The last few days have been really aggravating from a systems-administration perspective. I needed to make backups of several computers, which isn’t such a big deal by itself - I have a backup strategy for both the Windows and the Linux boxes I baby-sit. The problem turned out to be, “Where in the world is my external hard disk??!”
Most people that work with computers know about Moore’s Law, which basically predicts that computing power will double every 18 months or so. (I don’t know why it’s called a law when it’s a prediction, but whatever!) Generally, you would imagine that this should mean that a particular computing task should take half the time to complete every 18 months, too.
But, there is one operation that seems to have remained constant over time, thumbing its nose at Moore’s Law, and that is booting up the computer. It seems like that always takes about a minute. It has from the days when I was playing with MS-DOS 3, all the way until now when I boot up Windows XP or the latest Linux. I think this is kind of counterintuitive. Hard disks are faster, memory is faster, and processors are faster, but still, somehow, it takes a whole minute for the computer to boot up.
You might say, “But there’s all these nifty new features built into operating systems nowadays! Like filesystem journaling, and automatic hardware discovery, and clock synchronization, and …” Yeah yeah, but still there’s got to be a reason why it takes about a minute, and not, say, ten minutes, to boot up. “You see, that would just be way too long for people to wait. But a minute is okay.” So, I think that there’s something “special” about getting the OS loaded in a minute or less.
As an aside, I have it on good authority that this is still going to be the case in the 24th century. You see, there was an episode of Star Trek TNG where the Enterprise’s memory got corrupted, and “Oh hey, we’ll just reboot the whole spaceship.” It took a whole hour for the geniuses to figure that one out. If Microsoft were still around then, that would have been the first thing they would have tried. They could’ve just hopped onto a subspace link to India and gotten some good tech support. The episode would probably still be an hour too, although not as exciting.
And how long do you think it took for the Enterprise to reboot?
About a minute.
Today I tried to use my iPod to temporarily store some large files on my laptop. See, the Microsoft disk defragmenter can’t seem to get anywhere unless it has at least 15% free disk space to use, and, well, I only have 14% free. So no defrag for me, until I can move some of these large files off of my lappy.
Now, these files are all around 4GB apiece, and my iPod is a 40GB version, so it shouldn’t be a big deal. Right? Well, unfortunately for me, I kept getting these “Disk full” errors, and I had at least 30GB free space. That was really frustrating!
But then I finally realized what the deal is. 4GB is the maximum file size that the FAT32 filesystem can handle, and now that my iPod is formatted for Windows, that’s just the limit I gotta deal with.
Apple has an information page about this issue, which is characteristically snippy and self-aggrandizing:
This is because the FAT32 file system–the Windows hard disk format used for iPod–limits files to 4 GB. This limitation does not apply to an iPod formatted for Mac, which uses the Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) file system. Its file size limit is much larger, in case you were wondering.
Yes, thank you Apple. I was wondering whether Macs could possibly be as stupid and broken as Windows. A little worried, even. I’m so glad they aren’t. I can sleep again at night.
</sarcasm>
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