Tie it to the American obesity epidemic.

Story: Microsoft's FAT patent upheldTotal Replies: 3
Author Content
cr

Jan 11, 2006
3:16 AM EDT
Maybe we can get some excessively-nourished people to dump boxes of XP or Vista in Boston Harbor, under the slogan of "Get rid of shameful American FAT!"
r_a_trip

Jan 11, 2006
7:37 AM EDT
Too bad that money prevailed again... If MS seeks to enforce its patents and wants to get royalties, this will mean that every consumer device using storage like digital photo cameras, USB-keys, MP3-players will no longer be legally attachable to GNU/Linux.

Since the (bigshot) companies can afford to pay a few pennies per device more, this simply means that MS has yet another weapon to throw back GNU/Linux. Consumer devices will not be adapted to run a different Open Filesystem. Electronics manufacturers won't do it, because it would mean the requirement to ship filesystem drivers for Windows again with every doohicky and we all know how Windows people react to configuring stuff themselves.

I know that USB-keys run fine with Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS. Problem with that is that they become unusable as a portable storage mechanism between GNU/Linux and Windows machines (I don't have to mention the fact that there are far more Win machines out there than GNU/Linux machines).
tadelste

Jan 11, 2006
2:07 PM EDT
I think that Microsoft should enforce it. Then lets see what happens. They don't have enough lawyers - what am I saying - not that many lawyers exist. They'll have to bring them in on work visas. They can do that.
Koriel

Jan 12, 2006
1:36 AM EDT
I have a Creative Zen 20gb MP3 player http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B000BLEW9I.02.LZZZZZZZ....

which i got from my lovely wife for Xmas, this nice piece of hardware came with a CD full of windows drivers and Creatives mediaplayer/ripper, now i'm going to make a general assumption here (i might be wrong but i doubt it) that other manufacturers do the same so why would shipping a device with say an additional say Ext2 driver be any different from the way it is now?

Now i can't speak for USB Flash devices as i don't have any but things like my USB bluetooth dongle, digital camera and such all came with driver disks so i really have a hard time believing that shipping a driver with a device is a hardship regardless of what the driver is for

A bit off topic but i was well impressed that this player has good linux support plugged it in and PCLinuxOs spotted it right away not a driver install to be seen, a quick install of Gnomad and Gnormalise which are supplied by PCLinuxOS as standard and i was ripping away like their was no tomorrow even the protected ones that Windows baulked at, don't ya just love the freedom of linux, i of course own the CD's in question.

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