News Microsoft waves goodbye to FAT with exFAT deals

Another move to make Microsoft a more walled in Apple like eco system. I don't like it.

 

Fat is 35 years old and is a broken piece of crap that nobody uses on there pc anymore anyway.

NTFS has largely replaced all FAT systems in business, Windows 7 does not even offer the option of formating the drive as FAT last i checked.

The only software this will effect is linux which is likely to be left out in the cold.

 

exFAT cannot be supported under Android, at least not as a kernel mode driver. It would have to be released under the GPL.

OSR2 is short for "OEM Service Release", by the way.

 

And any hardware manufacturers who do not wish to licence the new fat from MS...

 

sooo linux which is likely to be left out in the cold i guess. ;P

 

I realise that was tongue in cheek but I'll continue any way .

Computers are not the only places you'll find FAT, anything with internal storage will most likely be running a FAT file system. So your camera, your television, web streaming blu-ray the list goes on.

A free, (relatively) reliable and most importantly ubiquitous file system makes life much simpler for all us geeks not just Linux users .

 

The fact that this filesystem is proprietary makes this decision seem like more of a money making thing rather than 'fixing' an old filesystem. If they truly wanted to 'fix' it they would make it open like FAT.

 

I really hope to see a new file format in my next smartphone in early 2013, because I am one of those few people that can actually go over 4GB in a single file (I have a 12GB 1080p movie) and at the moment it is annoying when you have to find ways in which you can divide those files yet still use them on your devices

PS: I know some people would think it is not really needed having a movie displayed in 1080p on a mobile device, but when I shrunk it down to my device resolution of 800x480, you could see that the film looked horrid, yet, when I divided the file and watched it in 1080p, it looked amazing... just a shame about the pauses you get when watching the film and half way through it goes to the next file...

And yes I do know that you can format the sdcard to ntfs on some android devices & it'll work with a few mods, but I can't risk bricking my phone.

 

Is it really that hard to get along and just come up with one standard file format across all OSs? Or at least one common file format for removable media?

I like me some Windows, but seriously, it is annoying as hell when I have my external HDD along and want to transfer a whack of files to my cousin at the holidays....and since he has a Mac Book Pro...no go, as it refuses too with the NTFS formating on the 640GB external drive. So then I am stuck slapping the images on a thumb drive and transfering them in 2 or 3 steps because the only way they can talk to each other is through FAT32 (at least storage to storage).

Sigh. I really hope exFAT doesn't become standardized and leave people out in the cold. I am not a huge Linux fan, but it deffinitely has its place. It'll be a sad/bad day if, for example, my only option on my future digital camera is to use it with Windows, or a Mac or I can get a special open source digital camera that sucks and will work with Linux.

 

Azazel1024, that's the scenario I envisaged too while reading the article. It'll be a mighty pain in the ass. And I'm sure its not hard for such massive companies to come up with one standard format. It's just a matter of will, financial and political.

 

What has Microsoft got against fat people anyway? Steve Ballmer is quite fat.

 

rather than leave exFAT on the cold I wish it doesn't become a closed standard so that it can be adapted by everyone faster, well unless everyone licenses exFAT. lol, i don't really want to stick to fat32 anymore honestly

 

You had the resources of the entire internet and a desktop PC and you couldn't down-sample a 1080p video to 480p without it looking much worse than the same resizing performed during playback? i think if you'd have persevered you'd have been able to come up with something equally as good if not better.

 

NTFS is the future for internal storage

Wether exfat takes off for external storage time will tell.

 

Linux will be fine. It's the same as NTFS was. FUSE will solve all the issues.

 

FAT is not missing hard links - you can have any entry pointing to a cluster already in use and pointed to by another entry. This constitutes a hard link. Might not be exactly standard (and FS checking software will report it as error) but it can be done.

 

Really? How long will it take reverse engineer it and add compatibility? Isn't NTFS also proprietary, and that works perfectly.

 

I actually came across an XP machine only today with 4x FAT32 partitions on one disk! It took me a good 10 minutes to figure out why I couldn't paste the 4.2 GB PST file to it despite some 40GB of free space!