Last week, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) sued TomTom for infringing on patents relating to (among other things) the format of its File Allocation Table 32-bit (FAT32) disk format. These patents relate to mundane issues like how to translate pretty names like "C:\Temporary Files" into ugly short ones like "C:\TEMPOR~1" that older programs can understand, and the layout of files on the physical media such as hard drives or flash memory.
So what are the implications of Microsoft having a patent on FAT technology? Let's look at a simple example. Whenever you plug a flash drive into your PC, the odds are that it's formatted with Microsoft's FAT32 technology. If you take that flash drive to another non-PC device, the software on that device needs to be able to understand the FAT32 format in order to read the files. Microsoft says that to do that, you need to license their patents.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Spiders: "We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.
If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply."
That my PS3 still only accepts fat32 formatted external drives, it is time it starts accepting modern Linux filesystems, without filesize limitations btw.
Here you go Bro:
SwissKnife
Allows creation of a single partition of up to 2048GB of FAT32 or NTFS file systems.
Supports Hi-Speed USB, PCMCIA, SATA, SCSI, USB 1.1, and FireWire® external drives
http://www.compuapps.com/Do...
Plus some of the drive manfac: (Maxtor etc have tools on there web site to make large partition). Using Swiss I even split my single external hard drive with one partition Fat32(500g) and the other partition 500(NTFS) on the same physical drive.
FAT32 limit for a single file is 4GB not 2GB.
Fat16 file size limit is 2GB.
Fat32 file size limit is 4GB.
Fat32 partition size is 2048GB.
Any thing larger than 2048GB(2TB) requires GPT.
thanks to everybody for the SwissKnife tip, I'll have to give it a try. But what about the System Files that are over 4GB? If I try to do a system backup, what happens with those files?
You should try it out and see. Maybe the PS3 will split the files over 4Gbs when copying them for backup and re-compile them during transfer process. If not it'll probably just skip those files.
Since it only supports particular types of media files I would think they're likely to have a built in program that can split things like MP4s, Vobs and Avis where as as game file install being limited to 4Gbs because of it's different file structure.