Kevin -
I see some subtle, but helpful advances, one being the FAT32 allowing for large capacity drives, and small (512Byte) clusters.
While this is better than the way it used to be, it's hardly innovative, advanced, or anything but a halfhearted (copied) bag on the side of the original FAT FS. IDE drives still have to pretend they're smaller than they are. I remember when I believed the manf. label on top once, while writing a IDE device driver, and skipped the heads right off the platter.
I tend to overlook the MMX channel, since it has been 'out' for a while, but that is really kind of a 'good' enhancement.
Only because their FPU wasn't doing anything anyway. Adding media extensions was a good idea, though. AFAIK, it didn't have anything to do with MSFT.
I think that as the hardware reaches out, it is harder and harder to make the kind of significant increases that 'we' might be looking for.
Naaah, just live on the edge a little! Journaled filesystems, implemented with something like inodes. Get rid of that silly 66Mhz bus. Implement really ansynch. i/o. There's lots that could be done, but much of it would require stepping away from the current cash cow paradigm, so it wouldn't likely happen. Too bad.
Interesting idea about the disk i/o. I'll think about it and we'll talk some more later, after I think about how it could be implemented.
-justinb |
