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Microsoft Expands exFAT Multimedia Licensing
alphadogg writes "Microsoft Thursday announced a broadening of its licensing program around its exFAT file system, which is designed to handle large multimedia files. Microsoft hopes companies making devices such as cameras and smartphones will adopt the Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology to support the sharing of audio and video files. The technology is available on Windows 7, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Embedded CE."
To be able to read it on almost every computer available? There's a benefit to that when you have removable media, you know.
-Bucky
You'll need to develop and install a driver anyway, why not take an existing one that's unencumbered?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
simple, the only non-microsoft formats that windows supports out of the box are cd and dvd media.
i wonder how long it will take before microsoft gets a slap on the wrist over this...
new microsoft, same as old microsoft...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Why do you always look at Microsoft will "all" the disdain?
Experience.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ... umm... you won't get fooled again.
Snide comments aside, it's simply that it's been too many times the case. Of course MS is in the business to make money. But to that end, vendor lock-in is one of the golden tickets to cash cows. If you can monopolize, you can charge whatever you want and nobody can undercut you. You can dictate price, conditions and format, what your user may or may not do with your tools and so on.
Yes, MS is in the business to make money. And doing what we "accuse" them to do is the easiest, most profitable and most sustainable way. So I guess we might be correct?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Microsoft is in the business of making money and licensing of its wares is just part of the game.
Creating a software product and selling it is fair enough. Creating a standard, expecting everyone to use it, then charging a license fee for it is _evil_.
That's like the power company deciding to sell you power. Then charging you license fees for installing power sockets in your home that conform to the standard.
FAT looks like someone's half-baked science project. FAT32 and exFAT (aka FAT64) just take the same mistakes and repeat them.
The fact that FAT32 is widely available is irrelevant; everyone will still have to install drivers.
So, yes, there's a demand for a simple (needing little CPU and RAM) filesystem. There's even an argument to be made that it should honor the same overall contracts that FAT does so that device manufacturers don't have to put lots of extra logic in. But it does *not* need to be the spawn of FAT.
So a mediocre but patent encumbered technology gets adopted as a standard because it runs out of the box on Windows. As Microsoft itself puts it, "exFAT is relatively simple". Hello, antitrust regulators? Hello, patent office?
Almost every computer available? Hardly. From the article: "The technology is available on Windows 7, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Embedded CE". That's it. The Win 98, 2000, and XP systems you'll find in the wild won't support it. Some of the older systems (ie, XP) can be patched with an update from Microsoft, but are you going to carry a second removable media device with FAT16 or FAT32 around with you and install this patch everywhere you go? And bring XP or later as well for those machines running 98/NT4/2K? I don't believe there's Apple support either, and Linux support is still experimental.
I haven't seen the spec for exFAT (I'm not paying some fee to see a spec for some microsoft cruft), but I imagine it's another vendor-lockin, poor-performance-substitute abomination like NTFS was, or WinFS will be.
That driver has a serious user-unfriendly limitation: No support for inodes larger than 128 bytes.
This means Linux users can't use GUI tools to format a USB stick (or a harddisk partition for sharing files with Windows) - they must use the command line and figure out how to persuade mkfs.ext2 not to default to 256 byte inodes. And this probably after learning of this limitation the hard way. Easy enough for you and me, but definitely not user friendly.
Also, this still leaves Windows users unable to format as ext2. A crashy driver is not enough.
That brings me to the third problem: I have yet to see a stable IFS (Installable FileSystem) driver for Windows. In my experience, perfectly stable Windows installations start crashing when an IFS driver is installed and in use. I suspect this part of Windows needs more debugging, or the API needs to be better documented, or both.
exFAT may be a patent encumbered extension to a lame filesystem, but the ext2 drivers for Windows are a lousy counter proposal.
Well, the CD-ROM standard they support is "Joliet". Which is their own extension.... I wonder how long until they are going with patents after others implementing it.
ISO-9660 doesn't support Unicode. Believe it or not, some languages use characters that aren't part of ASCII.
ISO-9660 doesn't support lower case letters, spaces and multiple dots in file/directory names.
There's nothing wrong with naming a directory "Family Photos 25.12.2009." - if Joliet didn't exist, we'd have to burn that to CD as "FAMILYPHOTOS25122009".
People won't be able to do without exFAT, because (if, and when, the standard gets adopted) it will be the file system used by consumer electronics devices. Which won't likely support more than one file system, so there will be no choice.
The beauty of digital storage for media is the freedom for the user to access his data in every way he sees fit. Closed standards for *personal* media storage are a step in the opposite direction.
...Microsoft is in the business of making money...
No, that is a secondary goal. The first priority for Microsoft is control, technology ownership and monopolization. Even at a financial loss.
See IE, XBOX, dotnet, Silverlight, etc, etc
)9TSS
Non-Windows systems have never required Joliet, but Windows has, because all other solutions are technically inadequate for that OS.
In what way is Rock Ridge "technically inadequate"? For that matter, why not just use UDF? It's designed for all optical media, not just DVDs, and has supported Unicode for almost a decade.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Microsoft is in the business of making money and licensing of its wares is just part of the game. What's wrong with that? Did you want Microsoft to go the Linux way and "donate" the software for "free?"
Get a life...Have some faith.
Well, what is wrong in the customers resisting the profit motivated actions of their vendors? Customers have as much right to protect their money as does Microsoft have for making their profits.
Some actions of the vendors, including Microsoft, enhances the productivity and competitiveness of their customers. Rightfully the vendors, including Microsoft, are entitled to a share of the extra profits generated. But some other actions by the vendor, does not enhance the productivity or competitiveness of their clients, and the customer would be better served by switching to a competitor of the current vendor. Actions by the current vendor that prevents this switch by vendor lock would hamper the clients from employing their money, maximizing their profits etc. And we have as much right to highlight to potential long term danger and make everyone aware of it.
Why is Microsoft and its apologists are so against people making informed decisions? Vendor lock is real. Companies are hurting from it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I can't believe that MacOS X doesn't have native EXT2/3 support
Blame the GPL license. Most of OS X is under a BSD-style license. Is there even a BSD-licensed EXT2/3 implementation?
There is a pre-built version that you can download and install yourself, however.
Also, the only people who need it are the 2% who use Linux. 2% of 5% isn't much, especially when OS X users have much less need to keep Linux around than Windows users.
And we OS X users already have a very nice filesystem, thank you very much. Apple did add an amazing number of hacks to it so that it can do Unix-y things like inodes and hard links, but it works very well. It can even be made case sensitive should we ever want to compile Linux. (A million curses on whoever required case sensitive filenames in the netfilter code.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Your point illustrates exactly why microsoft having so much influence over the industry is such a bad thing, and why many people despise the way microsoft do business...
Because of their size and influence, the world will end up stuck with the inferior exfat filesystem regardless of what else is available or how superior it is... MS will achieve this by ensuring their widely used os simply doesn't support anything else out of the box, making exfat the only option for many... This is also how fat32 got so widespread, despite also being total garbage.
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