[OT] What a fat lump of bloatedness

[Tim Watts]

Probably - though I noticed my cp was more agressive than VMWare's compacter.

The other thing is that cp requires you have enough space to make a copy of the file.

It's possible (but I have not checked) that VMWare or VB could make use of the relatively new linux feature (supported for ext4 and xfs filesystems) to punch holes in files - that is, if the utility determines a block is all zeros, it sends a special IOCTL to request the block be deallocated from the file, which leaves a sparse file.

For any non-unixy person:

A sparse file is simple one where the file has been created with a specific size, but not fully wirteen to. Any unwritten blocks are not allocated. Any attempt to read unallocated blocks returns a bunch of zeros. Simple, yet effective. Allocate-on-write as analogous to Copy-on-write.

[PeterC]

I read it with interest, fascination and some horror, when it was first written. My XP Pro SP3 had the key put in somewhere in the process (it was several years ago, so I can't remember the process) and the last time I installed it there was no request for the key. I remember doing the installation as econd time in case I'd missed something. It doesn't have OE or WMP in it.

I've another nLited vesion with IE taken out as well. When I get the tuits...

[John Rumm]

This trend to "HD" compatible resolutions of only 1080 tall is a bit of a pain IMHO. I wanted a new monitor a while back to sit beside an existing 4:3 1600x1200 resolution panel. There was only about 5 monitors that I could find at the time that did the 1200 vertical (which at the

1980 width makes them 16:10 rather than 16:9)

[Bob Eager]

Economy of scale making the panels, I guess.

[Gib Bogle]

I remember CP/M. One install diskette?

[John Rumm]

I was about to suggest that, but you beat me to it ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

If that.

It was only about 25K IIRC

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , John Rumm escribió:

Same here, but to replace a 4:3 1600x1200. Got a Samsung SyncMaster

2343 (2048x1152). Not quite 1200 but the extra horizontal pixels mean I can dock the taskbar at the right.

[Bob Eager]

UNIX was only three 2.4MB disks!

[The Natural Philosopher]

CP/M need 'at least 16K of RAM' which suggest it was even smaller than that. Sigh.

I remember running Unix on PDPs with 128k of RAM...

[Bob Eager]

But then it wasn't a fully fledged multi-tasking system.

We did too, back in 1975.

The smallest system I ran it on was a 28kW (56kB) PDP-11/20. But that was Mini-UNIX, since the 11/20 had no memory management.

I'm going to try Mini-UNIX on my 11/23, not to mention UNIX v6 on my

11/84.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oooh you do talk dirty. But I like it!

[Jules Richardson]

Depends on the release. The ones for the ol' Epson machine sitting on the desk next to me are around 200KB - but of course the core resident bit of the OS is far less than that (as it has to fit in 64KB of memory with plenty of room for apps)

cheers

Jules

[Jules Richardson]

Well, there was always OS-9 - that would fit comfortably on a single floppy and give a multi-user / multi-tasking environment.

[Tony Bryer]

I remember OS/2 2 - 36 diskettes IIRC. This would have been c.1992 when CDs weren't yet in common use.

[Huge]

The kinds of computers I was working on at the time didn't have diskette drives. Their software came on tape.

[Reentrant]

OS/2 1.0 was released in April 1987 - I don't remember it being that many diskettes.

You had to be careful installing it on a PS/2 Model 80 because the diskette eject button was very close to the power-off button.

Presumably it bloated later with Presentation Manager, but by then CD's were becoming more common.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Or MP/M - or concurrent CP/M .

If only IBM had picked that instead..

[John Rumm]

Coincidentally, I got the syncmaster 2443, which is 1920x1200

[John Rumm]

It had resident and transient parts. So the disk image was significantly larger than the memory footprint. The console command processor only had around 6 native commands IIRC, the rest were loaded on demand.