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Micro$oft is FAT!

Judge Kathleen Kottler-Kavein ruled that Microsoft must be broken up into two companies. The name of the two companies will be MICROS~1 and MICROS~2. HAHA!!

The Bug:
(not in reference to the car or the insect)

So... today I stumbled upon something weird with FAT16 partitions. Why FAT16? Because the manufacturers of the SD memory card formatted the card with FAT16... your own USB flash drive might also be FAT16. Anyways... here's what happened: I had 126 files (totaling over 1.4 GB) on the SD card. If I added one more file, Windows would complain, saying that it could not create the file. And, here's the strange part... if I deleted a 4 MB file and copied a 1 MB file, it would still not let me create a new file. And, even stranger... if I deleted all of the files and created 1000 small files, it would let me.

So... the problem doesn't seems to be a file size limit or a # of files limit. What is it then?

WTF, mates?

Here's a strange bug in FAT16: http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?MSDOSFileSystem

A long time ago, Microsoft made you create files with an 8.3 filename. What that means is... your files, by convention, had to start with 1-8 characters, followed by a period, and then followed by a 3-character-max file extension. After people realized that this limitation was ridiculous, they yelled at the evil empire. So, Gates hacked the FAT file system to create support for long filenames... and it created some complications... hidden complications... read the link above to find out.

Quoted from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120138:
"This problem occurs when all 512 root directory entries have been used. This problem can also occur with fewer than 512 files and folders in the root directory because Windows 95 uses additional directory entries to store long file names. "

So, when Windows couldn't create a file due to some weird, mostly undocumented FAT16 limitation, it SHOULD HAVE SAID: "Bill Gates told me not to let you do that because there is some undocumented feature in FAT16 that won't let you. Try formatting in FAT32".

But, instead, I get the cryptic error message: "Sorry, Blake. I can't do that now. And, nope... I won't tell you why... you'll have to Google it... I mean... search using Windows Live, of course!"

Also see... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_filename

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