Cookies, privacy, mIm

[Thomas Dowling]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib at library.berkeley.edu
> [mailto:web4lib at library.berkeley.edu]On Behalf Of James Klock
> Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 1998 3:50 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: Re: Cookies, privacy, mIm
>
>
> >At 08:39 AM 6/9/98 -0700, James Klock wrote:
> >>Surely you mean 32 bytes (not Kilobytes, or just over three orders of
> >>magnitude larger).  And the last I checked, my cookies (per Netscape
> >>3.x/4.x) are all kept in a single file (cookies.txt).
> To which Bob Cherry responded:
> >No, each cluster is 32,768 Bytes!!  Not just 32 bytes!
>
> Yeowch!  How obscenely huge!  I'm using NTFS on my own machine, with
> default allocation units of 512 bytes (it's probably customizable, but I
> haven't bothered to find out...) so I hadn't ever bothered to
> look into the
> block size that 95's FAT defaults to.


The FAT16 file system has a 32k cluster size only for disk partitions
between 1GB and 2GB.  A smaller partition will have smaller cluster sizes
and accordingly less waste; that's one reason why a new machines with 4GB
drives sometimes come with, for example, an 800MB C: partition, a 1.2GB D:
partition, and a 2GB E: partition.  The C: drive in this configuration
only has a 16k cluster size.

It certainly bears pointing out that Win95 OSR1--the factory installed
version for about the last year--uses FAT32, as does Win98.  FAT32 uses a
4k cluster size for partitions up to 8GB.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu