exFAT
Why does Microsoft have to be stupid again?
Microsoft recently announced the licensing model for their new exFAT filesystem (article in Dutch). exFAT is a filesystem that supposedly is especially suitable for flash-based storage media, such as flash cards, MP3 players, USB sticks, smartphones, and so on – stuff that you carry around, basically.
Of course there was the immediate need to raise the file size limit to 256 terabytes, because that is what they did. (For comparision, that’s over 300 times the amount of space on an average home PC.) Granted, FAT32 – which is in use by most devices today – is kind of limiting with 4 gigabytes (a decent HD movie can’t be stored in a FAT32 filesystem), but 256 TB?!
Anyway, since they want to make exFAT the new standard for portable devices, obviously they need it to be supported widely by both operating systems and storage devices. So, the obvious choice to Microsoft is to introduce a paid licensing model, which is really restrictive and requires you to sign non-disclosure agreements. This way, there is very little chance that open source initiatives are going to support exFAT (think Linux, for starters). But lets also look at it from a device manufacturer’s point of view: you’d have to pay for a license (not to mention the cost of implementation) of a new filesystem, which in the end, doesn’t really add that much. Sure, we can have bigger files now, but I’m making an MP3 player with maybe a few gigs of space, where the average file size is about 5 megabytes – who cares about large files? Plus, my MP3 player will only work on Windows operating systems (while I’ve just gone through all the trouble of letting it talk on USB as a mass-storage device, so any platform/OS can use it). And there is a perfectly good, widely supported alternative (FAT32), to which specifications can easily be found anywhere in the Interwebz, and which I’ve probably already used on older devices so I can just copy that code over and be done with it.
Gee. Difficult choice.
Games
I’m not much of a gamer person. I do enjoy the occasional game every once in a while, but many games can’t really keep my attention for long. Occasionally there is a game that does manage to do just that, and if there is it’ll quite often keep my attention for a wee bit too long (the “oh crap, it’s 5 AM and I have to get up at 6:30″ kind of too lon), but luckily that only happens a few times a year.
One such time has just passed. The game in question is Dragon Age: Origins, which is a very nice RPG from Bioware. Even the main storyline alone is really really long, but it’s also really really addictive (those two don’t mix well together if you want to avoid the 6:30 problem I mentioned earlier). I just finished playing the game today… it took me about 60 hours to get through the entire main quest (without doing too many sidequests, but not always taking the easiest route either). It generally ran smoothly on my PC – which is not known for its awesome performance in the graphics department – and there are just so many things I like about the game. For instance, I like how you can make all sorts of decisions that can affect the game world in a fairly important way. I like how one of the characters in the game is voiced by Claudia Black (also known as Vala Mal Doran in Stargate SG-1), which is particularly fun because those two characters are quite much alike in terms of personality (and if you know the Stargate character, you know how much fun that can be ^^)). I like… well, there isn’t a whole lot not to like actually.
I did also play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (yes, on easy, because I suck at shooters big time 
). Went through the campaign in one day and thats pretty much the only interesting bit to me. It was pretty good though.
For the rest… I got myself a copy of DCS: Blackshark, which is pretty cool, a hell of a learning curve though (but that was to be expected). It’s not that I’m doing badly at it (actually I’d say its not bad at all considering my all of perhaps 2 hours in the game so far), but it’s just the getting used to the million different keyboard commands (which often involve ctrl/alt/shift keys, and even more so you need to specifically use the left or right one, because otherwise you’ll probably activate something entirely different) and procedures that makes it difficult.
On an entirely unrelated matter, I just came accross this little Flash game. It’s a Hitchhikers-themed game where you’re destroying as many Earths as possible. It’s quite entertaining to play for a bit (random tea breaks? what the hell? ).