They are here! M$ and a new trick!

[iamaboringperson]

Coder wrote:
Hi,

Yup M$ is at it again. From now on companies that make camera's have to pay M$ 25 dollar cents for each sold camera. The payment is for the FAT filesystem. Also the creators of memory cards have to pay. And you have some others products that use it and will be next up.

Coder

I have nothing against the collection of royalties for your patents, however, why can't these companies just use different file systems?

I don't have memory cards here, however can't I just format them to a different file system?

[iamaboringperson]

Now format the disk using FAT12 and put the command.com program on there... now rename the program foobar.com.

Reset the machine, and when it boots, it will promt you for the file name of the command interpreter... which can be entered and it will boot.

Hense the BIOS can read the FS...

No, I think that's false

The code that asks you for the name of the command interpreter will do the same thing regardless of the BIOS, the code to do that is written on the bootblock.

The BIOS can read the bootblock into memory and execute code from it.

Try using a QNX disk, or a Linux boot disk.

Or one interesting idea, is to use PC-TASK, to format a floppy, it has its own interesting code for the boot block!! ;-)