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On Thursday 03 October 2002 11:34, you wrote:
> Window$ operating system lives in 1 partition and encompasses 10,237 files
> by itself! (I counted them.)
i would love to say something horribly sarcastic and funny, but i'm feeling in
full control today ;-P
> How do we deal with this incredible explosion in complexity and
> application & storage media size? The answer is right before our eyes:
> chop our disks into pieces that can be handled more easily.
i would disagree. the VFS (virtual file system) mechanism renders multiple
partitions and file system types a moot issue (that's the whole point of the
VFS, really). things like LVM (linux volume management) and the projects that
are set to overtake it make multiple volumes transparent even to the VFS!
the reasons for having multiple partitions:
o controling the size of a specific type of data (e.g. logs)
o making upgrading easy (e.g. by having /home on a partition of its own)
o making mounting/unmounting specific types of data easier
o merging multiple physically seperate devices
o evading software limits on things like inodes on a single filesystem
but those are pretty much all machine or OS issues, not human issues. for
humans, we have a well defined hierarchy of directories to help us view our
data storage (and other helpers like quotas)...
viewing slices of disks as distinct things is an unecessary and even bad
practice that is all-too-easily learned on systems that were designed with no
clue towards handling such devices.
e.g. MS Windows.
the MS Windows design came from a world of small, single disks, small amounts
of memory and a company that lacks the foresight to see beyond its next
customer.
the answer is the VFS, and even MS is slowly waking up to that. it'd be a
shame to let them beat you to the revelation ;-)
(ok, i said i wouldn't say anything sarcastic. i suppose i lied. i did try
though. =)
- --
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
- Albert Einstein
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