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Old 11-02-2008, 01:33 AM   #10
rjh
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Posts: 50
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Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: New Zealand
Device: TungstenT3 Nokia770 BeBook
Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe View Post
Actually Palm has no file system at all. the files were in RAM and accessed directly, not stored in a file system. There is no file name or extension. See the wiki on PDB for more details
You are correct, I didn't want to complicate the issue unnecessarily - .prc and .pdb are what most end-users see, they are totally unaware of what happens on the device itself. As they should be.

The current PalmOS (hah - its about 4 years old!) makes things somewhat more complicated, in that it does understand file systems and files that are not in RAM and can read and write real .pdb files on the device. Some applications may ignore or require file extensions, especially on external media. TCPMP and Explorer for example both require valid extensions.



Quote:
It was not silly unless you only think as a windows pc person. It is the only OS that requires intelligent file name extensions.

Dale
Actually, I'm a Linux person and I still think it appears to be silly in retrospect; I know they were reasonable choices when the Palm OS was first developed. It is actually quite a tribute to ingenuity that the PalmOS was able to be extended as far as it was to accommodate usage well outside the original vision.

Why have extensions when they mean so little? And in the context of ebook formats, since they mean so little, why don't vendors make a point of being more explicit when mentioning .pdb wrt to ebook formats?

Its a little like saying a device can handle .zip files without specifying the actual content of the .zip file.
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