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McDonalds Free Wi-Fi Users Soak Up Seating
bfire writes "McDonalds has earmarked potential changes to seating plans in some restaurants to prevent free Wi-Fi users from monopolizing seating, particularly in peak periods. The availability of Wi-Fi means people are now spending 35 minutes in McDonalds — rather than the average ten minutes that patrons used to spend eating there. But it appears not everyone is happy with the increased 'stickiness' of customers, with some licensees in Australia reporting that Wi-Fi users aren't turning over seats fast enough. The restaurant chain is considering options including space demarcation to deal with the problem."
Who said anything about using public hotspots for secure transactions? Always a bad idea.
That said, the best way I've found to work around this limitation is to have an SSH server on my box at home, and set up my laptop to tunnel all my web traffic over SSH to my desktop. Any MITM attacks are then easily detected, because any potential attacker would have to present a different public key to either side, and SSH will report the probable MITM and exit. It also encrypts all traffic until it gets to your home network, preventing any packet sniffing. Here's a short tutorial I wrote up on the topic, it's a lot easier than you'd think: http://spareclockcycles.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/ssh-secure-browsing-via-socks-proxy/
Whaddya think of KDE 4.2.x? :D
Also, I've never used QT Creator. *downloads it*
I think KDE 4.2 is bad-ass. I give it 3.5 out of 4 stars. This is from someone who has posted that Vista is better than Ubuntu or Kubuntu. I couldn't stand KDE 4.0 but I really like KDE 4.2. It's got that ease of use that I like so much about Gnome but it also has the workmanship and flexibility that I like from KDE. I would say that its as good as Vista in -some- areas, and arguably better in others. The assignment of applets to the task bar is better in KDE - actually always has been, but Vista still has way better common file dialogs.
QT Creator is pretty cool. I made a simple application that looks at SVG files and pulls stuff out, displaying them, and it was pretty easy to do in Qt Creator. I could not figure out how to get the forms editor to blend with normal edited code, but I'm sure there is a way. The forms editor itself is much better than the resource editor that comes with Visual Studio, the signals and slots mechanism is interesting coming from an MFC style event binding mechanism, and, above all, the class help is indexed much better than the SDK help is in Visual C++.
I would say that Visual Studio is still better for general C++ development because the intellisense works better... but you can certainly make pretty damned applications for Linux and in some ways Linux is better. I've had 64 bit Linux running for four years now and Microsoft cannot bring a 64 bit Windows to my machine because there is no signed SATA controller driver. Me wonders, how does Linux make all of these drivers for free, when they have no money?
Microsoft needs to move off their laurels because Linux tools are really recapturing the lead in C++. Microsoft needs to make Visual C++ 10.0 a killer for writing native code applications, or they are looking at Linux making a major development breakout and keeping the lead in native code development for a couple of years.
This is my sig.