Despite what Ashlee Vance speculates I didn't remove it because Sun ... seem to have convinced me to do so. Something which Ashlee could have found out if he'd contacted me (he does have my email after all). I dropped the article for two reasons:
Firstly I wasn't entirely happy with it. It sounded far too much like a Register article, too many "it seems", "it sounds like"s and "it may be"s for my liking.
I'd had the article in draft form for a few days, since seeing Robert Milkowski reference to a new Sun Workstation, called Munich. As more information became available I was updating the article and then, when the new server names appeared on the Sun web site I thought it was time to post it, before someone else beat me to it. Reading the article again before the weekend I still didn't like the large amount of speculation mixed in with the occasional fact, even I found it confusing, so I pulled it from the site until I could confirm the details and tidy up the language.
The second reason for removing the article was because I was unsure about whether I was allowed to post it.
The information came from the Opensolaris.org site (a possibility I wrote about in January). The OpenSolaris site has two different terms of use pages, one is housed on the OpenSolaris site (which appears to apply to the bugs database), one links to a terms of use at Sun.com (which appears to apply to the Solaris source code).
The limitations applied to the source code include a condition on use of Confidential Information requiring users of the site to hold confidential information in strict confidence. The terms of use associated with the bugs database has a statement that ANY INFORMATION OR MATERIAL YOU SUBMIT TO THIS WEBSITE WILL BE DEEMED NOT TO BE CONFIDENTIAL before going on to point out that other material on the site may be covered by more stringent terms.
If you consider that the bugs database is covered by the site's terms of use then the information I extracted wasn't confidential and could be distributed. If it was covered by the second license then it was confidential and should not have been distributed.
So, I pulled the article partly because I wasn't sure which license covered the data I'd found and partly because I wasn't happy with the way it was written.
I can honestly say that Sun did not contact me and ask me to remove it, if they had I'd have made sure that it disappeared from the Google cache as well.
1 comments:
I saw a putback to Solaris Nevada build 44 which mentions Munich and that it will have a "ALC880/885" audio chipset supported by the new "audiohd" driver.
A putback to build 45 ammeds that by saying that it has been decided that the ALC833 variant will be in these boxes and the audiohd driver should support that.
Looking up the ALC833, it is a audio chip from Realtek which supports 24bit/192KHz digital audio and is capable of 7.1 output. Looking at the source for this driver it seems that up to 48KHz will be supported in two channel (standard stero) mode only.
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