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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."
Embrace
---- You are here ----
Extend
Extinguish
(Thanks slashdot formatting-filter for making me sacrifice my ascii art skills.)
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.
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.
Are you serious? I wonder, have you ever heard of:
* The AARD code?
* OOXML?
* The Halloween documents?
* Embrace, extend and extinguish?
* Samizdat?
"Have some faith", you say? Indeed, to trust Microsoft to act ethically is a matter of faith: to believe in something incredible against all evidence.
Circumcision is child abuse.
What exactly is evil? Firstly, they haven't created a standard. If they had then surely they would have published the specifications somewhere. exFAT is a proprietry file format.
I don't know if they expect everyone to use it, although they may hope that everyone uses it.
Everything that wants to SDXC will have to use exFAT. It's part of that standard. This is going to be inconvenient for anyone who wants to use their shiny new camera/camcorder on a Mac or linux netbook or someone else's XP machine.
So after exFAT, they won't be able to do what they do today, that is, freely exchange their media among their devices at their will. That's evil, and once again, it comes from Microsoft.
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".
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
> Unless Microsoft somehow coerced the association to select exFAT
Of course they did.
Microsoft do not support third-party file system drivers. It's certainly possible to write them, but documentation is scarce, there are few tools available, and it's intended for use only in embedded systems. It's not possible to provide the same level of integration as the Microsoft-provided drivers, since none of the disk management tools are extensible by anyone but Microsoft. The IFS drivers themselves are far more complicated than filesystem drivers in any other operating system, since they have to implement functionality that is normally provided by the operating system's VFS layer, and that functionality isn't well documented. Basically, all existing third-party IFS drivers suck.
The SDXC committee needed the memory cards to be usable on Windows, ideally without installing any drivers, and without having to screw around to get it to work. NTFS is completely unsuitable for flash storage, and is far too complex to implement in an embedded device anyway (not that Microsoft actually license any part of NTFS out to third parties anyway).
That leaves UDF, which can not be used on anything but optical discs in Windows XP, FAT16, which can't be used for drives larger than 2GB, and FAT32. FAT32 can actually scale well into the terabyte range, but Windows will refuse to format a disk as FAT32 if it's larger than 32GB.
Microsoft's solution was exFAT. The selection of exFAT instead of FAT32 was forced by limitations on Windows' FAT32 support. These limitations were intentional - the idea was to get people to use NTFS instead of FAT32. The only party to benefit from this situation is Microsoft - they get to sell licenses for their (apparently) patented new filesystem, which they can't do with FAT32 (cameras never used the patented VFAT extensions). In addition, they get to kill off one of their own filesystems, which was being used as a common interchange filesystem between completely different systems, none of which needed to run Windows, or use any Microsoft technology.