Germany declares Microsoft's FAT patent not valid.

Could you possibly find a link to a similar article in english ?? I havent been able to turn up anything except stuff about US patent reviews.

On a sunny day (Thu, 01 Mar 2007 22:27:52 GMT) it happened "John Barrett" wrote in :

I suggest running it through babelfish online translation service. As it is a German decision, in a German court, and just made, it will likely take some time before other countries pick up on this.

"John Barrett" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:IrIFh.4094$Tg7.2560@trnddc03... | Could you possibly find a link to a similar article in english ?? I havent | been able to turn up anything except stuff about US patent reviews. |

What do you want to know exactly?

- Henry (native German speaker)

news:IrIFh.4094$Tg7.2560@trnddc03...

They speak real German in the Frankfurt area?

John Barrett wrote:

"Joerg" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news:Ss0Gh.11985$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr17.news.prodigy.net... | They speak real German in the Frankfurt area? | | < ducking for cover... >

At least we have applewoi.

- Henry

news:Ss0Gh.11985$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr17.news.prodigy.net...

And Federweisser. Boy did I have a hangover after that.

Much appreciated :) There didnt seem to be a link on the german language version to the english, and my goggling turned up nothing :)

I really dont see the problem -- most vendors sell their media unformatted to begin with -- let the end user do that with their already licensed (in most cases) operating system :)

Hard blow for linux though -- will have to yank fat32 support out of the core since MS is being a real ass about what amounts to an obsolete technology... must be hard up for cash for some reason :)

And that probably wont stop people from passing around the kernel patch and putting it right back in :) those that care anyway -- who moves data around on floppy any more ?? burn a rewritable CD and have done with it !!

Won't Wine run Doze apps off an ext3 or reiser FS?

(IOW, who needs MICRO$~1?)

Thanks, Rich

What ever happened to Germany's indictment of Rumsfeld for war crimes? Or did he weasel out of that by taking his golden parachute while the getting's good?

Thanks, Rich

FAT patent? Linux reads and writes FAT just fine, thank you. :-)

And any patent on anything as old as FAT would have to have expired by now.

Cheers! Rich

Fat32 and long filename support are Win98 technology -- and apparently what the patent fight is all about -- still has another 10 years or so to run :)

cameras, and the like, use it on their memnory cards.

floppies etc don't need a FAT format, 99.9% don't use FAT32 (the 0.1% being LS-120 floppies, and zip drives). regular floppies use FAT-12.

Bye. Jasen

FAT32 is just FAT12 with wider integers, there's nothing novel there, except the 2^24 cluster limit, that's a feature linux doesn't implement, it'll go all the way to 2^32 clusters AIUI.

VFAT (long filenames) is from win95, if microsoft is going to be awkward people will switch to something else.

Bye. Jasen

John Barrett wrote:

jasen wrote:

That's PART of the picture; floppies obviously *can* do LFN: http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:Rv57k5MKo7AJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table+zz+VFAT (The Heise article did a really lousy job on any details. The LFN thing was a BIG part of M$'s *newness* claim.)

It's (Windoze) also too stupid to complain about filenames with embedded blanks. I'm finding that a serious issue while I'm trying to organize a collection of about 9,000 files. (about 11GB.) =:-O

Thanks, Rich

Rich, Windows can handle filenames with blanks in it. As a parameter, the path will have to be enclosed in ""

Rene

That's OK - I fixed it:

#!/bin/bash

while export THISONE=`find . -type f -print | grep ' ' | head -1` ; do export NEWNAME=${THISONE// /_}

#echo "Renaming $THISONE to $NEWNAME..." mv -v "$THISONE" "$NEWNAME" done

# ;-)

(it's got the exports because I developed it a line at a time on the console.) :-)

Cheers! Rich

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:Rv57k5MKo7AJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table+zz+VFAT

I bet that if someone wanted to they could break the patent with even older Novell alternate namespace technology. It has been around since netware 2, which is before MSWindows 3.0; let alone Windows95 (OSR 2) where LFN was introduced. Perhaps Unix (TM) supported multiple names in the same namespace (directory structure) in something like NFS even earlier.

Reminds me, if the PTO compares introduction in commercial use with the patent application date the patent may be prima fascia invalid. After all the patent application dates run from 1992 to 1996 (or later).