Slashdot Mirror
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."
Number of Linux users in Germany who care what software their government uses: 25 thousand.
Population of Germany: 83 million.
Something less than overwhelming...
Even considering that Europeans are more likely to put up with difficult installation, cryptic configuration files and an ugly desktop this is less than I would have expected.
So the linux clipboard (or lack of compatibility thereof) provides enough reason for them to buy and use Windows/Office XP?
Sounds like a reason to fix the shitty broken clipboard, then. I'll be grateful when I can at last paste from KMail into Mozilla.
Hmm. This is just the sort of problem Lycoris would attack. Another reason to download it -- as soon as the slashdot effect dies down.
I'm sure I'll get flamed or modded down for not trashing MS and pumping Linux, but here goes anyways:
I would imagine that what the users are talking about is the inability to copy and paste all formats of data from anywhere to anywhere. Like copying a table from a HTML document and pasting it into Excel. That's just useful sometimes when your manager is breathing down your neck looking for a report of something that could just be looked up online. We all know how it is.
About the more stable thing... The last time I tried making ANY in-depth spreadsheets on *nix, I tended to take the app (I think it was Star Office) right down. Or sometimes when importing data from other existing sources the app would either blow up or fail to import the data. Users can't have that when they have deadlines. On the other hand I've been sitting here for the last five hours working up process documentation in Excel (yep, management can't get it done, I want a faster process, I'll write it myself) without a single issue.
Yes, I love Linux, but I don't think it's ready for the desktop. MS has it right with near-universal copy and paste and stability is no longer an issue. On a properly configured machine there is no reason that 2000 or XP should crash. Ever. My machines don't, yours can too. I still believe that Linux's best place is on the back end. Passing out files with Samba without people thinking about it. Serving internal websites with Apache. Watching what's going on with Snort. There's many, many good places for Linux, but the desktop just isn't there yet.
Not to mention notebooks... I've yet to see a Linux distro that can transparently handle being undocked, taken to a conference room, hooked up with a PCMCIA NIC, worked on, then docked again. If I'm wrong here, please correct me and provide links...
-Steve
Because there is such as thing as network order.
It's called "portability".
If you're following good programming practices, you shouldn't have to care - or even know - whether your system is big-endian or little-endian, unless you're writing kernels or compilers.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Byte ordering strikes me as rather arbitrary.
Arbitrary perhaps, but not unmotivated. Big-endian of course has the obvious relation to how we write numbers. Little-endian has the advantage that if you are attempting to load a 1-byte value into a 2-byte register you can use the same offset (assuming the next byte is 0). This means casting an unsigned byte to a short to an int or back does not require any actual pointer fiddling.
Now, back to your regular program...
Um, I don't mean to flame, but why does it matter? Byte ordering strikes me as rather arbitrary.
Yes, it's completely arbitrary. Which means that since Kerberos is supposed to be Big Endian, Microsoft had no compelling reason to screw with it. Its arbitrary, but by no means interchangable. Now when using Kerberos you actually need the check every time you use an integer to determine which way 'round it ought to be, thus allowing for a whole new class of bugs. Hooray.
Why?
This comment is sadly a joke. Most LAN games are not going to have complex routing issues. What routing issues do you think the average single or dual hub network is going to have??? Do you think they develop their games around the idea that at 5:00pm Corporate America suddenly turns into Blizzard Central? Of course they don't. Secondly, the networking overhead is not going to be detectable for your average game on a LAN unless it's a total peice of crap game. If TCP is good enough for WAN based multi-player gaming, it's certainly good enough for LAN play!!!!! At best, assuming sane implementations for both protocols, you *may* see differences of a few ms per PACKET and even still, I seriously doubt you'll even find that much of a difference!
Simply put, use of IPX is certainly for nothing more than restricting user options and control or just maybe, they have this old IPX networking library laying around that works and they'd simply not rewrite it unless they had too. Meaning? They might of been trying to save time and money and it have nothing to do with control or technical merits of the protocol. As for your assertion that IPX has bandwidth guarantees, please back that statement up. That's pretty hard to do when a) it's going over ethernet and b) the os can commit to the application all day long at what it thinks it can deliver over the wire but it really has no say at all, otherwise, a single IPX station could bring down a whole IPX network (that is, one computer says, all the network bandwidth is mine...go find your own). The words, "ya right!" come to mind. How would it control this with other types of network activity on the wire? After all, when it's all said and done, it's the wire activity that counts!
End point, you're statement is completely without merit and makes no sense. If you do have games which support multiple protocols on the same OS and one is notibly faster than the other, it more likely it is reflective of nothing more than one was optimized and the other was extremly poorly implemented, or both.
It's really as simple as that.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Which side of the road you drive on is arbritrary. Things just work a lot better if everybody agrees on the *same* arbritrary.
The existing dominant processors are the IBM and Sun big iron.
Maybe you like reading the hex value 12345678 as 78 56 34 12, but I don't.