No sorry… nothing about today’s Apple fan-boy event. More as to why I didn’t post much today.
Apple’s new OS version is 10.6, named “Snow Leopard.” Snow Leopard brought about a lot of under the hood changes to the OS. One of them is fairly well covered on this page of the Ars Technica review.
Basically, Apple did some stuff very very low level to help with reclaiming some disk space but also taking advantage of the volume format layout of HFS+ and how they can use that to their advantage to speed things up… RAM and CPU’s are wicked fast these days, and disk drives are still abysmally slow by comparison (physics can only go so far). So Apple did some neat things to improve speed and access times, and for the most part it works out great. Most people will never notice.
But in the line of work I do… I’m not most people.
The software I develop in my day job does a lot of working with the file system. So all of these changes that Apple made are actually wreaking havoc and hell on me right now. Long held maxims like a file’s logical size will never be larger than its physical size…. out the door. That calculating sizes is now base-10 instead of base-2 (i.e. 1 kilobyte is now being calculated as 1000 bytes instead of 1024 bytes)… changes a lot of things.
I’ve been reevaluating our entire codebase (which is huge) and this just doesn’t play well with us. All I can do at this point is formulate a lengthy email to Apple’s Developer Technical Support and ask for some help and guidance.
It’s been a trying couple of days.
I’m glad I have Kali class tonight. That should relieve a little stress. 🙂
Stuff From Hsoi 
The base-2 – to – base-10 conversion seemed like something that either should have been done at the very inception of computing, or not at all, and I figured programmers (like yourself) would appreciate that change least of all.
It would be nice if they released some massive “find all instances of file size declarations and reduce it by 1000/1024”, but even that would only fix a fraction of the problems.
Best of luck, though ;).
I can understand why it’s been done, because 1000 ≈ 1024. Back in the days when we only had hundreds of kilobytes of RAM and disk space, it wasn’t a big deal to estimate sizes that way. But now when things are gigabytes and terabytes, that “24” really starts to add up and greatly magnifies. And so, it starts to become a marketing issue.
What really burns me is instead of bringing people up, we’re dumbing things down. Instead of educating people and having people understand that a KB is 1024 bytes, we’re dumbing it down. People don’t get it… so, we assume the definition of the people that don’t get it.
*sigh*
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