Some months back, in my compendium of on-line Microsoft humour (the one kicked off by the now-classic gag "press release" about Gates buying the Catholic Church), I mentioned the view, widely held on the Net, that the computer press is corrupt and in Microsoft's pocket -- and said that I disagree. I didn't elaborate at that time, but I will now. It's easy to see why so many feel that way: To users with broad computer experience, the press's obsession with even the most vapourous Microsoft products and initiatives has seemed ludicrous, for quite a few years. One leading example is the ongoing push for Windows NT, a slow, bloated, none-too-compatible product whose market share still remains minuscule, even after its much-ballyhooed, three-year-late introduction, several years ago. (When the initial versions rather stunningly flopped, magazines such as PC, PC World, InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, Byte, and so on showed only minor embarrassment over their protracted gushing, but then promptly forgot the experience, and resumed their drumbeat a year later.) Yet, when accused of favouritism, those magazines' writers and editors very heatedly and consistently deny the charge -- and cite copious evidence of their independence from advertisers. I believe them: As I see it, the truth is much less dramatic. Last year, there was an intriguing panel discussion on this very topic, at a meeting of the OS/2 Bay Area User Group. Quite a few of the most famous industry editors and writers were kind enough to participate. The main question was why OS/2 (like other non-MS operating systems) gets such disproportionately tiny, ill-informed coverage, and how this might be fixed. Several panelists gave the same answer: IBM simply needs to promote its offerings a great deal better. Now, sometimes I'm a little slow: At first, this struck me as a most peculiar answer. Why should the accuracy and fairness of InfoWorld's coverage depend on IBM's marketing? Isn't that a non sequitur? (Don't these magazines purport to research the facts, and then report them?) Well, so it seems, unless you consider how the computer press in fact works. Most of the magazines are run by overworked staffers on tight schedules. The central offices' computers are rarely sophisticated as to either hardware or software, and many of the feature pieces are by outside contractors of uneven quality. Given the constant demand for quick production, any text or other information from vendors (such as Microsoft) is a godsend -- particularly in a quickly-moving technical field where most reporters are writers first, and technologists second. Writers and editors are constantly plied with press releases, backgrounders, white papers, and pre-release samples. They're also whisked off to weekend-long "technology conferences", where vendors try to prime the PR pump by supplying them with prefabricated coverage in the form of press kits. (You can predict the press's party line about a month in advance, by following such events.) Microsoft is, of course, the master of press relations, making concentration on what it promotes the path of least resistance. That's a formidable advantage. In short, that wasn't a non-sequitur answer, because of the fact -- seldom discussed because it's an awkward truth -- that these reporters, even as capable as many of them are, really do very little reporting. Rather, they (mostly) reflect what they are fed. Nods are occasionally made towards "balance" -- usually in the form of printing two readers' letters with opposing views. The subtext is clear: If you want them to print fairer coverage, then make sure they're sent some. An uncharitable interpretation would be that the industry prints mostly regurgitated press releases -- biased in favour of whoever has the best PR machine -- because it's lazy, and doesn't care about the readers' interests. My view, though, is that this is all that the readers demand and care to pay for, so it's all they get. Most readers are so uncritical, these days, that they might not know the difference. [********SUBHEAD FOLLOWS********] Still Chewing the FAT Speaking of not knowing the difference, another piece of half-baked technology from Microsoft has just emerged: Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2. Contrary to misinformation conveyed at our July general meeting, this revised version is already shipping to OEM vendors (such as, say, Gateway 2000), and appearing on new computers as pre-loads. This is an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) upgrade only. Again, contrary to what we heard at the general meeting, there are no plans for its release to the general public.<^>1 It is available as an OEM preload, only (and should not be confused with the earlier small package of bug fixes, Service Pack 1). How do you know you have it? Open a DOS session (eek!), and type "ver /r". If MS-DOS 7 reports back the version as "4.00.950", it's regular Win95. If it says "4.00.1034", though, you have OEM SR2. So, what's the deal? It adds native support for removable IDE drives, high-capacity "flopical" disks, IDE busmastering, and a few multimedia extensions. There's a new (and less gargantuan) e-mail client, replacing Exchange, and some more-stable support for IRQ-sharing (gaackk!). Mostly, though, people will notice a new, incompatible disk format, "FAT32". FAT, as readers of this column may recall, is DOS's one and only disk format, a creaky invention copied bodily, 20 years ago, from the 160 KB (no-subdirectory<^>2) diskette format used by Digital Research's CP/M operating system. (Contrary to the claims of Microsoft's copious press releases, FAT was not invented by Bill Gates, nor by anyone else at Microsoft. This CP/M-clone format was acquired when Microsoft bought -- not invented -- DOS from Seattle Computer Company.) FAT is named for its primary feature, a File Allocation Table of 65,536 (2 to the 16th power) housekeeping entries that each keep track of a "cluster" (one allocation unit) of storage. At the time one formats a hard drive volume, DOS decides how big a "cluster" must be -- how many 512-byte "sectors" -- in order that the 65,536 available entries might span the entire volume. Now, this was a perfectly fine scheme back in the days of 160 KB diskettes with no subdirectories, but a horrid way to run, say, 2 GB hard drives. Each FAT entry has to figuratively wear seven-league boots, making DOS unable to allocate storage in dollups smaller than 32 KB on larger volume sizes, even if storing only a 1 KB file. The waste of storage can be incredible: up to 30% or more of total drive space. This was a glaring problem, but not the only one. FAT volumes rapidly fragment both files and directories, requiring use of utilities to disentangle them (a DOS-world fetish unknown on OSes with better-designed file systems, including Macs). The more fragmented they become, the more failure-prone data integrity measures such as un-erasure of files also become. Worse, performance is so bad that the OS has increasingly compensated for it using delayed-write caching, increasing the FAT's vulnerability to damage in case of power interruptions or crashes. With Windows 95, Microsoft said it had a "new format", called VFAT, promising all sorts of wonderful advances. On examination, though, it turned out to be just plain old FAT, with a kludged set of hidden regular directory entries stitched into it, to store long filename information -- which silently has the effect of worsening FAT's fragility and fragmentation problems. That brings us up to the present, with Win95 OEM SR2 and FAT32. What about it? First of all, the name is misleading. Contrary to Microsoft literature (and its reflections in PC, InfoWorld, etc.), it's not "32-bit" anything (a much-abused term that should be given a vacation): FAT32 uses 28-bit entries in its table, with a bigger boot record per volume, and new partition types in the partition table (thereby, by a curious coincidence, breaking OS/2's Boot Manager).<^>3 Also, the root directory becomes no longer fixed in size or location, there's space for sundry new data fields (free space per volume, etc.). The 28-bit FAT means there can be 2 to the 28th power or 268,435,456 entries in the FAT table (up from 65,536), which in turn means those entries can manage very small (even 512-byte) clusters, when you format even very large volumes. Smaller clusters make possible huge FAT volumes without cluster-related wastage, which is good, right? Well, yes and no. A tremendous number of very small clusters also means more overhead managing them all (including more RAM for in-memory copies of FATs, and it means greatly accelerated fragmentation. Further, Win95's somewhat hyperactive virtual-memory driver does cluster-based read-aheads on your hard drive (it reads a certain number of clusters past your present needs, in case adjoining data will be needed), so the swapper may become less efficient. (I haven't had time to test this.) However, as the old line goes, "But wait, there's more!" A fair cross-section of the following types of utilities are going to break completely, leaving you with the fun of re-buying them (if new versions become available): hard disk repair utilities, unerasers, anti-virus packages, disk compression (e.g., Stacker), tape backup, security programs (e.g., Norton DiskLock), uninstallers, games and other applications that use copy protection, defragmenters (!), and disk drivers (e.g., ASPIDISK.SYS). If you're lucky, the broken ones will merely crash. If not, they may start writing abstract designs atop your data. . . . . . . and all this for what? Even with the antique FAT/VFAT format that DOS/Windows users have endured until now, tolerable results have been possible with intelligent partitioning and occasional disk maintenance. This new thing brings only a small space savings over careful "FAT16" setups, at the cost of even worse performance, worse fragility, and a veritable junkyard of broken utility packages. Back when Win95 and its billion-dollar promotional campaign hit the streets, I remarked that it's a crying shame they didn't seize this golden opportunity to offer a real file system instead of FAT. The same goes double with OEM SR2. If you check the Microsoft PR Department's explanation (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pr/fat32.htm, with subsequent articles from InfoWorld et al. bobbing in Microsoft's wake, as usual), you'll see that they dismiss what is proclaimed to be the only alternative, WinNT's NTFS disk format, as unwieldy. However, as usual, they omit a more obvious option: the much better-performing HPFS format, to which Microsoft still has rights from the days of its partnership with IBM, and which works at blazing speeds in OS/2 2.0 and above. (It's also used on Novell NetWare servers to support -- ironically -- Windows 95 long filenames.) HPFS is fast, is damage-resistant, holds long filename information without ugly VFAT-type kludges, and self-defragments. Why didn't they support it? The reason may be that it'd be embarrassing to so openly adopt IBM's technology, instead of their own. Also, Microsoft seems to still be "accidentally" impairing interoperability with OS/2 at every turn: HPFS support will be dropped in the next version of NT, where it has until now served as a higher-performance alternative to FAT and NTFS on workstations<^>4 -- and there's also the aforementioned blow to OS/2 Boot Manager.<^>5 <^>1 <^>3FAT32 will not work with Boot Manager at all. This is a step beyond Microsoft's mere gratuitous deactivation of Boot Manager every time one runs the DOS 6.x, Win95, or NT installer. In the latter case, users quickly learned to simply re-install Boot Manager thereafter. This new step is more of a challenge. <^>4 <^>5I'm not sure why this is, but it may have something to do with two new type numbers Microsoft puts in the partition table (0B hex for regular FAT32, or 0C for FAT32 with LBA translation). Anyhow, for those wanting multiple boot partitions while waiting for IBM to compensate, there are alternatives: (1) FreeBSD's BootEasy will boot anything, and puts up a text screen with your choices selectable using function keys.