Which platform?

[Tim Cutts Zoology]

In article <4r990d$s65 at newstand.syr.edu>,  <dslomczy at mailbox.syr.edu> wrote:
>The problem with running Windows NT, UNIX, and another OS on the same platform is the
>harddrive format issue.  UNIX and NT use there own special type of format and you need to
>partition the drives in order to use them.  It can be very hairy to try.

Anyone running DOS on a PC should be used to partitioning already.  If
they have a hard disk >200Mb and they haven't partitioned it already
into logical drives they are wasting disk space.  On a 300Mb DOS
partition, for example, the allocation unit is 8Kb, which means that
every file will on average use 4Kb more disk space than it actually
needs.  If your logical drives are all around 200 Mb in size, that
figure is only 2 Kb per file.  That's a saving of 2 Mb per thousand
files.  The MS-DOS filesystem is very inefficient on large partitions.
This is one of the advantages of NT, which always allocates 512 bytes
at a time, regardless of partition size, so a given file will on
average only use 256 bytes more space than it needs.  Converting a 300
Mb drive containing 3,000 files from FAT to NTFS will probably gain
you about 12 Mb of free hard disk space.

>As far as the PPCP Macs running Windows NT, the programs still have to be compiled for that
>processor and not many companies are doing that right now.

They don't really have an excuse.  The MSDN Level II Development
Platform was (and maybe still is) shipping with a PowerPC compiler.
The same argument is true to an extent of the other non-Intel NT
architectures.  Once PPCP hits the shops the companies will compile
for it.

>If you want to run NT and UNIX, if
>you can afford it, buy a Digital Alpha computer.  You can get a patch to software compiled for the
>X86 platforms and they are the fastest processors made : )

I'd love to.  I just don't have the money :-)  Having said that, there
is a disadvantage to non-Intel NT boxes, which is that they cannot run
Intel 32-bit Windows programs.  16-bit ones, yes, but not 32-bit,
which is something of a limitation, if you can't find a version
compiled for your platform.