Comments on: Get the FAT Out http://www.hohndel.org/communitymatters/opensource/get-the-fat-out/ open source, technology, high tech toys and the communities around them Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:28:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: doj http://www.hohndel.org/communitymatters/opensource/get-the-fat-out/comment-page-1/#comment-12956 doj Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:43:09 +0000 http://www.hohndel.org/communitymatters/?p=282#comment-12956 The reason everybody loves FAT is, that it can even be used by a 8-bit microcontroller with only some KB of RAM. And lots of them are connected to a USB flash drive today. All those fancier (and more free) UN*X rooted filesystems can't be used without a 32bit processor. So any real alternative to a FAT16 needs to take into account this small-scale computing. And this suggestion remind me of the old Internet days, when Unisys were using their LZW patents for GIF, and even if we have a vastly better alternatvie (PNG) for almost decades, people are still using GIFs today (ok, Unysys's patents have expired). Why, because they just care when they receive those nasty lawyer letters. The reason everybody loves FAT is, that it can even be used by a 8-bit microcontroller with only some KB of RAM. And lots of them are connected to a USB flash drive today.
All those fancier (and more free) UN*X rooted filesystems can’t be used without a 32bit processor. So any real alternative to a FAT16 needs to take into account this small-scale computing.

And this suggestion remind me of the old Internet days, when Unisys were using their LZW patents for GIF, and even if we have a vastly better alternatvie (PNG) for almost decades, people are still using GIFs today (ok, Unysys’s patents have expired). Why, because they just care when they receive those nasty lawyer letters.

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