<quote who="Robert Collins">
> On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 10:56, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 05:38:33AM +1100, Kevin Waterson wrote:
> > > MS is set to begin charging a license fee for FAT file system
> > > FAT is used by camera manufacturers and more importantly is
> > > used on Compact Flash cards used by digital cameras.
> >
> > Don't know why. It's utterly shite for flash memory, since FAT keeps
> > hammering the same sections of the device, and flash has a limited number of
> > write cycles before it dies. JFFS2 is much nicer, I'm told.
>
> Because FAT is supported by windows, so the cards can be plugged into
> standard flash readers to extract the images - without needing to write
> a custom windows driver.
>
Also, there are thousands of devices out there which already do FAT - and
all the flash cards come preformatted that way. Having read the patents
referenced on the microsoft announce though, they all pertain to
long-filename support within FAT - and I don't know of any devices which
produce anything except 8.3 names, so I personally think it is unlikely that
the manufacturers need to change their behaviour. It does however have some
relevance to the vfat drivers within Linux - but I'll defer to people with
more legal knowledge as to what needs to happen there.
J.
--
Jan Schmidt [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<stibbons> Yeah. The whole climax thing would make much more sense
if I'd paid attention.
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