Slashback: Bundestux, Kerberos, Blizzard

Slashback tonight with several updates and amplifications, starting with a nice report on the current state of the effort to put Linux into the heart of the German government, but also bits on Starcraft, cleaning up UNIX config, and Kerberos.

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."

Comments

Kerberos and MIT

[LWolenczak]

Its been a while since I played with kerberos, but if memory serves, atleast a few years back, i think each use, under the terms of the lisence, had to be registered with the MIT Athena Project. Maybe MIT had a little talk with microsoft and microsoft got scared. Well, we can atleast dream that. :)

Um, does anyone actually trust MS on this one?

[cherry2000]

My prediction: they make some more "extensions" to the Kerberos protocol, implement them in the next version of windows, and keep them proprietary.

I call this concession is just to keep people temporarily quiet while they do more nastiness with .NET.

Bundestag

[jezreel]

It seems like this is just another of these ongoing M$ vs. Open Source thingy, isn't it?
It'd be interesting to see what kind of work is done on these ~5000 computers. IMHO -though I may be totally wrong- parlamentarians only need some word-processing (and Netscape for pr0n :-). So I wonder why these people really care so much about what OS their using. Probably most of the people working there just don't care. If it weren't for that M$-Lobbyists ***I*** wouldn't care at all... So what is all the fuss about? Linux-Freaks bashing at M$-Lobbymonks, stories all over the net....

Maybe I'm missing something, so maybe s.o. could explain actually ***WHY*** they want to change OS

Slashdot in the FUTURE!!!

[Serial Troller]

• 2002. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts."
• 2002. CmdrTaco married to Kathleen Fent. Many geeks believe Kathleen, a purported transvestite, outmeasures CmdrTaco.
• 2002. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it.
• 2003. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God.
• 2003. Papperatzi videos of Miguel de Icaza caught going down on Bill Gates in his private yacht spread across Usenet. Miguel swears that recent decisions to rename the Gnome desktop to "Windows NT 6.0" have nothing to do with it.
• 2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity.
• 2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."
• 2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.
• 2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, an empty tub of crisco and several used condoms. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Steve Ballmer.
• 2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again.
• 2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.
• 2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again. With a woman.
• 2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place.
• 2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.
• 2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time.
• 2009. After years of living under the heel of his domineering wife, and being deprived of the homosexual orgies of the past, CmdrTaco commits suicide. Another sweaty geek mob gathers and tears Kathleen Fent to shreds. Geeks discover Ms. Fent was indeed a woman, but don't exactly know what that means. Driven by their sexually-repressed rage, they subsequently invade Redmond again and lynch the current CEO of Microsoft, Miguel de Icaza.
• 2010. Microsoft is blamed for the assassination of Richard Stallman. Redmond invasions by geek hordes become commonplace.
• 2011. Microsoft campus burnt to the ground by screaming, unwashed geek mob after Microsoft is blamed when a Linux hacker in Cambridge, Massachusetts spills his coffee on his pants.

Re:Doppelstandard

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, that's one of the great motivators for any church - the Catholic church is all about money and power, and very little to do with religion. Do you seriously want to try and claim that Scientology is the only religion out there with not-quite-pure reasons for existence?

Secondly, if Southern Baptists can get away with it, why shouldn't Scientologists?

Thirdly, what makes you think you have the right to tell people what is or what is not a religion? Arrogance like yours caused the age of colonialism and missionaries, and untold suffering.

Re:Doppelstandard

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll... grr...

Yeah, a country which has a constitution that forbids any group who has as part of their goals taking over the world is outlawing a group who has goal specifically saying they are out to take over the world. At the same time they are not banning users of an OS who don't have this as an official stated goal. Yeah, that is strange!

Re:Copy and paste of all things...

[maxpublic]

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 support a great many of these machines and every time I hear some yahoo going off on the idea that 'stability is no longer an issue' with Win2000 - or XP, which is less stable than 2000 - I can't help but think "what the fuck planet do they live on?"

And don't tell me I don't know what I'm doing, sonny. I do. No version of Windows is stable. Some are more stable than others but they still suck compared to Linux or BSD.

There's many, many good places for Linux, but the desktop just isn't there yet.

Every time one of you yahoos starts on about how 'Linux isn't ready for the desktop' there'll be one of me saying, "no, it isn't ready for your desktop - which says nothing about anyone else".

Christ, do all you Microsofties get together and practice certain chants in the morning before breakfast? "Linux isn't ready for the desktop, ommmmmmm", or "Windows is now stable, genuflect to the Great Bill".

Praise the penguin and pass the ammunition. I've got some fanboys heads that need a'mountin' on my wall....

Max

Blizzard Sucks AIDS Monkey Balls.

[Pr0p3r_Tr0ll4g3]

"Whatever you may think of Blizzard and the DMCA, at least it shows Blizzard is listening to its fans."

What fsckin' crack are you smoking? Blizzard is all about the benjamin's. Where the hell was TCP/IP LAN play in the first *eight* patches? They throw you a bone now and you want to suck their dick.
Good for you.

Re:MS Kerberos, a corporate culture of wrongness

[ppanon]

My guess is three Microsoft developers were sitting around one day.

Engineer 1: You know it's too bad we weren't around during the early days of Microsoft. It would have been great to have been the guy who came up with using the backslash, \, as a DOS directory separator because the forward slash, /, had already been used to indicate DOS command options.

Engineer 2: You know, I think if we work at it, we can top that with a new level of pure "Not Invented Here" stupidity.

Engineer 3: Nah, no one can top the backslash fiasco!

and the rest is history.