On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 09:58, Roger Heflin wrote: > > > > > > It is not a patent for FAT in general. > > > > um ... so the concept of supporting longer filenames > > qualifies as "novel and non-obvious?" really? > > > Apparently the screwball way they did it, yes, they had to come > up with the method to put things into the already existing structures, > and I believe it is rather a odd hack, since the pre-existing structures > only have space for 8+3, how they are doing it is a lot different than > the way one does it for a filesystem designed from the ground up to accept > long filenames. So the way to protect something is to do it badly the first time and then add a quirky work-around to fix some of the problems? I don't think that qualifies as "novel" for Microsoft, though. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx