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."
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.
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.
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
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.
Here's why Linux isn't making up ground on the desktop. When someone says something doesn't work right the response is RTFM, or that it is supposed to be like that. If Linux is going to succeed in environments like the German government then intuitive or ingrained use patterns should be the norm, no matter how much geeks like the other way and no matter how much it might seem like windows. Geeks can turn it back the other way if they like, they know how.
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.
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.
There is no replacement for StarCraft. There doesn't appear to be one on the horizon. I think it is remarkable that a company like Blizzard continues to support and enhance it. How many other companies are still provding free patches for five-year-old games? How many other companies even provide bug fixes for old products like this with little sales potential?
I too am concerned about Blizzard's actions with respect to bnetd. I understand their legitimate need (and their right) to control the spread of the Warcraft III beta, but they overreacted. I hope this is just an aberration. Too many companies seem to have run out of fresh ideas of their own, so they use the legal system to suppress fair competition. It would be a shame if Blizzard has joined that list.
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.
But that's just my $0.02 worth.
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).