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Slashback: Bundestux, Kerberos, Blizzard
This deserves a hearty 'Jawohl!' DocSnyder writes: "Since the Bundestux campaign started collecting votes in favor of putting Free Software into the German parliament (Bundestag), more than 25000 people have done so. A lot of online discussions - in addition to Heise News and Linux-Community.de, even some Bundestag parties have put up their online forums - are very active to share user experience about GNU/Linux and Free Software. (Sorry for most of the linked sites speaking German, it's simply too much to translate at once.)
After several open letters and press releases have been exchanged between lobbyists and politicians, some information about a research performed by the German company Infora appeared on Heise News (english version), recommending an all-Microsoft infrastructure with the exception of some security-critical services like e-mail. The detailed paper is still not available.
An internal test (english version) between the Bundestag administration, SuSE, IBM and Microsoft confirmed that GNU/Linux and Free Software are in fact ready for the Bundestag's IT infrastructure, yet the testers don't like the copy&paste method used by KDE and recommend Windows for the desktops.
Last week, the Bundestag members (MdB) Jörg Tauss and Hans-Joachim Otto have been invited by Heise for an online chat with the community. While Jörg Tauss is a clear supporter of open standards and Free Software, Hans-Joachim Otto takes the internal test as well as Infora's research as primarily relevant for the coming decision.
On Saturday, MdB Uwe Küster summarized some details in an interview. He considered the decision - officially due Feb 28 - as almost finalized. The solution would show GNU/Linux on most servers, Windows XP and Office XP on the desktops, keeping proprietary data formats and lock-in interfaces up to the next upgrade cycle, which in fact would have been problem number one to solve.
All in all, the community has provided lots of experience, ideas and solution paths which finally seem to be largely ignored in the decision finding process towards the successor of a homogenous Microsoft Windows NT4 infrastructure, which has to be replaced until 2003 when Microsoft will no longer provide support for NT4."
That's a lot of cleaning up to do! maffew writes "A lot of feedback and ideas have been flying around since my article How to fix the Unix configuration nighmare was featured on freshmeat and slashdot. So we've created an ongoing web site and mailing list for people to continue discussing, organising, and hopefully in the end coding. It's all at unixconfig.sourceforge.net.
Meanwhile here's a link to the permanent home for the nightmare article. This is where I'm making revisions and adding links."
Raise your hand if this would mean seeing it for the 4th time ... Chris Brewer writes "In case you've been living on a different planet, The Fellowship of the Ring picked up Five Baftas, the British equivalent of the Oscars, including Best Director, Best Film, and Peoples Choice. During a live interview (Real only) after the awards, Peter Jackson announces that a preview for The Two Towers will be shown from the March 22 screenings of The Fellowship."
At long last ... something? If you've followed the strange relationship Microsoft has had with Kerberos, you may feel grateful to the anonymous coward who writes: "It would seem that Microsoft is granting the world a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to implement their Kerberos extension."
Here's some comfort for Starcraft players. An Anonymous Coward writes "As stated on Blizzard's battle.net service, the latest Starcraft patch supports UDP play, so some of the compelling reasons to use bnetd have been addressed. Whatever you may think of Blizzard and the DMCA, at least it shows Blizzard is listening to its fans."
Um, the UDP thing doesn't replace bnetd. You can't use it to play against other folks on the Internet (unless you're using VPNs, or some kind of tunnel that doesn't currently exist). Choice is still lost, unfortunately.
Blizzard is suck.
Schroeder: Ich bin ein Pinguin...
(found within an article about Bundestux on Web.de)
In regards to your notebook comment, I'm not sure what "docking" envolves, but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work with just about any linux distribution with pcmcia support.
I have a Sony 505TR notebook. I installed Slackware 8.0 on it when I got it back in September. I've since rebooted the thing once (to install a 2.4 kernel). Basically the thing's been booted for nearly 6 months, all i do is close the lid to suspend it. I'm always swapping out PCMCAI NIC's (wirless at home, ethernet at work, no card on the road) and have never had to manually change anything when switching cards (if that's what you mean by transparent).
Am I missing something?
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
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Heimdal Kerberos 5
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KTH Kerberos 4
Both are from the Swedish PDC (Centre for Parallel Computers), and are the only two Kerberos implementations I've ever used besides MIT's and Transarc's. (Transarc's implementation was a proprietary extension of MIT krb4, and was included in AFS. However, the OpenAFS developer community reccomends against using Transarc's krb4, and instead suggests using MIT or Heimdal krb5.)This is not a Fugazi
x86 stores integer data in a different binary format than other architectures. One of the amazing things about TCP/IP is that it's designed in such a way as to be oblivous to the underlying architectural implementation. Hence, network byte order.
It's the only way to allow different computers to communicate with each other.
I would say though that the whole berkley socket interface is antiquated for handling binary socket data. It works wonderfully for handling ascii data (which is what a majority of early protocols where).
Fortunately, most languages have decent socket libraries that abstract network byte ordering. Now, the really annoying thing about berkley sockets is the lack of an async name lookup mechanism...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Byte ordering is arbitrary if you don't give a hoot about interoperability or standards. It's not called "network byte order" for nothing. It's the default byte ordering for all RFC-defined internet protocols -- including Kerberos itself.
Almost all network software uses "hton*" and "ntoh*" functions to convert the byte ordering from host to network byte order and reverse. On big-endian machines they happen to be NOPs. So now what? Everyone implementing the protocol on big-endian machines has to implement their "itoh*" and "htoi*" ("idiot to host", "host to idiot") functions. And to implement any software portably you'll need the same functions on little-endian systems as well. OK, so now you can write your non-portable apps without the "ntohl" -- that's OK if don't care about playing nice with others. Those of use who work in heterogenous environments and write software for a living do care.
Sure, network byte ordering is arbitary. But big-endian was chosen long ago and causes no harm. What Microsoft did is just a good way to piss off folks who care about everyone playing nice on the internet.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
It is true that selection and middle-mouse click will work between all X applications.
However Windows users are used to ctrl+x and ctrl+v. Most X apps initially supported this by simply making ctrl+x do nothing (because the text was already selected) and making ctrl+v do the same as middle-mouse click. This is how current KDE applications work.
This worked pretty good, but it turns out most Windows users were also used to selecting the text they wanted to replace and then typing ctrl+v to replace it. This unfortunately changed the clipboard and the paste did not work. They do have a point that this is confusing to anybody coming from Windows.
There are several kludges an app could do to detect this and do what the user expects, but it appears the solution adopted, first by Motif programs like Mozilla and then by GTK and several other toolkits, was to have 2 clipboards, one for the selection and another for the most recent ctrl+x. In many ways this is an ideal solution, as in fact the middle mouse is really equivalent to drag & drop and is best combined with that mechanism, not the clipboard.
The problem now is that KDE apps (and quite a few others, I'm sure) do not understand this. Typing ctrl+v still pastes the selection. Since this is usually the same as the clipboard except for the "select and replace" Windows reflex it probably isn't any worse than before. However the opposite way is a pain, as ctrl+x in KDE does nothing and ctrl+v in a newer program then pastes and older ctrl+x, which I am sure drives the user nuts.
Yes the next version of KDE will fix this.
PS: the newest versions of FLTK match GTK as well, it had the same problem as KDE.
I hope you're kidding and that you're really going to wait until March 22nd to go see it again. Otherwise, you'll be in for a nasty surprise when you sit through the closing credits and find that there is no trailer afterwards.
IPX is NOT faster than IP for ANYTHING. I suspect the IP in the games mentioned are designed to be played over the net/modem so packets are kept small, hence the slowdown you see. If memory serves (and it's been a long time) IPX is something like 70-80 percent efficient (packet size compared to actual data sent) and IP is somewhere above 90 percent. IP as a protoocol is FAR more efficient than IPX.
Normal people worry me!
Either you're clueless, or you're trolling. The little endianness only applies to Microsoft's proprietary PAC. Only applications that care to be compatible with Windows 2000's implementation of Kerberos need worry about the format of the PAC, especially since they'd need to worry about other Microsoftese formatted structures like user and machine SID and GUIDs. Besides which, nearly the entire PAC uses NDR encoding (Network Data Representation -- the type of data encoding that DCE/RPC does).
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
http://www.kali.net/
I used kali all the time a long time go.
If you plan to comment on the "cut and paste" issue, please read the X clipboard explanation, in detail, and make sure you fully understand it before commenting.
X - or, at least the X11 Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) - does specify a clipboard that works like the MacOS/Windows clipboard. Selecting text does not have to copy to that clipboard; it merely has to set the "primary selection". The middle mouse button can paste the "primary selection". Ctrl+C and Ctrl+X can copy/cut to the clipboard, and Ctrl+V can paste the clipboard even if you've subsequently selected something else (in which case it replaces the selection with what you're pasting).
Motif and GTK+, for example, work that way. Qt 1.x and 2.x, as used by KDE 1.x and 2.x, didn't; Qt 3.x, as used by KDE 3.x, works that way.
The KDE announcement speaks of the primary selection and the real clipboard as both being clipboards; that was, as far as I know, done to avoid "frightening the horses", i.e. to work around the confusion that some people suffer from, thinking that selecting text copies it to "the clipboard". The ICCCM doesn't call them both clipboards (it calls them both selections; for better or worse, that's standard terminology inside the innards of X, but you don't have to call them "selections" when talking to users).