German Court Invalidates Microsoft FAT Patent 192
walterbyrd sends this news from Techworld:
"A Microsoft storage patent that was used to get a sales ban on products from Google-owned Motorola Mobility in Germany has been invalidated by the German Federal Patent Court. Microsoft's FAT (File Allocation Table) patent, which concerns a 'common name space for long and short filenames' was invalidated on Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Federal Patent Court said in an email Friday. She could not give the exact reasons for the court's decision before the written judicial decision is released, which will take a few weeks."
What about FAT32 (Score:3)
Does this ruling cover FAT32 or just FAT16
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The monopoly commission should investigate exFAT...
It's not the best filesystem on offer, there are many much better filesystems which are more suitable for use on flash media, and which are available royalty free... The only reason anyone even considers exfat is because microsoft will intentionally never support anything else.
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--Just anecdotal evidence, but I've had data loss with FAT16/FAT32 on 4-16GB USB2 sticks. After reformatting to exFAT, haven't had any issues (yet?) with the same hardware. FYI (And it also works in Linux with FUSE, so there's that.)
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Just a guess, but it's part of the SDXC industry standard. (SDXC basically means exFAT and potentially different access speeds, but it usually comes down to exFAT + no guarantee that any given card will work in some device, even with reformating)
Re: What about FAT32 (Score:4, Informative)
But it has never been standardised by any commitee.
That's true only as long as you are willing to totally ignore the SD Association.
This is one of those cases where the industry is way ahead of the so called "standards" organizations.
The SD Association offers a formatter [sdcard.org] for SD/SDHC/SDXC cards but only for Windows and MAC. It may format a card in such a way that some devices can't use it.
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The SD Association offers a formatter [sdcard.org] for SD/SDHC/SDXC cards but only for Windows and MAC. It may format a card in such a way that some devices can't use it.
Do you know if the source code is available under a free and open source license?
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I posted a link. You could maybe start there.
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standardisation... committee... hmm... why are these two word in such close proximity to each other triggering my oxymoron detection algorithm?
Must be a glitch...
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Not certain buy I would guess FAT32 because of this 'common name space for long and short filenames' as FAT12 and FAT16 did not support LNFs. Hopefully and this what actually matters at this point it also covers exFAT
Re:What about FAT32 (Score:4, Informative)
As I understand it, exfat has been carefully designed to be rather patent laden, and rely on multiple patents - not just this one that is due to expire soon.
Re:What about FAT32 (Score:5, Interesting)
Every camera, phone and tablet manufacturer should use UDF to format flash cards. It's patent free and supported by all major operating systems. The only thing missing is write support in Windows XP, but it would cost Google pennies to write a free driver, compared to the billions they pay Microsoft for FAT patents.
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most likely MS would refuse to issue new patent licenses to any OEM supportung UDF
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I'd think it would violate the "ND" (non-discriminatory) part instead.
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No MS will not refuse it. It will include this in the patent license needed for a android phone.
It is suspected that MS receives 10 dollar/euro (not sure) for every sold android phone, in patent licenses.
However as part of the license it is sealed exactly what is licensed. So you cannot work arround this. And nobody is usre about this. And since fighting of a pantent is a long and expensive proces, most suppliers just pay, because is has the least risk, and most economic outcome. The FAT [swpat.org] patent is needed
Re: What about FAT32 (Score:2, Interesting)
Apples earns money with Android as well. HTC for example signed a license agreement with Apple and pays them several dollars per device.
Apple wanted to sign such an agreement with Samsung as well. Before all this litigation stuff. But Samsung refused. That's why they got sued.
In Soviet Russia, Phone compiles YOU! (Score:2)
There is a simple way around it. Sell some model of phones without firmware at all or with some primitive firmware with limited functionality but not covered with patents. And supply it with an URL of source code that you can compile yourself. If at least some of routers take this model (they use OpenWRT) and (in Russia - with FreeDOS) with computers - why it cannot be done with phones?
See also: http://neo900.org/#main [neo900.org]
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Oh yes it does.
If your device doesn't support SDXC + exfat - you can't call it SDXC on the sticker.
Windows will not format as other than exfat volumes >32G, without jumping through hoops - and automatically formatting non exfat volumes >32G as exfat is actually conforming to the spec.
Automatic data loss (Score:2)
automatically formatting non exfat volumes >32G as exfat is actually conforming to the spec.
Reformatting a card with data in a foreign file system causes data loss. Which section allows data loss without the user's confirmation to conform?
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No, it's not.
This situation deeply depresses me, the fact however remains - you cannot legitimately sell a SDXC compatible device without it supporting exfat.
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One of the points of a SD (or SDEX) card is that you can read it very simple in an other device. By formtitting it it in JFFS2 or YAFFS you cannot read/exchange the card in windows. Inconvinent, but technically possible.
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One of the points of a SD (or SDEX) card is that you can read it very simple in an other device. By formtitting it it in JFFS2 or YAFFS you cannot read/exchange the card in windows. Inconvinent, but technically possible.
Shouldn't that be considered a feature. Who wants their data to be infected by a windows device? I've formatted most of my sd cards that are not used in a camera or similar device to ext2 or ext3. To most ms-windows users, it would look like a bad card. I have no problem at all with tha
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It was rather common back in the Windows 9x days to still be using floppy disks, of which were formatted with FAT12. LFNs were fully supported on it too for this reason. :)
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iirc the vfat extension to fat16, was introduced with win95 and had lfn support, while still not being fat32. even-so, the patents should be close to death assuming 20 years (not really sure what the term is in germany. anyone? ). the eu patent was filed for in 5.10.1994 and relates to lfn support.
from wikipedia:
1977 (Stand-alone Disk BASIC-80)
FAT12: August 1980 (SCP QDOS)
FAT16: August 1984 (IBM PC DOS 3.0)
FAT16B: November 1987 (Compaq MS-DOS 3.31)
FAT16X: August 1995 (Windows 95)
FAT32/FAT32X: August 1996
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scratch that, VFAT was introduced with NT3.5 (September 21, 1994), so the patent was probably filed for in anticipation of the NT3.5 release.
from the same wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table [wikipedia.org]
OS/2 added long filename support to FAT using extended attributes (EA) before the introduction of VFAT; thus, VFAT long filenames are invisible to OS/2, and EA long filenames are invisible to Windows, therefore experienced users of both operating systems would have to manually rename t
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I inferred from the little doc-thingy, that the patent had to do with having both a long and a short file name for each file. I had thought (no real experience with non-ms platforms back then) that other operating systems at the time could already handle long file name support, but weren't as concerned with backwards compatibility as microsoft, diminishing the need to maintain a short file name for each file.
Even-so the ancient concept of abbreviating a name with a nickname or alias seems like prior art to
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It used a file called --linux-.--- in each directory. In a way, it was better backwards-compatible with FAT/MS-DOS than even VFAT was.
I did some disecting of how they worked a while ago expecting that I'd reimplement it with FUSE, which I never got down more than a couple trivial files (like the base-32 representation stuff...). I'll just put up the format notes on a Gist if anyone's interested :)
https://gist.github.com/chungy/7852622 [github.com]
Re:What about FAT32 (Score:5, Insightful)
It covers long filename support in FAT. Digital cameras that stored photos with 8.3 filenames were never affected by this patent regardless of which version of FAT they used.
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Wrong. Don't spout off on a subject about which you know nothing.
Well... there goes Microsofts Android ... (Score:5, Interesting)
There goes Microsofts Android extortion profits...
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Maybe this means that Android phones (non high end ones anyway, and especially Nexus ones) can go back to including SD card slots.
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There are lots of current Android phones with SD card slots.
Nexus devices don't have them because somebody at Google doesn't seem to like them.
High end devices of other companies sometimes don't have them because the manufacturer wants you to buy the model with 32 or 63 gig rather than the model with 16 gig and a cheap MicroSD card.
But the mid-level devices of the same manufacturers usually come with a CD card slot as they cut down the onboard flash memory to reduce the price.
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Nexus devices don't have them because somebody at Google doesn't seem to like them.
SD cards reduce your reliance on "the cloud". It's not surprising that Google doesn't like them.
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Well, they would just have to design it differently. I don't see a principal reason why it should not be possible for the card to be available to both at the same time.
Also, who says that the card must be directly available to the PC via UMS while inserted in the phone?
Simple soluti
Re:Well... there goes Microsofts Android ... (Score:4, Interesting)
MS gets FAT32 royalties from pretty much every device with SD cards. GPS devices, MP3 players, TVs, digital cameras, car audio etc.
Most "modern" Android devices don't have memory expansion slot (which sucks) and use ext4 internally. Most of the other MS patents taxing Android cover Exchange connectivity and that's unlikely to be invalidated soon.
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Why do we need MS filesystems at all? None of my USB sticks is FAT -- what a shitty filesystem.
And who the fuck is connecting to exchange? How about removing the exchange connectivity and offering that via a paid app?
Any other aspect of Android that Microsoft is fraudulently attempting to obtain patent taxes from?
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Because it is near-as-damn-it universally supported. You plug a FAT USB stick into any machine, whether it be Windows XP, Windows 8, Ubuntu, OSX, FreeBSD...you can be pretty sure it will work right out of the box. On a minority of niche systems which don't support FAT out of the box, you can be sure that a driver exists and is stable and easy to install.
Yes that's true of a few other file systems too (UDF I'm looking at you), but that's still the reason why FAT remains so popular over other common formats.
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Exchange is the de-facto standard for mail in companies with 1000+ employees (probably smaller companies as well), and compared to IMAP offers
* push email
* contacts (and calendar) sync via the same account
* enforcing corporate policies such as a requiring a device password and a maximum lock timeout.
Support for Exchange on Android and iPhone has provided a huge boost to the popularity of BYOD [wikipedia.org] and is one of the main reasons why Blackberry is now failing. Previously companies had to buy RIM servers and device
Re:Well... there goes Microsofts Android ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Some phones (Samsung for example) definatly support exFAT.
And thanks to the kernel source from Samsung, anyone who needs exFAT support can get it too (assuming your use of it isn't the sort of use that is likely to get Microsoft interested in suing you for patent violations that is)
Licensees should be able to recover their payments (Score:5, Interesting)
There should be a way to get a refund if you paid license fees for an invalid patent. Anyone have a guess as to how much money Microsoft has made off this patent?
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Re:Licensees should be able to recover their payme (Score:4, Insightful)
Patent validity shouldn't be random. The patent office should be examining them properly. If you start suing people over your patents you should be sure that you've checked prior art, etc. Many of them patents are obviously bogus but because there's no real penalty for extracting licensing fees for them patent trolling is a viable business.
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Sovereign immunity. You'll probably find the government has not waived immunity for the actions of the patent office, so you could not sue it.
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How is that worse? At least the plaintiffs have the ability to opt out of the mess, defendants do not. I would up the ante a bit more and require that the fees be paid back with interest and that if the holder should have known the patent was invalid they pay back triple.
When you go around shaking people down for money, you better be damned sure it is owed to you.
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Not only would it be difficult to overturn in court, it would also be embarrassing to admit they were snookered.
Re:Licensees should be able to recover their payme (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Was the product defective? Was something illegal done? Bernie Madoff's customers deserve restitution. Microsoft's do not. Whether or not the patent is valid, you pay to license the filesystem.
You would be right if modern patent licensing wasn't a legalized protection racket. The patent is invalid so there was never a product to begin with, only a bunch of men dressed in expensive suits telling you "that is a nice business you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it, either pay up or face years of curt battles with sales bans mixed in". The nearest thing to a product is the promise not to loose your business to a violent death.
Re:Licensees should be able to recover their payme (Score:4, Interesting)
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You would be right if modern patent licensing wasn't a legalized protection racket. The patent is invalid so there was never a product to begin with, only a bunch of men dressed in expensive suits telling you "that is a nice business you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it, either pay up or face years of curt battles with sales bans mixed in". The nearest thing to a product is the promise not to loose your business to a violent death.
I wish that were true. Typically, lawyers don't do "curt".
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Imagine you buy a new iPod. You get home and open the box and there's nothing inside but an artist's rendering of an iPod. That's what happened to anyone in Germany that licensed the 'patent' in TFA. I use quoted since apparently it wasn't actually a patent at all.
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True, but as a general rule you'll find that while there are certain rights that consumers cannot sign away in a contract, the same protections do not apply to B2B contracts.
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That is in general true. That doesn't alter the fact that the 'licensee' should be due a refund if the patent is ruled invalid, particularly in cases where there is a compulsive element to the original agreement (for example, if it is a settlement to avoid court or a court award).
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Yup. I was only addressing the statement that "contracts can't make any arbitrary thing binding" which is a bit less cut and dried when neither party to the contract is a consumer.
Expect Nexus phones to have SD cards... (Score:5, Interesting)
...that is at least in Germany. Google never wanted to pay any licensing fees. It's been Google's modus operandi for years.
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This ruling is valid across the whole of the EU. When local courts hear patent cases, they sit as European courts.
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That is nonsense, the ruling is only valid in germany.
To have a ruling over whole europe you need to appeal to a european court.
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And you're saying that this German court is not european?
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I'm saying that a ruling in a german court has no effect on the rest of the EU.
And, yes: I'm german.
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The German court is a European court when it hears patent cases, therefore the ruling does apply all over the EU. We don't have the same separation between State and Federal courts that they have in the USA.
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A german court is a court in germany. A european court is an EU court.
German rulings have no effect in any other european country. If that court in particular was an EU court, that happens to reside in germany, than you would be right. But as far as I understood it, that court was a simple german court, in other words its ruling is only valid in germany.
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Ah, I understand you now. You want to say a german court is in case of patents 'special' and rules as an EU court. :)
I was not aware of that.
Of course we have the seperation of national and EU courts. If you are right, then patent courts are an exception.
I will read up on that
Re:Expect Nexus phones to have SD cards... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that is what I am trying to say.
In terms of actual EU courts, we have the EU General Court, but that only has competence to hear cases against the EU itself. For example, if the European Patent Office refuses to grant your patent application, you can go there to appeal your decision, or if the EU competition authority thinks you are behaving in an anti-competitive manner, you will face trial in that court.
Most other cases involving EU law are heard in national courts, with the European Court of Justice as the final court of appeal. Generally speaking, judgements in national courts are binding only in that country, but persuasive elsewhere in the EU. ECJ judgements are binding in the whole of the EU. The exception is cases involving copyrights, patents, trademarks and registered designs (known as design patents in the US). For those cases, the national court sits as an EU court, and judgements are binding throughout the EU. Another exception is the EU small claims procedure, where consumers can take cases against suppliers in other EU countries in their local court, and the local court will work the the court local to the supplier to sort out the dispute. Small claims cases are not legally binding, but can be appealed to the European Court of Justice, who's judgements are legally binding.
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Interesting. Funny is, that this is obviously not made public in the EU. At least I never heard about this.
(And it is also hard to google for tis information).
Thanx again for your insightful information!
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I've heard of it (UK citizen), and I'm not exactly a legal expert.
Just because you've not heard of something, it doesn't mean it isn't public knowledge. Sometimes it's easy for smart people to forget that there are some things they just haven't learned yet :)
Re:Expect Nexus phones to have SD cards... (Score:4, Insightful)
Haha, you really think it was about patents and not about forcing users into uploading everything into Google cloud.
One-time vs. recurring fee (Score:5, Insightful)
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For what it's worth, my Google+/Drive/whatever apps all seem to have "sync only when on WifI" options (as far I remember). And my home Wifi is near enough "free" (in that I'd be paying for it anyway and don't pay extra to use it).
Not that I'm really arguing with you. I hate being forced to use "cloud services". Give me an SD card every time.
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To get my data to Google I have to pay for the electricity used by the phone. All my other costs are fixed so additional incremental use causes no further expenditure.
Where I have an issue is in getting access to the cloud storage anywhere that I might need it. My mobile network coverage is excellent, but it's not perfect.
Overages (Score:2)
To get my data to Google I have to pay for the electricity used by the phone. All my other costs are fixed
Your costs won't be so fixed once you start incurring overages on your data plan.
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Haha, you really think it was about patents and not about forcing users into uploading everything into Google cloud.
So thats why Android has had USB On The Go (OTG) in there since version 4, it works on my Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 (2013).
The reason why Google doesn't like SD slots is because SD slots are encumbered by patents Microsoft are continually trying to bash over their heads. If you want more storage on a Nexus device, use USB.
File formats? (Score:2)
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I thought file formats were not patentable anyway. And why hasn't this expired yet?
According to the article it expires next year.
Not useful (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the important requirements for a patentable invention is that it must be "useful".
This patent originally covered a way to provide compatibility between short and long file names. But nobody has used short file names in decades.
So now, the "feature" continues to be necessary only so that FAT can provide compatibility with itself. That's like begging the question. The feature no longer has any intrinsic usefulness, and in fact just serves to make the file system format more convoluted and less efficient.
The patent system ought to be changed so that any patent should be revoked once it is no longer useful for its intended purpose. This particular patent has recently been "useful" solely as a way to give Microsoft leverage in the media device market. The covered feature provides zero benefit to end users.
Network effect (Score:3)
But nobody has used short file names in decades.
In VFAT, the long file names are interleaved with the counterpart to inodes under UNIX. Each inode contains an 11-byte short file name, and these must be unique within a directory.
So now, the "feature" continues to be necessary only so that FAT can provide compatibility with itself. That's like begging the question.
It's to provide interoperability with the billions of other devices using FAT. How is a network effect [wikipedia.org] necessarily begging the question?
Re:Network effect (Score:4)
The network effect is similar to begging the question.
Something is popular because it's popular.
So how to break it? (Score:2)
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Sorry, but I'm unable to parse your question in its entirety, nor do I see how any of its fragments are relevant to the discussion.
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Sorry, but I'm unable to parse your question
Then let me rephrase: New features of FAT exist to provide interoperability with devices containing older implementations of FAT. To escape this network effect, one would have to forgo interoperability with these devices. But a lot of these devices that only speak FAT are critical to business operations, such as a digital camera used by an online merchant to prepare product photos for its website or for its eBay store. So how should one continue to do business while forgoing this interoperability?
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You wouldn't forego the interoperability. It's fine to continue using FAT.
I was simply saying that the patent system should be changed so that the patent on the short file name feature should have been revoked long ago (even if it had not been found to be obvious), due to the fact that nobody needs to interoperate with DOS machines any more, which was the original point of the invention. Having to use the patented feature so that FAT can interoperate with FAT is just a tautology that provides no benefit to
Re:Not useful (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but you describe a useful function. Whether it's relevant any more or not is neither here nor there. If I invent a way to make a clockwork mechanism work more efficiently, that's still an invention, still patentable. And, as Trevor Bayliss shows, still something that should be protected by patents even if it's "old hat".
The real crux of the matter is whether FAT is "obvious to one skilled in the art" which is a much, much, much more relevant and important test of patentability. Fact is, it pretty much is. If you're a filesystem designer and you're handed FAT and told to make it store long file names, FAT LFN's are pretty much one of a million ways to do them - and not even a particularly effective or perfect one.
Lacking such "inventiveness", and being just something that anyone with half a brain could come up with, AND being in a jurisdiction where software patents shouldn't be allowed by the EU courts anyway, that's what means it should be invalidated. By the same token, BTW, Trevor Bayliss would also fail. What he did wasn't invention, just quite a smart combination of two existing technologies. But at least it was a physical invention and not a way to get Linux-based vendors (e.g. TomTom) to pay Microsoft money for Windows-only inventions.
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Whether it's relevant any more or not is neither here nor there.
I was arguing that it should be.
If I invent a way to make a clockwork mechanism work more efficiently, that's still an invention, still patentable.
And it's useful to someone. People still buy mechanical timekeeping devices, often at a very high price premium.
Short file names aren't useful to anyone in this day and age.
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Short file names aren't useful to anyone in this day and age.
I would like to pretend that DOS is not still with us today, but that would be false. There's still people out there using short file names today. They're useful to someone. The test that FAT and VFAT should fail is obviousness. It's an obvious hack to stick the long file names in between the short file names. FAT itself is similar to other filesystems of its day, so it's obvious too.
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I would like to pretend that DOS is not still with us today, but that would be false. There's still people out there using short file names today. They're useful to someone.
Ok, so there are a few embedded industrial controllers still running DOS, and a few dorks running retro games in their moms' basements.
That doesn't mean that any of them are loading media files off of today's hardware gadgets into these relics. (In fact, a single one of these media files typically exceeds the entire addressable storage capacity of a DOS machine.) Yet Microsoft extracts royalties from the gadget manufacturers as if compatibility with short file names were an essential feature of the media li
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In the context of FAT file systems, "short file names" has a very specific technical meaning. It's a name of exactly 8.3 upper case ASCII letters which is baked into the file system format.
We're not talking about just using short strings for the arbitrary file names supported by modern file systems. Your data set wouldn't even begin to fit on an old DOS machine that only understands short FAT filenames.
Slow down there, cowboy. (Score:2)
Forget the Slashdot editor.
Does the Slashdot poster read to the end the stories he cites?
The expected appeal will be interesting because the same senate of the BPatG had previously invalidated it but the BGH then reversed that decision. A reversal may happen again. Despite my longstanding opposition to software patents I have to say, just to be realistic, that this patent is far from finished. Counsel for Microsoft argued today that a finding of nullity for a lack of technicity by the BPatG would be inconsistent with the aforementioned April 2010 ruling by the BGH, paragraphs 31 and 32 of which stated that the patented invention met the technicity criteria under Article 52 of the European Patent Convention, the article in European patent law that prohibits patents on computer programs "as such".
Maybe add warning for F*SSpatents' site? (Score:2)
It is rather incomprehensible that /. keeps on quoting F*SSpatents, even though it is known that this site is created by a well-known Microsoft/Oracle/anyone-else-who-cares-to-pay-him shill. There will be plenty of readers here who don't realise that everything written there should be taken with a ton of salt while half of what he writes is patently untrue or taken out of context in the first place.
Quoting F*SSpatents on patent issues is like quoting McDonalds on healthy eating habits or deBeers on the real
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Just don't mention the war!
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Mentionning the war to a German these days just gets you a major eye roll. They'll keep talking to you (especially if they have something to sell), but you'll be classified under the "dumb guy who can't understand it was three generations ago" category.
The Berlin wall came down a generation ago.
Maybe the US and UK have to grow up about being the winners of that WW2 thing.
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Would it help if I held my index finger under my nose and did the John Cleese walk... Because that's what most of the Germans I know will do when someone mentions the war. Partially because it's part of the Fawlty Towers sketch and because use of humour gets the whole thing out of the way.
Not that humour is well known German trait, but they can borrow a bit from across the channel.
Re: Pure money grab by the neo-Nazi regime. (Score:2)
It's all Americans at Oktoberfest anyway.
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