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."
Yes! Get it in you!
Oh well, back to dowloading pr0n...
Pr0n K1ng
--sdem
Linux is not an American product. It is not made in America. Linux developers are a bunch of loose-knit leftists from all over the globe, acting out of the interest of "global cooperation." Does this sound familiar? It ought to. The United Nations is an organization that operates (ostensibly) under similar principles, but has a far more sinister goal, which is the establishment of a One World Government that consumes and renders irrelevant the superior culture of the United States of America.
Would you allow a blue-bereted, black-helicoptered, jack-booted thug into your own home? If not, then why on Earth would you even consider installing Linux? For mere pennies a day you can run a moral operating system. I realize that Linux is big among the UN-loving liberals, but isn't most of Slashdot's readership libertarian/Republican? It seems to me that this is a fundamental contradiction, and that a lot of people need to start re-evaluating their priorities.
Thank you.
This troll was reposted from the Troll Library without permission of the original author. If you object to this post, or if you wish to add your troll to the Troll Library, please reply to this message.
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.
Sounds a little odd to me - given my druthers, I'd probably go with a BSD on the servers and a custom Linux distro on the desktops.
Speaking of which, I assume it would be SuSe?
But hey, what do I know. Not German, for one thing.
--saint
The German government actively suppresses Scientologists, yet Linux users are allowed to speak freely. Strange!
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. :)
My prediction: they make some more "extensions" to the Kerberos protocol, implement them in the next version of windows, and keep them proprietary.
.NET.
I call this concession is just to keep people temporarily quiet while they do more nastiness with
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.
it is simple to get the 10th post, but it is hard to know why the rebels only built half the deathstar.
yoda probably knows.
Yipee! They published their wire protocol:
"All data is encoded as little-endian."
Oh, god. Look, since the start of time itself binary data on the net has been big endian. No, you do not know better.
Head->table: Bang! Bang! Bang!
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Michael Jackson - Dirty Diana
You'll Never Make Me Stay
So Take Your Weight Off Of Me
I Know Your Every Move
So Won't You Just Let Me Be
I've Been Here Times Before
But I Was Too Blind To See
That You Seduce Every Man
This Time You Won't Seduce Me
She's Saying That's Ok
Hey Baby Do What You Please
I Have The Stuff That You Want
I Am The Thing That You Need
She Looked Me Deep In The Eyes
She's Touchin' Me So To Start
She Says There's No Turnin' Back
She Trapped Me In Her Heart
Dirty Diana, Nah [x3]
Dirty Diana, Let Me Be!
She Likes The Boys In The Band
She Knows When They Come To Town
Every Musician's Fan After
The Curtain Comes Down
She Waits At Backstage Doors
For Those Who Have Prestige
Who Promise
Fortune And Fame, A Life
That's So Carefree
She's Saying That's Ok
Hey Baby Do What You Want
I'll Be Your Night Lovin' Thing
I'll Be The Freak You Can Taunt
And I Don't Care What You Say
I Want To Go Too Far
I'll Be Your Everything
If You Make Me A Star
Dirty Diana, Nah [x12]
She Said I Have To Go Home
'Cause I'm Real Tired You See
But I Hate Sleepin' Alone
Why Don't You Come With Me
I Said My Baby's At Home
She's Probably Worried Tonight
I Didn't Call On The Phone To
Say That I'm Alright
Diana Walked Up To Me,
She Said I'm All Yours Tonight
At That I Ran To The Phone
Sayin' Baby I'm Alright
I Said But Unlock The Door,
Because I Forgot The Key,
She Said He's Not Coming Back
Because He's Sleeping With Me
Dirty Diana, Nah [x10]
Come On! [x4]
Money makes the world go 'round in Germany, too. What did you think?
The German govertment would devenetly have l33t skizlz compared to the american one because of american being owned by the windows companey and not being abel to do anything a.out it.
..thought i'd post something useless. isn't this gay?
fourth post!
I remember vividly my discussions with microsoft personel at the Win2K launch even in North Carolina. We were debating the validity of adding data to optional fields in a Kerb ticket which would effectively prevent a ticket issued in a unix realm from beung useful in a Windos Kerb realm, but not the reverse.
After filtering out the marketoids who repeatedly insisted everything was fine, a couple engineers conceded that the implementation was broken. It;s interesting to see Microsoft try and sell this as an extension that others shoupls implement and use. Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the effect of monopoly power.
'We support the standard but if you want to access our systems you need to implement the standard our way'
What a sham.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
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.
Choosing a desktop on the basis of a copy and paste model. I thought people got their priorities wrong but this takes the biscuit. Copy and paste vs free and more stable...
Just out of interest - how easy would it be to port a windows-style copy and paste model to KDE? I thought the KDE UI was relatively customisable in this sort of area so implementing such a feature would be relatively easy. Then again, I could be completely wrong.
It seems like this is just another of these ongoing M$ vs. Open Source thingy, isn't it? :-). 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....
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
Maybe I'm missing something, so maybe s.o. could explain actually ***WHY*** they want to change OS
0 001 11 1
Air - Le Soleil Est Pres Du Moi
Le soleil est pres du moi
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
ich bin ein Linuxuser
I am neither expert enough at Kerberos nor Samba to know if the above-referenced web page (Here in case you missed it) is truly sufficient for interoperability, but it sure looks like it.
And the critical language is at the bottom:
and
Translation: You can use this spec in your products. It's not covered by any of our current or pending patents, and even if it is, you can still use it royalty-free.
Other related specs are not rendered licensed or royalty-free, so they MAY have kept a loophole - but this looks sincere so far.
Amazing news, really.
The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life
i guess the main reason to keep windows on the desktops is to ensure compatibility with the rest of germany's industry and political infrastructure. just think of word attachments and how linux applications "handle" them. [personal note: they handle them right, they don;t!]. think also the shock secretary bertha would have if she comes in one day and sees KDE on the screen and the braindead ms office paperclip is gone...
I belive that your sig should be attributed to Voltare, not Beatrice Hall.
;)
Simon
Hmm. This is just the sort of problem Lycoris would attack. Another reason to download it -- as soon as the slashdot effect dies down.
You said it. This one needs to be posted more often.
Since WinNT is closed source, the only place to get service and support is from Microsoft.
Since Microsoft will not be supporting NT4 past 2003, they are wisely getting their house in order before they run out of time.
Everything has to change anyway, so they are entertaining the idea of building something better. Unfortunately, the argument that they don't have to replace the hardware at all wasn't good enough.
So rather than spend the money on consultants to use existing hardware, and free software, to rebuild their network, they are going to spend the money on consultants, new hardware and new software to retain the same functionality they have now.
And in a few years, when Microsoft stops supporting XP, they're right back where they are now.
That's why it's called an "Upgrade Cycle".
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
If France has a problem with Nazis, they should take it up with the Germans. Leave Yahoo out of it. Those fur lickers have no fucking balls at all. They still quiver even at the thought of German industrial might. Well, what can you expect from the French anyway? Maybe a good laugh or two when someone makes another "France surrenders" joke.
--Metrollica
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
A month ago someone on /. pointed me to y .h tm and it told me the following:
http://public.logica.com/~stepneys/cyc/l/libert
<SNIP>
The phrase "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is widely attributed to Voltaire, but cannot be found in his writings. With good reason. The phrase was invented by a later author as an epitome of his attitude. It appeared in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall under the pseudonym S[tephen] G. Tallentyre.
...
Hall wrote:
...The men who had hated [the book], and had not particularly loved Helvétius, flocked round him now. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. 'What a fuss about an omelette!' he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,' was his attitude now.
...
Hall herself claimed later that she had been paraphrasing Voltaire's words in his Essay on Tolerance: "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too."
</SNAP>
;)
0 001 11 1
Most people, at least in the US, don't bother to sit through the ending credits; so, they'll miss the trailer for Two Towers unless they're told about it as the trailer will run, properly, after the movie.
;)
Of course, given what theaters pay their workers, let's hope they actually tack it to the end and not the beginning.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
just a thought... i believe the patch for Starcraft with UDP support came out before all this mess. But, who cares.
If you do not, we will fire-bomb your cities (again) and have our way with your women (again).
And there is not a damn thing you could do to stop us, since all of the brave germans died in WW2 (or were killed at Nuremburg).
But I hate France more then I hate you. So lets hold hands and run through grassy fields!
"Whatever you may think of Blizzard and the DMCA, at least it shows Blizzard is listening to its fans." And it only took them 4 years to get around to this issue. Not that I'm complaining much, blizzard is better then some other software company's when it comes to patching games after sales for them have dropped. Still, I have to wonder if it's worth supporting a company that represses the people who actually buy their software in the name of piracy protection.
Actually the UDP support has nothing to do with bnetd. Starcraft was ported to Mac OS X, which doesn't have a working IPX protocol that they could use. So rather than try to graft IPX onto the Carbon version of Starcraft they created a new UDP version for LAN play with OS X, then added UDP to the other versions afterwards.
There were a few posts to insidemacgames.com's forums by the Blizzard techs who made the patch.
Here's the deal. I have a BIG lovely stationwagon with 5 cupholders, cloth interior, 6 tube hooka, large ash tray, leopard trash bag, and tinted windows.
This is a one person stationwagon rental. I am asking for $175.00 per month and all other expenses are paid. However, you are reponsible for washing the windshield, morning defrosting, and oil changes.
I work from 9:00am- 7:00pm weekdays......SO THE CAR-APARTMENT will not be available at those times for entertaining, sleeping, or cooking. Weekends are flexible.
The CAR-APARTMENT is furnished with a futon, one yellow pillow, a stuffed care-bear, and some left-over candy wrappers. (I like candy) Sometimes I like to leave my tenants snacks and such.
Of course you will have have to live/rent the CAR APARTMENT in my drive-way. It's quite nice and near the Berkeley Capus, 7-11, various neighborhood bars, and a laundromat. If you ask nicely I can even park my car at the laundromat so you have easy access to clean your clothing.
Color flashing, thunder crashing, dynamite machines.
"Whatever you may think of Blizzard and the DMCA, at least it shows Blizzard is listening to its fans."
Oh? Which fans might that be?
I think I can speak on behalf of D1 players everywhere: over 5 years on the clock and still running. Where's the patch for the dupe bug, Blizz? Oh, what's that you say? There's NOT a patch for the most egregious bug in the game YET? After 5 YEARS? And don't even get me started on all the other bugs that would be easily fixed if they gave half a rat's ass.
Hm. So much for the fans.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I now have it in me, about FIVE INCHES, as a matter of fact. What should I do next? It sort of hurts and makes me feel like I need to pee!
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
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.
...From 1933-1945. Apart from that, they were (and still are) ignorant louts. Only 'The Party' brought glory to germany, of only for a while.
But you bring up a good point. We (along with USSR) royally fucked Germany. BAD. No nation has ever been as destroyed as Germany was during ww2. You should take pride in that, that at least your ancestors were not a bunch of scared women.
We hated the japanese so much that we developed new ways of destroying cities, just to kill more of them.
And now, ~50 years later, we are immeasurably more powerfull. Not a superpower, but a hyper-power. No nation can even HOPE to stand up to us, militarily.
So warm up your women, Fritz, because GI Joe is coming, if you don't change your pacifist attitude.
Five inches is nowhere near far enough. Go for ten, my brother.
Oh well, back to dowloading pr0n...
Pr0n K1ng
All hail the Pr0n K1ng!!!
I was ready to post my message to the UnixConfig message board but apparently I wasn't logged into sourceforge. I think I'll just post my comments in response to the documents prepared there here instead:
...,{SMB|HTTP|NFS|...}).
/etc and ~/.*). This is where linuxconf falls down, it starts keeping its own copy of the configuration, which means if linuxconf takes over your system and then later something stuffs up, it's difficult to edit a text file manually without losing linuxconf completely.
--8<--
A core system would handle parsing, verification and storage of text-based configuration files in one or two basic formats.
We cannot do this. We must be able to handle arbirary file formats. There is no way we will get anyone to change the format of Samba's smb.conf, Apaches truly arcane httpd.conf, or DNS zone files for example. We *could* standardize on a uniform in memory representation but I'm not in favor of that either. I think we have to go all the way up to the API level (e.g. int exports_add(const char path, int flags,
The master copy of the configuration is always left in the native text files (in
Absolutely. The confuration files *are* the database. On a separate front, we might provide an idealized open-ended application configuration library for assisting new development but I think there would have to be some weight behind the main front before developers would even consider it. That might also give us the opportunity to normalize on a few file formats (e.g. scanf, WINI, XML).
Another option is to allow plugins to handle how the data is stored.
That's a goodish idea but there are interfacing issues. By "plugins" are you suggesting one could write their parser in C or C++ or Perl? At what point do you normalize on a common language? Keep in mind this has nothing to do with *file* formats.
In order for some features to work, it might be necessary for application developers to switch to the use of the configuration manager for their internal routines.
We cannot do this. We must transparently manage data within the configuration files of the applications themselves. There is no way in heck we'll get app developers to convert. Their intrests are far more important in their mind (and they're probably rigth).
A key element would be the configuration format description file. This would list the configuration options for a given piece of software, giving for each one the name, type (boolean, list, string, filename, internet address, etc.), options, category (for sub-sections within the config), and help text (short and long).
You'll end up with a glorafied property editor and that's not what you want. What I mean by this is that you do NOT just want to map configuration options within application config files to the configuration options of whatever tool we're talking about. This is one of the greatest failures of UNIX confuration tools. It would be far more effective to isolate and the concepts associated with changing the behavior of a system (or group of systems) rather than just mapping check boxes to booleans and selects to lists. The KDE runlevel editor is a spectacular example of this failure; it does not isolate the concept of what it means to change the initialization behavor of your system.
For example, rather than writing configuration screens for Samba, Apache, Pro-FTPd, and NFS exports, write an "Exports" module that handles all of them uniformly. They all do essentially the same thing; make a portion of your filesystem available as a network service. Similarly, instead of having a PPP dialer, make a module that controls your "Network Interfaces" (RH has largely done this working PPP into network-scripts). Again, isolate concepts rather than parameterize configuration options.
I, like most of my generation, grew up watching the Smurfs. I loved them so much that I tuned in every Saturday morning to see what crazy hijinks those lovable little blue creatures would get into.
It is just now that I have realized what I was really tuning into each and every Saturday morning was in actuality Socialist Propaganda!! Yes that is correct, Papa Smurf and all of his little Smurf minions are not the happy little characters Hanna Barbara would have us believe! The cartoon was really created by the Russian government in order to indoctrinate the youngest members of western society with Socialist beliefs and ideals thus destroying their resistance to the imminent Russian invasion that was to occur when this generation (my generation) grew up.
To prove my point I submit that 1.) They live in a communal village and are discouraged to leave the village without the company of their fellow Smurfs. 2.) Every Smurf has his own specific job and does not deviate from that job. The job even becomes part of their personality and their name (Brainy Smurf, Handy Smurf, etc.) 3.) If ever a Smurf decides to strike out on his own he is cast into danger in some way of another and it is up to the collective to save him. 4.) Papa Smurf looks an awful lot like Karl Marx plus, he wears all that red.
And let us not forget Smurfette, the lone female Smurf and the embodiment of community property.
In the face of such convincing evidence, it is easy to mark the Smurfs as the Socialists they are, and their nemeses Gargamel (and his maladjusted cat Azrael, a not so subtle attack on ISRAEL) is the personification of Capitalism; out for himself and profit trying to destroy the peaceful commune of Smurfs.
Thankfully our resistance was not destroyed, thanks to the determination of other cartoons such as G.I. Joe and Richie Rich who's goal it was to instill in the children of the western world the morals and values of Capitalism.
Hey, I agree. Copy/paste is one of the worst usability problems with KDE (and other window managers I've used).
It works perfectly in windows.
I hope that this news reminds some people that there are still basic problems to be addressed before linux on the desktop can go mainstream.
(OTOH, I am pretty impressed with KDE. It has been running 160 days straight on this box, and 160 days ago was my first boot... other window managers I've used have not been so stable.)
It's time to make an app that will make a "LAN" out of the internet. Nothing drastic, just an IRC chat client, and some software to keep track of the IP addresses of the gamers, and fool the game in to thinking that the game is being played over a LAN. It shouldn't be much harder than hacking together a new battle.net, and I doubt there is anything Blizz legal could do about it (since all you're doing is making a virtual UDP LAN with a chat client, Blizzard's own software is doing all the rest). This software could even be open source, since it requires Blizz to add the LAN play themselves (read: War3 betas wouldn't work with this). I see definite possibilities...
BlackGriffen
Yes, sir!
Uuuuuuuuuunnnnggggh...
There's six!
Uuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnngggghhhh...
And seven!!
Uuuugghhh-- Aaah!!!!!!!!
Eight... Uhh...
Uuuggh... Aaaah!!! Aaaaiiee dear GODD!!!
Nine....
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Oh my God I look like Goatse.cx!!!
TEN!!!
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
What's the about MS granting the world a non-exclusive license to implement their Kerberos protocol? We need an *exclusive* license. We don't want the trilobites on Europa to be implementing a protocol that has security implementations.
What ever happened to the Prime Directive, dammit!
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
From the license:
However, if Microsoft becomes aware or has any patent(s) and/or pending applications that are essential to implement this specification, Microsoft will grant you a royalty-free license under applicable Microsoft intellectual property rights essential to implement this specification for the sole purpose of implementing this specification.
First, there's a word missing in there somewhere. To what are they granting a license under "applicable Microsoft intellectual property rights"? But more importantly, when they grant whatever it is, what will those "applicable Microsoft intellectual property rights" do to the entities that try and use whatever is being granted? This is NOT the GPL by any stretch of the imigination.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
So the Bundestag testers don't like KDE's Cut-and-Paste method, and hence recommend Windows for the desktops. Um... ..isn't that why we have source code?
-John
According to a report on theonering.net, Jackson himself said that right after the scene with Sam and Frodo fades to black, but before the credits, is when the approximately 3.5 minutes of footage from Two Towers will play.
How many things can you get wrong?
The MIT code is updated fairly regularly.
I am not sure what you mean by fully complete as it is the standard and quite adequate to get the job done as well as develop support for it in other applications. If you mean otherwise, please state what it lacks.
KDE has implimented the CTL+(C|V|X) method that windows uses. I don't get how people, that I would assume be coming from windows, not be familiar with CTRL+(X|C|V) for cut/copy/paste?
Did everyone just forget that KDE does that and assume it used the standard highlight + button2 thing to copy/paste?
Palin...
Why do Westwood, Blizzard, Microsoft et al force you to either use IPX for LAN games, or connect through their stupid battle.net, westwood.net, msn zone, et al services? Why, when me and a buddy are on the same LAN do we have to either use IPX or use a third-party server to connect to each other? Thank God MacIntosh doesn't support IPX so Blizzard was forced to make a tcp/ip based lan option.
You didn't know this?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Because, for LAN games, IPX is a better protocol. It bypasses a lot of routing issues that happen otherwise, and is simply faster. Try running a game that supports both (loke Age of Empires 2) via TCP/IP, and then one via IPX to the same person. You'll experience a lot more lag on the TCP/IP game, in general. I'm not certain of the reasons behind this, but I know that IPX has a 'guaranteed' bandwidth that TCP/IP lacks since it can only be used in LAN settings.
And... I though Mac did support IPX...
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
KDE has implimented the CTL+(C|V|X) method that windows uses. I don't get how people, that I would assume be coming from windows, not be familiar with CTRL+(X|C|V) for cut/copy/paste?
Let's do the same operation (select, accel+C, select, accel+V) on Mac OS (Windows is the same), the KDE desktop, and the GNOME desktop.
Mac. Select, Cmd+C: Copy first selection to clipboard. Select, Cmd+V: Replace second selection with copy of first selection. Mac users and Windows users are used to this behavior.
KDE. Select: Copy first selection to clipboard. Ctrl+C: ignored. Select: Copy second selection to clipboard. Ctrl+V: No change, because second section is replaced with copy of second selection, the first selection being forgotten entirely.
GNOME. Select: Copy first selection to X clipboard. Ctrl+C: Copy X clipboard to GTK+ clipboard. Select: Copy second selection to clipboard. Ctrl+V: Replace second selection with GTK+ clipboard (which contains the first selection).
Did everyone just forget that KDE does that and assume it used the standard highlight + button2 thing to copy/paste?
KDE's semantics are the same as the oldskool X method, with Ctrl+V simply sending a button2 at the insertion point. GTK+ and some other toolkits have solved the problem by keeping a second clipboard for ^X ^C ^V.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Slackware.
Next question.
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.
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!
I don't think anything's broken.
OK, with you so far.
insanity-inducing if you're used to the simpler Windows model.
Here you lost me..
Using the windows clipboard isn't simpler, it's more complex - highlight, edit -> copy, click destination, edit -> paste.
Using X (or at least Xfree, the only version I've used), it's highlight, (middle) click destination; half as many steps to accomplish the same task.
I keep hearing about how poor X implements the clipboard - for graphics, it's true; but for text, it's not only better, it's simpler.
Can someone explain to me exactly where the problem lies with the X clipboard?
It uses UDP/IP a slightly different protocol than TCP/IP. One of the differences between the two is that UDP does not gauruntee that packets will come in order unlike UDP/IP. Think of UDP/IP as a protocol where you need to implement your own rules for packet loss and such and TCP/IP takes care of it for you. If I am bullshitting please correct me.
If only I had moderator points...
While everyone else has poked holes into your "faster" claim, I'd like to point out that IPX is indeed routable and can be used on a WAN as well as a LAN. That's why IPX has "Network Numbers". Of the few ethernet protocols Microsoft Windows supported, NetBEUI was one of the few that was completely non-routable. IPX in games is merely a holdover from the old days of DOS games where having a TCP/IP stack was unheard of.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Two jobs ago, I worked for Enlighten Software, whose EnlightenDSM product was supposed to do all this with some bells and whistles. They went bankrupt trying.
:-)
The only way I see it happening is if some common configuration API gets some traction and then everyone agrees to write shims to get it to talk to their favorite OS or piece of middleware. I am not optimistic.
"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.
Before Windows 98 or 2000, setting up a TCP/IP network was not so easy.
Either you had a DHCP server (small chance in a home network), or you'd had to assign an IP address to each PC.
IPX on the other hand, "just works" out of the box for small networks (like a typical LAN party). Simply connect a couple PCs, and they'll figure out the network themselves. (This has always been one of the strongest selling points for Novell.)
IMHO, that is the real reason for IPX games.
Windows 98 and later have a feature to autoconfigure a TCP/IP network, in much the same way as IPX. Novell has switched to TCP/IP for Netware servers as well, making IPX largely obsolete.
WWTTD?
No, not exactly. The Bundestag was and will again be bluescreened,
but some members of the Bundestag will still be "having fun".
Umm, no. Consider the Virgin Islands, a U.S. territory. Everything is American, they pay Federal taxes, and the cars have steering wheels on the left. Yet they drive on the left side of the road.
I think there was a virtual lan over internet called KALI back in the old days of Doom/ROTT... Perhaps there is still some form of it bouncing around out there..
Cool! Amazing Toys.
International support for this campaign wasn't very strong. Why don't you wirte an email in English to uwe.kuester@bundestag.de in order to let him know what kind of solution you like the most.
Hurray! But... It is jus the license and doc's for half of their extensions: the part which does group enumeration. Which was already understood anyway.
The real beef - i.e. the domain controller specifics - are still as closed as ever. And according to the presentation at the RSA conference last week - are going to remain so.
Congrat's to slashdot for picking it up just as the spinmeisters intended :-)
Dw.
Your reasoning about the digit order in Arabic is wrong because it is completely irrelevant for addition whether your MS digit is on the left or on the right.
Arabic numbers are written LS right, MS left because of the way numbers are read in classical Arabic. Classical Arabic (unlike modern standard arabic) reads numbers LS digit first. Since Arabic is written right-to-left, the LS digit comes first, i.e. right. That's why Arabic numbers in Arabic script are written the way they are.
Since numeral ordering is a relatively script-independent thing, the order of the numerals was retained when the Arabic digits were adopted into the latin script (probably in medieval Spain). This is convenient because most Indo-European languages pronounce their numbers MS digits first.
BTW The Arabic numbers weren't even invented by the Arabic. Arabic numbers were originally invented in India and written in the Sanskrit language and the Devanagari script which runs left-to-right. Sanskrit numerals are pronounced MS digit first, so it makes sense that way as well. In Arabic, the so-called "Arabic" digits are called Indian digits even today.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
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).
The socialist party supports Free Software, but conservative Support is stronger.
Diablo2, a newer Blizzard game than Starcraft, doesn't support IPX, but uses TCP/IP for non-Battlenet games, and it doesn't matt if it's LAN or WAN.
The only reason I and most other people know about bnetd, is because of all the news surrounding it.
I've been playing SC over lans for years, IPX was always a huge problem, yes, now it is fixed, but it is much better than using battle.net even over the net. I've always had problems with battle.net, with bnetd they've all disappeared (like clients getting dropped from the lobby for no reason).
D1 was great in its day. I lost thousands of hours to it. But D1 is a dead product, superceded by D2. If you liked the original, you will probably like D2 even better. It's the same basic game, but with far, far greater variety and replay value. Of course, if you didn't like D1, you may not like D2 either. To each his own.
You're wrong. D2 is a whole different kettle of fish. I have both, and you know what? I prefer D1. D2 is not an enhancement, it's a cheap knock-off of a game they did right the first time.
How many other companies are still provding free patches for five-year-old games?
All their recent patches do is remove functionality, change the networking of the other games to better suit D2, and screw with the balance for games that will never be balanced. Frankly, I could live without patches like that. I like the rules of a game to remain consistent over time as I play it, but that's not the case in SC and D2.
Yes, Blizzard has problems. If you look at their overall record, I think Blizzard is still one of the good guys. There don't seem to be many of them left. Give Blizzard a little slack, at least for a while longer.
Give me a break. I was giving Blizzard slack for years. I'm tired of it. If you'd been around Bnet as many years as I have, and seen the way they treat their oldest fans, you'd be disgusted with them too. I'm all out of patience and loyalty to Blizz.
You act like it's unreasonable for them to patch those bugs in D1? Those bugs ruin the game online. People don't even need trainers to ruin the play. Not only that, those bugs have been fixed in fan-written mods, yet Blizzard continues to say they can't do it. Won't is closer to the truth; I'm sure if they asked the modders for the patch code they'd just GIVE it to them for free, just to see the bugs finally fixed. And yet they've managed to release enough patches to bring Diablo to version 1.09, without ever finding time to even bother with it. You know what those patches did? They removed functionality from D1, and brought it in line with D2's new Bnet networking scheme.
I don't think what I ask is too much to ask from a company like Blizzard used to be. But they're not what they once were, and I for one have seen through it.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Ah, you mean I have to think up two IP addresses from scratch and assign them to my PC's? AAAAAAAAAGGHGHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhh! Novell, come save me from the agony and rending of flesh!
Boy, talk about a 180-degree policy change! First Microsoft keeps the extensions proprietary, then they reverse that and make it so open that license is even extended to other worlds. I guess that's a good thing. I'd hate to see a Mars mission that couldn't login to the on-board network simply because the authentication algorithm wasn't licensed for use off of Earth...
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The bandwidth 'guarantees' mentioned were in that IPX only works over ethernet, therefore it was built to rely on that speed. TCP/IP has no such inherent bandwidth.
TCP/IP on an internal LAN will work fine if you have an internal IP server and router. Otherwise you may go to external routers and (depending on your uplink type) you may have severe problems related to this. For instance, if you have a half-duplex uplink, your 'LAN' game no longer is, it's an internet game and has all sorts of related lag issues. IPX obviates all these concerns by simply not working outside a LAN setup. Additionally, for those who have no IP server, IPX functions fine connected to a hub alone. It is sometimes a bit more difficult to get TCP/IP running stand-alone in that fashion (by the masses, not you network geeks).
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
You're still wrong. Ethernet doesn't guarantee bandwidth... there's just usually more of it. This has nothing to do with protocol.
If you don't want lag, don't go over the net. IPX is routable though no does it on the Internet at large. Hell I'll even encapsulate it in TCP and spit it out on the other end for you. There is no reason to run any other protocol other then TCP unless you're bored or TCP is unsupported/broken. Considering more people have TCP/IP running by default I find it hard to beleive that it's a problem to setup at a lan party or otherwise.
kashani, who once ran THE largest Tribes 2 server where the FastEther port on the server was the slowest part of the uplink.
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
I'd put a vote in for OSX, as an OSX user :-)
Seriously, though, they have solved two simple problems: config files, and network config. Their config files are in xml, and the generic property editor is like an xml editor. Netinfo is their networked config database, and that's been moved to LDAP.
They have some market, and some money, and the API had been around the block. If unix programmers clone it and adopt it, it'll be easier to write software that works in OS X, which matters if you're writing components that are going to be used in a desktop OS.
As for having specific key apps using these libs, well, don't sweat it. If it becomes popular in unix, people will start to adapt their software to use it. It might take a while, though.
The one missing element is dealing with "little languages" config files. These are config files that are parsed top to bottom, and support macros or variables. The most extreme example is the sendmail.cf, but even nc-ftp's config file qualifies.
I think that those should be left as-is.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I don't know enough about IPX to comment, but I do know that TCP/IP, and UDP/IP, have no trouble taking advantage of the speed that fast ethernet can provide. They also work fine on slower networks.
That sounds like crap to me. Your network would have to be set up very strangely for the TCP layer to think it should send packets to hosts that are on the same ethernet (and the same IP network) to a router and back. Normally configured TCP stacks, even Microsoft's, put a TCP packet destined for a machine on the same LAN into an ethernet frame addressed to that machines ethernet MAC address.
What do you mean by an IP server anyway? It sounds like you mean a DHCP server, since you say that a stand-alone IP network is harder to set up than IPX with "no IP server". That would make sense, and I agree with you on that. However, you don't seem to know that the DHCP server is consulted every few hours or days to tell it you still want your IP address (renew your lease). You don't need to send all your packets through it.
You also don't need a router. Just put all the machines that are connected to the LAN on the same IP network, e.g. 10.x.x.x.
The only advantage IPX has is that it's easier to set up an isolated IPX network because you don't have to select unique IP addresses. That's not a very good reason to force people to use that instead of TCP, since LANs, other than at parties, are set up for a long time, and usually run IP, but not usually IPX unless they were set up for games.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
You're right. UDP is just bare IP packets, but with port numbers and a checksum. IPX is like that too. IPX has SPX, which is like TCP, but over IPX instead of IP.
I'm not sure why you pointed this out, since both IP and IPX networks provide packet and stream services. I don't think IPX packets are "reliable", but I don't know.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Off-topic reminisce:
(this actually reminds me of the time when I ordered an ethernet card for an old Sun-1 (upgraded to a Sun-2). I'm not talking about a sparc-1, either. I mean a 68010 processor with 1/2 megabyte of ram in gold-capped 64Kbit ram chips and a multibus backplane.
In any case, the ethernet card arrived without an ethernet prom. When I complained about this, my sales-droid fired back that this didn't matter because Sun-OS would just use the MAC address of the built-in card.
When I emailed him that my sun didn't have a built in ethernet card, he sent back a rather condescending note about how every sun ever sold had ethernet on it.
After a few such exchanges, I finally got a bit flustered and send back an email telling him that I had a box with serial number 300 etched in the back by hand, a tape of an early release of unix for the Sun that wasn't even written by SUN (Uniplex, I think), and a copy of the glossy PR sheet where sun announced that every box in the future would be sold with ethernet.
I ended by telling him that if he still didn't believe me, "you should talk to someone who was with the company when this computer was shipped -- I suggest Bill Joy".
I never got a direct reply from him, but the eprom did show up shortly after that.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.