Microsoft Expands exFAT Multimedia Licensing 181
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."
I wish... (Score:2, Funny)
...I was exFAT.
EEE (Score:4, Funny)
Embrace
---- You are here ----
Extend
Extinguish
(Thanks slashdot formatting-filter for making me sacrifice my ascii art skills.)
Re:EEE (Score:5, Interesting)
EEE only applies to open standard Microsoft targets.
It also applies to Microsoft partners. The multi-media product manufacturers (including cameras, media players etc. etc.) will be the long term target. Right now their functionality is being extended with the aim of Microsoft getting lock in. Microsoft is already one of them (with it's Windows Mobile phones and XBox at least). Later, when they need to expand their market, they will wipe out the multi-media companies that have become locked in.
The thing is, and I know this from working in a potential victim company and discussing with the person who was negotiating with MS for media standards, that the extinguish is at least five years away. Almost nobody working in such a company cares about that far in the future.
Only companies, like Oracle, which decide to fight Microsoft from the beginning as hard as they can, will ever survive long term in such a market.
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It also applies to Microsoft partners. The multi-media product manufacturers (including cameras, media players etc. etc.) will be the long term target. Right now their functionality is being extended with the aim of Microsoft getting lock in. Microsoft is already one of them (with it's Windows Mobile phones
That's true, but outside the operating systems market Microsoft have found it very hard to achieve anything like the same amount of influence. Windows Mobile, for instance, just seems to get weaker and lose market share every year.
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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To be able to read it on almost every computer available? There's a benefit to that when you have removable media, you know.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
One step vs. three: convincing administrators (Score:2)
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Even if you need to transfer data from an ext3 file-system to an MS Windows machine you can always get software that can read th
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Here is a MS Windows ext2/3 reader if you don't believe me.
Does it run on a user account that is not a member of the Administrators group? And it appears to be read-only; am I going to have to carry a separate, smaller stick formatted in FAT32 for files that I want to copy to a Linux system?
We require software that can read ext3 file-systems. Here is a change request that is signed by the appropriate people to install the appropriate software
You mean a petition? Please. Do operators of PCs in public libraries, Internet cafes, and office break rooms actually read those?
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So, you want an installable file system. You mean like this?
Ext2 Installable File System For Windows [fs-driver.org]
I'm not sure why the GP referred to the sysinternals utility when there is a freeware installable filesystem driver available.
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So, you want an installable file system.
And privileges to install it. I don't find it likely that change requests to install Ext2 IFS on publicly available computers will be accepted more often than not.
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I've been thinking the same thing for a long time. FAT really does need to be replaced on removable media with something that is better (larger partition sizes, handles large files better, doesn't fragment). EXT2 or 3 would be good options. I can't believe that MacOS X doesn't have native EXT2/3 support though. And the drivers people have created for it are not the best, though I applaud the attempts.
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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 Un
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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WinFS? Really? :p
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NTFS is actually a very good FS. The performance isn't so bad for desktop usage at least, and I've hard far fewer problems with it over the years than with say ext2/ext3 from a corruption point of view. It's easier and more reliable to read on my Mac (or on Linux boxes) than ext2/ext3 is (I had to uninstall the OS X drivers due to issue they caused, and the Windows support is a joke). The only downside is that nobody seems to be able to create a driver with reliable write support.
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What don't you like about the algorithms used in NTFS?
I don't like that they're shrouded in a black box.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Open standard, tons of features, fast on flash media, broad adoption by existing operating systems and devices.
They should use it instead of inventing yet another file system with less features. And closed, too (so much for Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards).
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Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
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and to add insult to unjury, i think microsoft have already provided xp with a exfat patch that provides full read and write support...
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So where's the profit in that?
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UDF doesn't magically know what kind of storage it is used on, and there's nothing special in its design that makes it unsuitable for use on magnetic or solid state storage. In fact, it fares somewhat better on SSD than many other general-purpose filesystems, because it's originally designed for media that wears out quickly.
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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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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Wrong. You COULD use rock ridge -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Ridge [wikipedia.org] . Of course microsoft prefers to come up with its own thing.
Yes, or I could use the Apple extensions, or the Amiga version of Rock Ridge, or god knows what else...
We are talking about Windows here - perhaps I haven't been clear enough.
Non-Windows systems have never required Joliet, but Windows has, because all other solutions are technically inadequate for that OS. For that very reason, Joliet is technically inadequate on MacOS and UNIX-like systems, the Apple ISO-9660 extensions are inadequate on UNIX, etc, etc.
Now, if you want to propose a unified spec that would
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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.
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In what way is Rock Ridge "technically inadequate"?
Take a guess? Also, does it support Unicode?
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.
UDF (consumer-level) is plagued with incompatibilities, not just on computers.
UTF-8 (Score:3, Informative)
Also, does it support Unicode?
Anything that supports the full 8-bit range of code units supports Unicode in the UTF-8 encoding.
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Anything that supports the full 8-bit range of code units supports Unicode in the UTF-8 encoding.
In theory. In practice, when we speak of some format "supporting Unicode", what we mean is that either the format mandates UTF-8, or vast majority of implementations supporting this format read and write in UTF-8 by convention.
If you have a single application that writes in UTF-8, and everyone else is going to treat it as, say, Latin-1, then it's not really "support".
UTF-16 vs. autoSpaceLikeWord95 (Score:2)
Microsoft actually uses UCS-16LE as an on-disk and on-wire format (not just an in-memory format).
True, Microsoft has a hard-on for little-endian UTF-16. But at least this encoding is standard, and it's no problem as long as either
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In Windows the file system api is 16 bits, so the driver would translate the UTF-8 to the 16-bit filenames and no program could get it "wrong".
If an 8-bit api like on Unix is used, you are seriously wrong about the problems with programs treating UTF-8 as ISO8859-1. They will display gibberish, yes, but they will not destroy the UTF-8 when copying the files and will not misinterpret it (as all the bytes with the high bit set have no meaning to the file system apis). The only failure is in display. Claims th
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The best chance ext2 / ext3 / ext4 or any other fs has for multimedia storage is when the user doesn't even know or care what file system is being used. I wouldn't give a damn what fs a NAS / streaming devices is using so long as
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Why ext2? How about UDF [wikipedia.org]? I know it was originally intended for optical media, but it works quite well for non-optical media. I use it on a number of flash drives that I have that I want to use between Windows and Linux systems...
Latest in a long line of suck (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Latest in a long line of suck (Score:4, Interesting)
FAT looks like someone's half-baked science project.
Quite so. I remember writing an experimental filesystem for 3" (not 3 1/2") floppies on the Oric in 1982, making up my own concepts as I had no experience in the matter. It didn't really work but it wsa good learning. Then a couple years later I looked at the details of FAT and was surprised by how simple, similar and limited it actually was.
ext is on MSWindows but not widely known (Score:2)
Re:ext is on MSWindows but not widely known (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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MacDrive seems stable enough, although it isn't free in any sense of the word.
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Though it blue-screened almost constantly when I started using it, ext2fsd [ext2fsd.com] is pretty stable, these days.
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exFAT may be a patent encumbered extension to a lame filesystem, but the ext2 drivers for Windows are a lousy counter proposal.
Perhaps those specific drivers are. But the proposal of using ext2 makes perfect sense. It's open, unpatented, and already has free implementations. The only reason for manufacturers not to support it is fear of reprisal from Redmond.
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They have created an ext2 driver for windows.
Not everybody owns the PC that he uses. Can this driver be used by someone who does not have privileges to install programs (user outside the Administrators group) or to run executables from %USERPROFILE% or removable media (look up Software Restriction Policy on a search engine)? I'm thinking of a scenario involving a user at a public library, Internet cafe, or employer's break room. Linux has the same thing: user not in sudoers and /home mounted noexec respectively.
Just great... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [microsoft.com], "exFAT is relatively simple". Hello, antitrust regulators? Hello, patent office?
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Don't want to create a piece of hardware with support for exFAT? Use another memory format. No one is forcing you to use it.
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SD, the camera manufacturers are free to make cameras that support other formats.
But they won't, because Microsoft will use its privileged position as the sole controller of "security" updates for its desktop monopoly OS to automatically push this encumbered filesystem to the vast majority of computers in use. No camera or card maker could ever hope to surmount that barrier and install enough filesystem drivers to reach critical mass of general adoption.
Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly position OSes to generate royalties in the unrelated camera market. That looks like an antitrust v
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Camera makers are free to use whatever file format they like. If it was one unsupported by Windows, simply include a file system driver to be installed alongside the drivers and utilities that come with most cameras.
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Yeah, because nobody expects a file system to be part of an operating system!
That's not the problem. The problem is that this royalty-generating file system will be part of most cameras and other gadgets.
If it was one unsupported by Windows, simply include a file system driver to be installed alongside the drivers and utilities that come with most cameras.
Countless others on this story have pointed out why that is not practical. Installing a driver takes significant effort and administrative rights on the system. User will not go through this effort if Microsoft has already installed their proprietary driver through their unique back channel that nobody else has access to.
In theory, nobody is "holding a gun their head" keep people fr
Re:Just great... (Score:5, Informative)
It's still a FAT variant, which means that seeking in a file is an O(n) operation (it's O(log(n)) on most systems) in terms of the size of the file. They've added a free space bitmap, but creating and appending to a file is still O(n) in terms of the size of the disk, just with a smaller constant. Both the FAT and the free space bitmap need to be kept in RAM for reasonable performance. The FAT size depends on the disk size and the configuration, but a typical 32GB memory card will need 32MB for the FAT. This is a lot of memory for a mobile device. Something like the N900 has 32GB of Flash and only 256MB of RAM. You're using an eighth of the RAM just for the FAT. More if you add another memory card, and that's not counting the free space bitmap (also needs to be in RAM, but is quite a bit smaller), ACL or file caches or any other driver overhead.
Oh, and the FAT itself needs to have individual words updated in a large contiguous section, which is about the slowest operation possible for Flash. They could improve this by using -1 instead of 0 to indicate free sectors: then allocating a sector would not require erasing a flash sector, but deallocating would.
You are breaking the DMCA ;) (Score:2)
You know, MS (and various closed source) things come with "You may not disassemble the product". I am trying to show what is wrong with using a frankestein filesystem which should be ditched the _day_ floppy diskettes were over.
What a sad thing that Linux, BSD and even Apple couldn't convince these SD card idiots even after the Tomtom wake up call. If it is the popularity, iPhone/iPod uses HFS+ journaled for years with gigantic files in them. Near all "media device" powered by Linux runs some sort of ext2/3
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BTW, am I reading wrong or Nokia still uses God damn FAT in a Linux powered device?
Only on removable flash cards. They use JFFS2 on the internal flash drives for Maemo devices, but FAT for removable media: people complain when they pull the flash card from their device and can't read it on a Mac or Windows PC (or even a FreeBSD machine if it uses JFFS2; it's Linux-only). The same with the phones. I transfer small files to and from my phone with Bluetooth, but it's much faster to just pop the card out and pop it in a card reader for large files. If it used JFFS2 (or ext2fs) then I woul
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Irrelevant for SDXC, though. I can't see that seeking.
No it isn't. You need to read n entries in the fat to seek within a file. I'm talking about algorithmic efficiency of the data structures used, not about mechanical motion within a drive.
SDHC readers (Score:2)
I can't read SDHC cards on any Windows PC I can find. I have one of those cheap USB readers. It used to work, then it stopped - I have no idea what changed. It's not hardware, because Linux machines will read it just fine. Yes, the card is >4GB, but as I said, Linux can read it, so this is not a hardware problem. Does anyone out there know how to fix this?
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Can't be sure, but the filesystem & partition driver for windows USB devices is sometimes very temperamental. Generally both the partition table and the filesystem must exactly match what windows expects.
If you're feeling brave you could try a complete wipe of the SD card partition table and all.
ie: "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc"
Then reformat it under windows.
I would make sure I keep a copy of the existing partition table and filesystem though.
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And for those in Linux that want exFAT support according to the wiki [wikipedia.org] an opensource experimental driver is in the works, or you can purchase a proprietary driver derived from licensed MSFT source code from Tuxera.
The sad thing is, that exFAT is being patented. That means that Linux users will either have to be lucky enough to live in that shrinking part of the world where software patents are not allowed, or consult their lawyer before connecting their camera to their computer.
Oh well, at least the patent submission appears to contains a copy of the exFAT specification, so reverse engineering the format won't be that hard.
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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
"The technology" (Score:2)
"The technology is available on Windows 7, Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Embedded CE".
I find this as technological as a fork or a pencil are "a technology". Why do trivial things so often get called "the technology"?
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FAT patent expiry (Score:2)
Hey Bill ... err ... Steve ... just make it free (Score:2)
... and they will come!
No Mac? No, thanks. (Score:2)
Seriously, until and unless there's (at a minimum) royalty-free supported drivers for non-Microsoft and pre-Vista (not just XP, I use 98 in some situations) operating systems, I don't see this going anywhere.
MTP (Score:2)
And if its a device that plugs into a PC, why not use MTP? After all, MTP is fairly decent these days and it means that USB stick, or media player or whatever you plug into your computer (of any kind), can implement any fs its little heart desires. It doesn't matter because i
sharing of audio and video files (Score:2)
We all know it's nice to share, or that is the way I was raised, but the last time I checked that kind of activity could land your ass in JAIL.
Kinda of a mix message, No?
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You are just part of a bunch of folks who are apprehensive about whatever Microsoft does...even in good faith.
I do not want to come across as judgmental but I am sorry you just seem to be. Why do you always look at Microsoft will "all" the disdain? Why?
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.
Re:I smell DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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*Takes sunglasses off, a la Caruso*
It's time to
Yeeeeeaaaaahhh!!!!!!!!!!
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I must say that you really
*puts on sunglasses*
butchered this one.
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They stand to be a victim of this nonsense too.
In order to interact with the "monopoly product" everyone gets on board with a
vendor-lock storage solution that gives Microsoft the excuse to sue anyone else
that "dares to be compatible". The Monopolist represents the single largest group
of customers, so all the other 3rd parties gladly go along since it appears to be
in their immediate best interests.
This BS has been going on since it was MS-DOS vs. Macintosh.
Microsoft and Making Money (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Microsoft and Making Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Creating a standard, expecting everyone to use it, then charging a license fee for it is _evil_.
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. If it is a sin to hope that your product is popular, then most of the companies in the world are going to hell.
Finally, why is charging a license fee for something evil? If you don't want to pay to use it, then don't use it. That is the same argument as saying if you don't want people to see your source code, don't incorporate GPL code into it.
Re:Microsoft and Making Money (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Everything that wants to SDXC will have to use exFAT. It's part of that standard.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't SDXC defined by SD Association [sdcard.org], not by Microsoft. Microsoft is one member of the association, I give you that, but there are several others as well. Unless Microsoft somehow coerced the association to select exFAT, I consider this to be a bad move by the association rather than Microsoft.
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Unless Microsoft somehow coerced the association to select exFAT, I consider this to be a bad move by the association rather than Microsoft.
That may be. It has the same net result though.
Re:Microsoft and Making Money (Score:4, Interesting)
> 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.
Re:Microsoft and Making Money (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking of the intentional FAT32 limitations...
Try formatting a drive bigger than 32GB with fat32 on win2k, win98, linux or macos, it works fine..
With XP they crippled that functionality for no other reason than to force people to use the more proprietary ntfs.
Bad excuse. (Score:2)
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. {...} That leaves UDF, which can not be used on anything but optical discs in Windows XP, {...} 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.
Well, exFAT isn't supported out-of-the-box in Windows XP either. And if you're going to accept exFAT, then you accept a system which only supported out-of-the-box in modern versions and requires an update installation on older versions.
- UDF pretty much follows the exact same description. Its works in read-write mode on modern Windowses. And under XP it requires a (3rd party) update to get write capability: It's even better than exFAT given the fact that, prior installation, at least WinXP has read capabili
Re:Microsoft and Making Money (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Since exFAT apparently is referenced in the SD standard, people will be forced to use it, if they buy any consumer electronic device containing an SD slot. They can't choose not to use it. It's a hardware standard.
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.
Is there any reason why you can't use UDF on flash media? It's designed for media that wears out with too many writes, so it seems like a perfect fit. And recent (since ~2000) versions support Unicode, so you can use Tengwar Sindarin for your file names.
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Yes, exFAT is part of the new SD specifications. So is FAT32.
What's really interesting about the exFAT specification is the terms of the license it's under (at least through the SD Association)
If you need access to the standard so you can build a device (or program) that will only need to understand the contents of the filesystem when it's accessed in a read-only manner, you don't actually have to pay a licensing fee. So, an MP3/4 player won't need a paid license for exFAT. It's only if the device needs to
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You don't have to understand the filesystem to be able to write data to it, as long as something else is telling you where to put the bytes.
So, for example, an SD-Card reader doesn't have to have a paid license because the card reader doesn't have to understand the filesystem. All it has to know about is reading and writing blocks. The OS has to know how exFAT works if that's the filesystem on the media.
Re: (Score:2)
The others (Score:2)
Are you telling me that it's impossible for me to format an SD card in something else than exFAT ?
No. But the future SDXC cards will be sold pre-formated on exFAT (instead of FAT32), and the "erase card" options of future SDXC-compatible cameras is going to use it by default too.
Thus, although you, as a knowledgeable geek, will probably manually format your SD media using FAT32 (for anything that goes in digital cameras) and UDF (for anything which only goes into Linux, Mac OS X and numerous Multimedia Players / Harddisk enclosures and media centers (of which, lots happen to run Linux too) ), most of th
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it's because everytime I come near a machine running windows, I lose around half of my nerves from all the
-EULAs,
-"Yes, please send all my personal data to Microsoft and/or McAffee, Delle, Evilcporp"-checkboxes,
-"YOU ARE A THIEF UNLESS YOU PROVE OTHERWISE"-'advantage'-dialogs,
-"Logging off"-Screens that stay on for 10 minutes before the computer shuts down
-"There are important updates", "there are more updates, "are you sure you want to do this", "I have a message" "ballons"
-"No you can't connect more t
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I smell DRM (Score:5, Informative)
Are you serious? I wonder, have you ever heard of:
* The AARD code? [wikipedia.org]
* OOXML? [wikipedia.org]
* The Halloween documents? [catb.org]
* Embrace, extend and extinguish? [wikipedia.org]
* Samizdat? [wikipedia.org]
"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.
Re: (Score:2)
You left out DOS Ain't Done Till Lotus Won't Run [waronsanity.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I smell DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
...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
Re:I smell DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 wid
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, NTFS is Microsoft's crown jewel file system, and based on my own benchmarking, and gut feel, I think EXT3 is faster
There's more to it than just speed (and I've seen benchmarks go either way between ext3 and NTFS). Have a look at the feature matrix [wikipedia.org], as well.