Mis-use of laws
More details need to be disclosed, but there are growing indications that privacy laws like HIPAA are being converted into walls against whistle blowers. The latest is growing evidence that VA employees who disclose unsafe practices are being threatened under HIPAA. You can't disclose facts to back up claims of unsafe practices without disclosing at least minimal patient information. The story is that the VA is claiming that informing your lawyer is a HIPAA violation.
The continual cold war between open source, Microsoft, and Apple hit me again today. Microsoft will no longer format a USB device that is larger than 4GB with a FAT-32 file system. In practice you can manipulate block sizes to get much larger devices supported, and I've gotten such devices. Now it must either be exFAT or NTFS. The problem with these is that they are not publicly documented and are covered by some US-only patents.
Why is this a problem? I want to carry around movies, music, podcasts, etc. on a portable hard drive. I want to plug this hard drive into my Windows, Linux, and Mac systems with read/write access. That's precisely what Apple and Microsoft don't want to have happen. Apple will not support any Microsoft disk formats (other than FAT) and Microsoft will not support any Apple formats. They both want to own their customers.
Fortunately, Linux is a fringe issue, has lots of non-US developers who can ignore US-only patents safely, and has engineers able to reverse engineer a file system. You can now get a reasonably robust and reliable NTFS read/write support on Linux. This rescues my 500GB portable that had to be re-formatted. It's now NTFS. The Mac can't use it, but I can use network access when it needs files. That's not great. But at least I can stuff a couple hundred GB of movies and podcasts onto the little disk. I don't have to decide now what I'll want when travelling. I can take everything and decide then what I want.
The continual cold war between open source, Microsoft, and Apple hit me again today. Microsoft will no longer format a USB device that is larger than 4GB with a FAT-32 file system. In practice you can manipulate block sizes to get much larger devices supported, and I've gotten such devices. Now it must either be exFAT or NTFS. The problem with these is that they are not publicly documented and are covered by some US-only patents.
Why is this a problem? I want to carry around movies, music, podcasts, etc. on a portable hard drive. I want to plug this hard drive into my Windows, Linux, and Mac systems with read/write access. That's precisely what Apple and Microsoft don't want to have happen. Apple will not support any Microsoft disk formats (other than FAT) and Microsoft will not support any Apple formats. They both want to own their customers.
Fortunately, Linux is a fringe issue, has lots of non-US developers who can ignore US-only patents safely, and has engineers able to reverse engineer a file system. You can now get a reasonably robust and reliable NTFS read/write support on Linux. This rescues my 500GB portable that had to be re-formatted. It's now NTFS. The Mac can't use it, but I can use network access when it needs files. That's not great. But at least I can stuff a couple hundred GB of movies and podcasts onto the little disk. I don't have to decide now what I'll want when travelling. I can take everything and decide then what I want.