Posts by David Brown 2 3 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2009
It's easy to plug a USB cable (type "B" end) into an Ethernet RJ45 port. For some reason, I used to do it regularly with an embedded electronics card we had. I really should have known better - I had designed the card in the first place!
You have to distinguish between a file system format, and an implementation of the format. The Linux implementations of ext2, 3, 4 are GPL'ed, but the format itself is completely open and anyone is free to write their own implementations under any license they want. For example, there are non-GPL'ed implementations of ext2 available for Windows, Macs, and some BSDs, as well as small read-only implementations in things like bootloaders.
exFAT is very different in that various features of the format are protected by patents (in non-free countries), and by missing documentation. MS's aim is that you cannot implement exFAT without licensing their code.
At my company, IE is banned Employees can use Firefox or Opera - whatever major version they like, but with the latest updates as they come in. IE is simply too unsafe, and can't be updated without intrusive and potentially dangerous updates to the whole system.
I can't understand why an organisation would be so obsessive about sticking to IE. Any IT staff that claims they can't support users with mixes of browsers should be out of a job. Any PHB that makes claims about "training costs" should be out of a job too - IE users can learn to use Firefox within seconds.
Some organisations have legacy IE-specific internal web services designed by half-wits who don't understand the concept of "standard". It's safe enough to let people use IE (whatever version) for that sort of thing - just as long as they stick to a real browser for other sites.
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