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Microsoft aiming IBM-scale patent program at Linux? (Register)Microsoft aiming IBM-scale patent program at Linux? (Register)Posted Dec 8, 2003 16:47 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104)In reply to: Microsoft aiming IBM-scale patent program at Linux? (Register) by stumbles Parent article: Microsoft aiming IBM-scale patent program at Linux? (Register) It doesn't matter if such driver exists or not. Users of digital cameras expect that they connect the camera to the PC and the contents of the flash card is shown as a drive. They don't have to install any software now. Installing software on Windows is still a barrier for many users, and the manufacturers of digital cameras and other devices don't want to lose those users. Another filesystem supported by Windows is iso9660 (used on CD). NTFS is not supported by Windows 98 and Windows ME. But I'm not sure it will work out-of-box like FAT on non-CD devices, and it's working out-of-box that matters here.
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Microsoft aiming IBM-scale patent program at Linux? (Register) Posted Dec 8, 2003 18:08 UTC (Mon) by yohahn (subscriber, #4107) [Link] Actually, how many of these devices use long filenames. If what I have read elsewhere is correct, all of microsoft's patents have to do with storing both a long filename and a short filename for each file. Why not just create a FAT compatible system which does not do this? In place of each long name (or each short name) put nothing.Not ideal, but would mostly work. (N.B. I have not read the patents and even if I did, I'm not a patent lawyer, so I really have no idea if this would cya or not. It SEEMS to me that it would)
Microsoft aiming IBM-scale patent program at Linux? (Register) Posted Dec 8, 2003 19:19 UTC (Mon) by pjs (guest, #10927) [Link] The 32 byte FAT directory entries that are used to store the long filename do NOT store critically important information about the file, specifically the starting cluster, size, attribute bits, and modification time. So, it is quite easy to have only short 8.3 filenames, but there really is no option to have long filenames without their 8.3 counterparts.... at least within the scope of FAT, which is implemented in every almost operating system and countless portable devices.
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