In case you haven't read it yet, The Reg posted this article today: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/11/microsoft_wins_patent_case/
"Microsoft wins FAT patent case" I'm not sure how this will play out. Do we have anyone in the group who knows what this article is referring to exactly? My first interpretation was FAT filesystem; to which I figured "big deal, we have EXT2 and 3, Rieser and others". I was thinking that okay if we can't deal with FAT16/32, NTFS or whatever MS filesystem is out there that it would be inconvenient but not disastrous. Hell even USB keydrives and their ilk use some variation of these filesystems. That's not to say they couldn't be reformatted to something Linux-friendly but then they would be unreadable in a Windows system. The more I thought about it, I am not sure it has completely to do with filesystem at all but rather the way that files are written to a particular media hence the name File Allocation Table. Perhaps every filesystem uses FAT. I don't know, can anyone clarify? If this is the case then we could be in very big trouble. I'm sure we could come up with something but it would require some friendly ties with storage hardware vendors. Nope, I don't like not knowing how much this could affect you and me. This could be one of those nasty things that MS's nasty FUDslingers (TM) could have a day with. I'd like facts please. -- Jarrod Major Registered Linux User: #224211 GPG Fingerprint: 4556 EFA8 EC69 7C54 EE33 C881 2C7C 0E10 2439 231E _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
