that the prophets did not directly or indirectly mention the United States of America, and concluded that the U.S. would lose its leadership position on the geo-political stage by the time the Tribulation of the end times arrived ^[14].

In a later book, entitled, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, Lindsey wrote that he felt compelled to write because "so many things have occurred" in the last ten years (since he wroteThe Late Great Planet Earth). ^[15] He believed that it was possible that the battle of Armageddon could take place in the not too distant future, stating, "the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it." ^[16]. He noted again that the U.S. is not mentioned in Bible prophecy as a leading nation and listed some scenarios that, at that time, seemed plausible to him: (1) A takeover by communists, (2) destruction by a surprise Soviet nuclear attack, and (3) becoming a dependent of the 10-nation European community.^[17] The book was on the NY Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks.

Planet Earth - 2000 A.D., published in the early 1990s, states that Christians should not plan to still be on earth by the year 2000.

Lindsey's earlier predictions all assumed that the Cold War would continue indefinitely, and had eschatological significance; he explicitly identified Russia with the apocalyptic figure of Gog. He also assumed that the 1960s counterculture would eventually become the dominant culture, and become the source of prophesied "immorality" that would lead to the establishment of a false religion.

Bibliography[link]

• The Late, Great Planet Earth
• Satan is Alive and Well On Planet Earth
• The Liberation of Planet Earth
• There's a New World Coming
• The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon
• The Final Battle
• The Terminal Generation
• Planet Earth: The Final Chapter
• Rapture
• Planet Earth - 2000 A.D.
• Apocalypse Code
• Blood Moon
• Vanished into Thin Air: the Hope of Every Believer
• The Everlasting Hatred: The Roots of Jihad

See also[link]

• Christian eschatology
• Unfulfilled religious prophecies
• Summary of Christian eschatological differences
• Christian Voice (USA)

References[link]

External links[link]

Find more about Hal Lindsey on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
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	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

• Hal Lindsey's web site
• Hal Lindsey commentaries on WorldNetDaily
• The Hal Lindsey Report at Daystar Television Network
• The Hal Lindsey Report at Trinity Broadcasting Network
• Hal Lindsey at Rapture Ready
• Hal Lindsey at the Internet Movie Database
• International Intelligence Briefing at the Internet Movie Database