Yes, the SEC requires that any such potential risk factors (and "our product licensing is untested in court and might conceivably turn out to be worthless" is definitely a risk factor in their eyes) be plainly set out in an IPO. That's the rules of the game.
First (in response to the original message): GNOME being RHAD's raison d'etre, I doubt that Red Hat will be "jettisoning" it any time soon.
As to GNOME stability: I'm currently running GNOME out of CVS on my home system (P200, Linux) and my work system (SPARC Ultra 10, Solaris 2.5.1). The only stability problems I've had (aside from some problems with the original 1.0 release, and one of the pre-1.0's until I rebuilt the world) were caused by outdated includes and libraries being visible during the build --- you can't safely build GNOME with outdated Gtk+ headers and libraries around, a fact which is fairly well documented.
(I'm not currently running E; I find the default Enlightenment theme to be a bit much, I *like* minimal user interfaces. I currently run a seriously minimalized fvwm2 configuration, but will be borrowing the RH6 E theme as a basis for customization when I have time.)
There may well be no legal basis. But if you don't have the money to fight an action, you lose... so for greedy companies it's an obvious way to put us out of business.
Why doesn't it exist yet? Money. And control: the FSF will do it, but only for programs whose copyright is assigned to the FSF.
(Then again, the "control" problem might well be a legal issue, if it's significantly more difficult or more expensive for an organization to defend a product it has no legal control over.)
The OSS movement is about a *better way* to do things. Using the same tactics as the opposition isn't a better way, it's a rehashing of the same old crap and will ultimately have the same results.
(NB: this is also the problem I have with the GPL's "fight fire with fire" methodology --- it means that in some circumstances I have to treat GPL'ed software as *proprietary* from a legal standpoint...)
Yes, I've used IE on Solaris. Huge, slow, buggy (the mouse cursor appeared to suffer from both color inversion and endianness problems, making it difficult or impossible to click on things), and generally not worth the download.
I have to admit that the beginning of the article reads as flamebait. But I get the impression that that was intended more as a noise filter than anything else: the flames can be easily identified and tossed.
That said, the fundamental flaw in the article is his suggestion is that Microsoft wants anyone to fix their software. The facts are:
(1) They don't make the source available for fixing, except via restrictive licensing that locks most people out of it;
(2) They only fix bugs themselves if they get a lot of airplay, and even then they try to put blame elsewhere (recall when the Win95 SMB ".." bug was found, and they tried to blame the Samba folks? They aren't quite so blatent about it now, but they still tend to avoid taking responsibility for their bugs).
The bottom line is, if it were possible for us (meaning people outside of Microsoft) to fix Windows bugs, we would undoubtedly be doing so. A large part of the impetus behind Linux, FreeBSD, etc. comes from the fact that we can't fix Windows (or, for that matter, Solaris or AIX or...).
So the article's premise is wrong from the beginning. There's little point in discussing the article... although there might be some point in discussing the premise with the reporter.
If they choose a different component spec, it would probably be based on C++. And then most people would be happy because C++ is the 600-pound gorilla of the object world.
But the fact is, a component spec isn't necessarily tied to a language. So they like the EJB components: that means someone will do compatible components in C++ as well. It's not as if the components are inherently Java-specific.
Most of you are whining because they didn't go with the Windows of the OO language world (C++). Think about it.
This is being blamed on every fear-of-the-"new"-and/or-"different" target known: geeks, the Internet, Dungeons&Dragons, goth, etc., etc. ad nauseam. Anything that came into existence after the "reporter" fossilized is grounds for suspicion and a potential "cause" of every possible evil.
Sanity check: there's a quote from Socrates indicating that the Greeks believed the very same thing. Insularity and fear of change haven't changed at all; we're still cavemen afraid of the thunder, and for some strange reason we're *proud* of it.
(Keep in mind, however, that the media are a business; they're selling a product, and the best way to sell that product is to cause as much trouble as possible. I've ranted about that before; the media will manufacture riots, if necessary, to sell themselves. The danger is that they will indeed inflame that caveman fear and cause problems for us, whose only crime is not being 100% identical to those that are afraid.)
"CNN sure gets a lot of FUD these days. Seems like they will post anything that anyone with deep pockets sends them. shouldn't media *try* to be impartial and not commercially oriented?"
Huh? The media doesn't care about that, they care about anything that gets people upset/angry and thereby gets people to pay more attention to them --- if they can cause a riot, they've succeeded.
Judging by the size and content of this/. topic, I'd say they were spot-on.
Remember that records and tapes undergo enforced decay every time they're played. This is also true of CDs to some extent, but that extent is much less --- it'd take a lot longer for the laser to knock away enough molecules of plastic coating and substrate to affect audio quality than for a record player's needle to warp vinyl or the head of a cassette player to scratch off the magnetic coating of a tape.
In re: digital error checking: quantization removes redundancy, and redundancy is key to error correction. Again, there's a *lot* more redundancy in an analog signal. (Compression removes redundancy as well --- that is exactly how it works --- so e.g. time-compressed analog would also have more drop-outs.)
"Myth" isn't quite right. It's a question of what *kind* of information is lost --- and much of that noise comes from the older technology used in audio systems; a record player with a laser "needle" would have lower noise than traditional record players.
The real limiting factor in analog comes from the fact that ultimately, analog is really digital with a really small quantum: individual molecules of the recording medium, pickup, and speakers, and individual electrons in the amplifiers. But there are no production mass-market analog systems whose noise floor is enforced by Heisenberg:-) (I dare say there are some in a lab somewhere) so none of us have any referents to compare such systems to current digital technology. And it's not currently feasible (possible, yes, but a digital recording built up by molecular beam epitaxy would be horribly expensive, to say nothing of the playback system) to duplicate that kind of resolution in a digital medium.
"There's good reason for wanting analogue, but if you crank up the resolution of digital stuff enough, you'll eventually hit human perception limits."
Well, yes, but how much larger will said digital signal be than the original analog signal? At what point does (say) an optical-analog record player using a laser "needle" to track the grooves (this ought to be doable with current technology) end up being cheaper than a digital audio "superdisk" of some kind which requires gigabytes of storage to produce sufficiently "near-analog" quality?
Can we all try to remember (yeah, I know, this is slashdot and I don't expect much) that digital encoding involves tradeoffs? Music and video are both inherently analog, so there *will* be artifacts when they are quantized for digital encoding. How noticeable the artifacts are depends on how small the quantum ("unit" of digitization) is and how the signal is encoded (e.g. the radio-like L+R/L-R vs. straight L/R); but the tradeoff is against size. Until we get gigabyte (terabyte for hi-res video) storage that fits in a pocket, artifacts are going to be a fact of life in digitized audio/video.
The same applies to digital satellites and other streaming audio/video applications, except there the question isn't storage but bandwidth. The fatter the pipe, the better the quality you can get.
But the artifacts will always *be* there; the question is how noticeable they are and how much you want to "pay" (not so much in money as in space and/or bandwidth) to reduce them below some threshold. (Zero being unattainable in the digital realm, as that means a zero quantum == pure analog.)
So why digital, if it can never be as good as analog? Because in many cases you can get "good enough" with usable storage/bandwidth, and because digital formats can be compressed (the same quantization that produces artifacts also makes the signal more compressible) you can fit more digital audio/video in a specified bandwidth than you can analog.
And yes, there are pathological cases. Sometimes you can juggle the digitization constraints to make up for them, other times you're stuck because they just don't quantize nicely for any real-world quantum size.
Welcome to the real world, folks. If you don't like it, you can try whining to $DEITY about it; but neither Sony nor Fraunhofer nor the marching morons can give you truly analog-quality digital audio/video. Live with the tradeoff or stick to analog --- there aren't any other choices.
Let's see: MP3 is already out there and widely used. The competition is a bunch of proprietary formats (how many now?), incompatible with each other and MP3, with no market coverage.
But we're to believe that they are already *the* future? Uh huh. While they're busy duking it out to determine whose proprietary pay-per-play format "will" take over, MP3 will swallow their target market. If it hasn't already....
With every new "MP3 killer" format announced, the chances of any of them pushing MP3 out of the market drop. They just don't get it.
So this is what, the third time Microsoft has proclaimed the coming of Windows "thin clients"? Uh huh. Wake me up if they actually get anywhere with them this time.
Slashdot Mirror
Echostar and Hughes are still fighting that battle --- a bill that will throw out the current local-signal restrictions is currently in reconciliation between the differing House and Senate versions.
Yes, the SEC requires that any such potential risk factors (and "our product licensing is untested in court and might conceivably turn out to be worthless" is definitely a risk factor in their eyes) be plainly set out in an IPO. That's the rules of the game.
Red Hat shipped an older and buggy (early 1.0) version of GNOME. You can get updated GNOME RPMs for Red Hat 6, which will help stability considerably.
The current CVS GNOME is quite stable. I haven't used E much yet, but hope to get it set up on my Ultra 10 soon.
First (in response to the original message): GNOME being RHAD's raison d'etre, I doubt that Red Hat will be "jettisoning" it any time soon.
As to GNOME stability: I'm currently running GNOME out of CVS on my home system (P200, Linux) and my work system (SPARC Ultra 10, Solaris 2.5.1). The only stability problems I've had (aside from some problems with the original 1.0 release, and one of the pre-1.0's until I rebuilt the world) were caused by outdated includes and libraries being visible during the build --- you can't safely build GNOME with outdated Gtk+ headers and libraries around, a fact which is fairly well documented.
(I'm not currently running E; I find the default Enlightenment theme to be a bit much, I *like* minimal user interfaces. I currently run a seriously minimalized fvwm2 configuration, but will be borrowing the RH6 E theme as a basis for customization when I have time.)
There may well be no legal basis. But if you don't have the money to fight an action, you lose... so for greedy companies it's an obvious way to put us out of business.
Why doesn't it exist yet? Money. And control: the FSF will do it, but only for programs whose copyright is assigned to the FSF.
(Then again, the "control" problem might well be a legal issue, if it's significantly more difficult or more expensive for an organization to defend a product it has no legal control over.)
No, we don't.
The OSS movement is about a *better way* to do things. Using the same tactics as the opposition isn't a better way, it's a rehashing of the same old crap and will ultimately have the same results.
(NB: this is also the problem I have with the GPL's "fight fire with fire" methodology --- it means that in some circumstances I have to treat GPL'ed software as *proprietary* from a legal standpoint...)
Yes, I've used IE on Solaris. Huge, slow, buggy (the mouse cursor appeared to suffer from both color inversion and endianness problems, making it difficult or impossible to click on things), and generally not worth the download.
Okay, does anyone else read those specs and think "shar"?
I have to admit that the beginning of the article reads as flamebait. But I get the impression that that was intended more as a noise filter than anything else: the flames can be easily identified and tossed.
...).
That said, the fundamental flaw in the article is his suggestion is that Microsoft wants anyone to fix their software. The facts are:
(1) They don't make the source available for fixing, except via restrictive licensing that locks most people out of it;
(2) They only fix bugs themselves if they get a lot of airplay, and even then they try to put blame elsewhere (recall when the Win95 SMB ".." bug was found, and they tried to blame the Samba folks? They aren't quite so blatent about it now, but they still tend to avoid taking responsibility for their bugs).
The bottom line is, if it were possible for us (meaning people outside of Microsoft) to fix Windows bugs, we would undoubtedly be doing so. A large part of the impetus behind Linux, FreeBSD, etc. comes from the fact that we can't fix Windows (or, for that matter, Solaris or AIX or
So the article's premise is wrong from the beginning. There's little point in discussing the article... although there might be some point in discussing the premise with the reporter.
If they choose a different component spec, it would probably be based on C++. And then most people would be happy because C++ is the 600-pound gorilla of the object world.
But the fact is, a component spec isn't necessarily tied to a language. So they like the EJB components: that means someone will do compatible components in C++ as well. It's not as if the components are inherently Java-specific.
Most of you are whining because they didn't go with the Windows of the OO language world (C++). Think about it.
Remember how the PIII is supposed to "make the Internet faster"? Looks like Intel has finally figured out how to pull that off.
(not serious, yes sarcastic)
This is being blamed on every fear-of-the-"new"-and/or-"different" target known: geeks, the Internet, Dungeons&Dragons, goth, etc., etc. ad nauseam. Anything that came into existence after the "reporter" fossilized is grounds for suspicion and a potential "cause" of every possible evil.
Sanity check: there's a quote from Socrates indicating that the Greeks believed the very same thing. Insularity and fear of change haven't changed at all; we're still cavemen afraid of the thunder, and for some strange reason we're *proud* of it.
(Keep in mind, however, that the media are a business; they're selling a product, and the best way to sell that product is to cause as much trouble as possible. I've ranted about that before; the media will manufacture riots, if necessary, to sell themselves. The danger is that they will indeed inflame that caveman fear and cause problems for us, whose only crime is not being 100% identical to those that are afraid.)
Dunno about you, but I'm terrified of the prospect of Congress uniting to Get Something Done. The result would probably be a national disaster....
MPEG-1 Layer 4 does indeed exist. You only have to sell your soul to Fraunhofer to get it.
"Why would anyone spend the time and money to create a "better" format?"
Why would anyone spend the time and money to create a "better" Unix (Linux, *BSD)?
"If that's what he is saying, he should phrase it in away that it doesn't take an infinite number of slashdot monkeys to decipher it."
If slashdot monkeys had more functioning neurons, it wouldn't require a million of them to see past their knee-jerk reactions.
"CNN sure gets a lot of FUD these days. Seems like they will post anything that anyone with deep pockets sends them. shouldn't media *try* to be impartial and not commercially oriented?"
/. topic, I'd say they were spot-on.
Huh? The media doesn't care about that, they care about anything that gets people upset/angry and thereby gets people to pay more attention to them --- if they can cause a riot, they've succeeded.
Judging by the size and content of this
Do you see a Mac or PC with multimedia capability that's as small as a Rio anywhere?
Remember that records and tapes undergo enforced decay every time they're played. This is also true of CDs to some extent, but that extent is much less --- it'd take a lot longer for the laser to knock away enough molecules of plastic coating and substrate to affect audio quality than for a record player's needle to warp vinyl or the head of a cassette player to scratch off the magnetic coating of a tape.
In re: digital error checking: quantization removes redundancy, and redundancy is key to error correction. Again, there's a *lot* more redundancy in an analog signal. (Compression removes redundancy as well --- that is exactly how it works --- so e.g. time-compressed analog would also have more drop-outs.)
"Myth" isn't quite right. It's a question of what *kind* of information is lost --- and much of that noise comes from the older technology used in audio systems; a record player with a laser "needle" would have lower noise than traditional record players.
:-) (I dare say there are some in a lab somewhere) so none of us have any referents to compare such systems to current digital technology. And it's not currently feasible (possible, yes, but a digital recording built up by molecular beam epitaxy would be horribly expensive, to say nothing of the playback system) to duplicate that kind of resolution in a digital medium.
The real limiting factor in analog comes from the fact that ultimately, analog is really digital with a really small quantum: individual molecules of the recording medium, pickup, and speakers, and individual electrons in the amplifiers. But there are no production mass-market analog systems whose noise floor is enforced by Heisenberg
"There's good reason for wanting analogue, but if you crank up the resolution of digital stuff enough, you'll eventually hit human perception limits."
Well, yes, but how much larger will said digital signal be than the original analog signal? At what point does (say) an optical-analog record player using a laser "needle" to track the grooves (this ought to be doable with current technology) end up being cheaper than a digital audio "superdisk" of some kind which requires gigabytes of storage to produce sufficiently "near-analog" quality?
Can we all try to remember (yeah, I know, this is slashdot and I don't expect much) that digital encoding involves tradeoffs? Music and video are both inherently analog, so there *will* be artifacts when they are quantized for digital encoding. How noticeable the artifacts are depends on how small the quantum ("unit" of digitization) is and how the signal is encoded (e.g. the radio-like L+R/L-R vs. straight L/R); but the tradeoff is against size. Until we get gigabyte (terabyte for hi-res video) storage that fits in a pocket, artifacts are going to be a fact of life in digitized audio/video.
The same applies to digital satellites and other streaming audio/video applications, except there the question isn't storage but bandwidth. The fatter the pipe, the better the quality you can get.
But the artifacts will always *be* there; the question is how noticeable they are and how much you want to "pay" (not so much in money as in space and/or bandwidth) to reduce them below some threshold. (Zero being unattainable in the digital realm, as that means a zero quantum == pure analog.)
So why digital, if it can never be as good as analog? Because in many cases you can get "good enough" with usable storage/bandwidth, and because digital formats can be compressed (the same quantization that produces artifacts also makes the signal more compressible) you can fit more digital audio/video in a specified bandwidth than you can analog.
And yes, there are pathological cases. Sometimes you can juggle the digitization constraints to make up for them, other times you're stuck because they just don't quantize nicely for any real-world quantum size.
Welcome to the real world, folks. If you don't like it, you can try whining to $DEITY about it; but neither Sony nor Fraunhofer nor the marching morons can give you truly analog-quality digital audio/video. Live with the tradeoff or stick to analog --- there aren't any other choices.
Let's see: MP3 is already out there and widely used. The competition is a bunch of proprietary formats (how many now?), incompatible with each other and MP3, with no market coverage.
But we're to believe that they are already *the* future? Uh huh. While they're busy duking it out to determine whose proprietary pay-per-play format "will" take over, MP3 will swallow their target market. If it hasn't already....
With every new "MP3 killer" format announced, the chances of any of them pushing MP3 out of the market drop. They just don't get it.
So this is what, the third time Microsoft has proclaimed the coming of Windows "thin clients"? Uh huh. Wake me up if they actually get anywhere with them this time.