[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[ChrisQ]

On 08/23/12 01:15, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> Except you will get a block, and not a stream of bytes, when you read
> from a disk. If your "stream of bytes" supposedly were just 10 bytes,
> you would still get one block of bytes from the disk. The other 502
> bytes will also be something. You will then have to write a layer on top
> of the block nature of a disk to try and hide this truth.
>

Sigh, your still missing the point. If I do a file open and read from
unix, I get the whole file as a stream of bytes loaded into memory. The
underlying disk format is irrelevant. All that stuff is handled by the
files system and the underlying block size may be 512 or any other 
convenient
value. If the file size is not an integral block count in length, then the
last block is truncated before being returned to me. Thus, from a system
programming pov, the written or read data is a lowest common denominator
byte stream onto which you can impose a structured format.

No one thinks about disk blocks other than driver writers and yes, I do that
sort of work from time to time as well...

< snip irrelevant stuff about tapes and comms >

Regards,

Chris