New Website, dedicated to my 7-men tablebase generator

[hgm]

I have finally started working on coding my tablebase generator.

I already devoted part of my website to its description:

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/EGT7/7-men.html

[jshriver]

May I make a modest request that it be written somewhat platform independant so it can be used on Windows/Linux/BSD/Solaris whatever.

Either way thanks for your hard work, very anxious to see how it progresses

-Josh

[hgm]

I am sure it can be written in a platform-independent way, but not so sure if it can run efficiently under all platforms. I am not an OS expert, and can use most systems only with their standard settings. And my first experiments with disk I/O on Windows XP were that writing seems to be 8 ties slower than what I expect, based on the HD parameters (tranfer rate, seek time). Under Linux this problem did not seem to exist.

I know how to access a raw partition (bypassing the file-system layer of the OS) in Linux and other Unix-like systems (using the block-device files in /dev), but I have no idea how this could be done on other platforms. So there one might be restricted to using plain files, with an unpredictable amount of unnecessary overhead caused by the OS (like the factor 8 speed reduction caused by Windows XP).