What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2082

Sorry, that wasn't clear. If that's what you meant I'll retract my retort.

I think that's likely, yes. I think more than half the people living in China and India have never heard of MS Windows; that's over a billion right there. I don't expect I'd have much trouble making up the rest of the number from elsewhere in the Third World. Even in the developed nations there's a decent cadre of people who haven't, due to age or incapacity or isolation.

Now, yes. Back in the late 1980s, no.

This is really a minor issue. My point was that arguing it's wrong to call X11 "X Windows" because "Windows" implies Microsoft is an unwarranted argument; and I'm saying it's unwarranted because since "X Windows" was an established (if informal) term prior to the ascendancy of Microsoft Windows, it remains recognizable as a non- Microsoft reference to people familiar with X11. (You might also infer some reluctance here to cede "Windows" to Microsoft.)

I don't know if that clarifies things.

Most. Microsoft Windows from Windows 2000 Advanced Server onward has Kerberos built-in as the authentication mechanism for Active Directory domains, which is Microsoft's preferred configuration for Windows going forward - and judging from what I heard at PDC 2005, is already dominant in large Windows shops. And since the late 1980s it's been used as the authentication mechanism in a lot of Unix shops.

From what I've seen, those places generally aren't using FTP much at all; they're using Kerberos-enabled file sharing and Kerberos- enabled file transfer utilities (like rcp and scp).

I have no idea. Google shows quite a few.

At least a couple of the most prominent SSH implementations (SSH Communications Security and OpenSSH) support Kerberos authentication.

Yes, and that's good, but the rhetorical position of a claim ("Kerberos seems to have been replaced by sftp") is different from that of a query ("hasn't Kerberos been replaced by sftp?"), and I believe it's your practice of starting threads with the former that's resulting in a certain amount of brusqueness in reply. I suspect your respondants' tones would be even friendlier if you provided some insight into your degree of knowledge of the matter up front ("I've only ever seen it used with FTP").

Of course that's not *mandatory* - in an unmoderated newsgroup, you can post however you like. I'm just suggesting that it would perhaps reduce the friction a bit.

*I* certainly make no claims to be particularly tactful, diplomatic, or patient, particularly on Usenet, and if truth be told the same could fairly be said of one or two other people here. Usenet, as a medium, intrinsically encourages a certain amount of heat in a discussion. (Several years ago I published a short essay on Usenet in the humanities journal "Works and Days" on Usenet where I noted this problem, and I've been keenly aware of it since - but that hasn't stopped me from sniping at other posters.)

Thus it's my observation that on Usenet the best offense is often a good defense, and one may win more arguments by being careful at the outset to qualify one's claims, cite sources, and so forth. That's all.

Tcl isn't a bad language. I'm just saying that if I were starting from a blank slate, Ruby's one thing I'd like to try. (I'm currently playing with APL, too, but it's not really well-suited for writing GUI applications in general.)

I doubt I'll ever write another X11 application in C that calls Xlib directly, anyway. Unless I write another window manager, perhaps, though my previous one met a tragic end many years ago when a backup tape proved unreadable, and I've never had the heart to try another. (Somehow duplicating lost effort seems so much worse than doing almost anything else that's new...)

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Pocket #9: A complete "artificial glen" with rocks, and artificial moon, and forester's station. Excellent for achieving the effect of the sublime without going out-of-doors. -- Joe Green