We get our password list by post. You could argue that that's also risky, but we trust our postal service in Finland.
The two banks I have money at, do it this way:
Bank #1: List of one-time passwords and 24 different "transaction" passwords delivered by post. You use your access code and one of the one-time passwords to access your account. Then if you want to make a payment, you need one of the 24 transaction passwords - you are told which one to use for each transaction (they have a letter of the alphabet associated with each one). This list lasts me about 2-3 months, but they obsolete it at a certain point even if I have one-time passwords left. When I get my new list, it also contains a new set of 24 transaction passwords.
Bank #2: Here I get a list of 1-time "do-anything" passwords. I use my access code and access password to login to my account, but I can't do anything useful, not even see my funds, nada. If I want to do anything, I need to apply one of the one-time passwords.
Yes, that could be done, but that's not really the same as having the user's computer compromised. Oh, well, maybe this is just semantics. I really dunno. I am in my 10th year of online banking, and my assessment is that it's hard to be a victim of any sort of attack, if one just keeps hi/her eyes open, at least a little bit.
even if a user's computer has a keylogger installed, the bad guys would only be able to steal the access code, not the password of the user - because the passwords are from a list and are unique for each session. At least that's how they do it in all banks in Finland. Once the user is logged on, to start a new (parallel) session, a new password would be requited, even if the bad guys would manage to steal the one-time password just when the user is logged on.
Though I disagree on principle with the implication of your post... it made me laugh (and I needed that, got a bad flu), so high-fives to you and the banjo players.
You are right! Why can't we all just take it into the ass and just shut the hell up? Lenovo's gotta sell some new laptops - how will they do it if we all stayed with our snappier, faster OS?
Complaining about Vista's slowness is un-American!!!
Yeah, the SSD in the Eee is actually some kind of Flash RAM with a UDMA interface. The problem with the swap file is that its location is fixed so wear leveling might not do much for it.
You can read my comment (which I wrote after doing some due diligence here
In fact, I can quote myself:
I'd like to point out that "Siliconmotion SM223" is NOT the SSD manufacturer - only the interface to the memory itself is Siliconmotion SM223. Here http://www.siliconmotion.com.tw/en/en2/products_FMCC.htm you can see that SM223 is "Compact Flash card controller with UDMA support".
We basically don't know what the storage Flash RAM is, who manufactured it and what are its specs. That's a pity, because I am extremely curious to see what is the number of guaranteed rewrite cycles. That's the spec I am most curious about. After all, the SSD of my Eee is going to store the most critical part of the computer (as I am guessing it's more reliable than the SDHC card). We have no clue what CF card or chip is in the Eee. It could even be a MLC Flash with some 5000-10.000 write/erase cycles, for all we know.
Did you install XP yourself or was it preinstalled? Perhaps the preinstalled XP doesn't have the swap?
blah. why are there even MORE stories about this on slashdot. it was obviously hype to benefit nick, benefit his new employer, and then play down the MS leaving angle to make somewhat/all nice with his old employer. everybody wins. even slashdot. go go gadget newscycle.
everybody except me, im the idiot taking the time to click the link and write this little rant. and you're the idiots taking the time to mod me -1 troll and +5 underrated. It's called "circlejerk".
I bought one! German model, so the keyboard is mostly compatible with my Finnish needs. I got the 4GB Flash + webcam (not the Surf) model. I am really excited about this purchase, similar to the time I got my first ever PC.
I'll be looking for informative websites for Eee PC users now. I am curious about the longevity of the built-in Flash RAM.
As a new Eee PC user (bought it today, not yet delivered, hopefully during the week-end)... how does the XP install handle the lack of pagefile.sys on the system drive (or did you actually leave that on? I am extremely worried about Flash RAM's longevity - it has a limited number of writes (100.000 on the best Flash RAMs I know of, which is an achievable limit, even on sectored Flash)?
And what does Asus themselves say about this issue, Flash RAM and temporary files?
I hope you notice my question.... thanks in advance.
You are 100% right. I remember the announcements for the Eee PC and the RRP was about 100$ less than you can buy them for, now that Asus has actually ramped UP the production. To tell you honestly, I don't even remember when I have seen a product selling above RRP. Maybe sometimes in the 80s the ZX Spectrum in Trieste (Italy) computer shops, due to the huge demand from Ex-Yugoslavia visitors.
When Everex gets their subnotebook in order (it's having some overheating problems) and drop the price to match that of the Eee PC, we'll start to have some competition and the prices MAY start to drop, but my feeling is that the demand is so huge that it will take some time to reach that point.
Exactly. I am actually impressed by the vision & associated balls that Asus had with the EEE - and to some extent Everex with the CloudBook. These machines are the new wave, one very huge wave at it, too. They won't mean the end of desktops, because many will still like gaming, but guess what? They might just do it on the smae OS that runs their subnotebooks - Linux (for instance).
I won't lie to you, I'm not mad about Octave's graphing capabilities and the integration with gnuplot. I think for now I'll stick with Matlab - provided I can run it sufficiently well on the eee - which I just bought!!
I just bought a GERMAN eee PC! Before reading your post - but for those exact reasons. Yay me, I guess? Looking forward to get my lustful hands on the thing...
MS didn't think this through very carefully - it seems like a giant "oops!" waiting to happen.
Though I'm really looking forward to Linux with Wine being better at running existing Windows applications, than Windows 7. That's an amusing thought, isn't it? I'm also giggling inside at the thought that the company to jump on the idea of Windows 7 will be HP, since they have developed a habit to embrace doomed technologies of this sort.
I keed, I keed... Besides, I really doubt the veracity of this rumour. MS would be crazy to do this (they might as well rewrite their corporate strategy as "shoot ourselves in the feet with machine guy").
I didn't even dream some 15 months ago that I would ever say this, but OO.o (and StarOffice) are _better_ at this point, than the current version of Office - at least it's easier to create formulas and the documents look better. The installation is smaller, and the end product is a standardized document format (ODF) _supported by a number of vendors_ so it's future-proof. And macros in OO.o Write seem to work better than those in Word.
OO.o for Aqua is still in alpha, so I consider it still as not being an option. The non-Aqua requires a crudgy X11 install and that "can be a difficult process" (quoting the OO.o for MacOS X website).
I don't pies in the sky but something that works. eee PC + Linux work, now. There's even Matlab for Linux!
Those are bogus Verkkokauppa prices they put there when they ran out of the eee PC. The real price (while the device was still available) was below EUR 400. And I thought they had them back in the warehouse by now (was out of the country for a while on holiday). Well shit, looks like I'll be ordering from Taiwan after all. F* you verkkokauppa, I'm sorry to say.
I might call datadog.fi and ask them if they plan on selling the eee PC. They have consistently had the lowest prices in Helsinki, so it might be worth waiting a week. But not more than that.
The Eee PC is one iteration of "Moore's Law" away from being a decent Vista machine. This statement is lame. What is "one iteration" exactly? Do you think the successor of the eee PC will be able to run the current version of Windows Vista? For your information, that succcessor has already been announced and is the eee PC 900 and Asus did not put ANY effort of making it Vista-capable. And they never will. Why? Because people have already voted with their wallets, massively supporting a Linux-based ultraportable laptop.
If MS wants to see Windows Vista on the eee PC, they will have to trim it and adapt it. Or, you know, support this light version of Windows XP.
All in all, the GP was spot on and showed much more thinking before posting than you did.
I'm buying one (or two - must think of mom) Asus eee PCs. I've never felt so good about buying a computer in many years. I was very close to buying it online the past week but finally I decided I'll buy it locally in Helsinki.
The straw that broke the camel's back was the problems I had with formulas in Word for Mac on my brother-in-law's iBook. Nice machine but OO.o works much better for me - and since it runs on Linux, and I always wanted a LIGHT notebook... eee PC just won out as the logical option for my on-the-move needs. If I could run a Matlab equivalent on it (and I will definitely look into that) this little gem might replace one of my desktops as well.
By the way, this is my first experiment with Linux as a desktop OS. I have a router with CentOS at home, but as my WinXP-running desktops die out, I'll be replacing them with Linux. Sorry MS, no Vista for me.
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Does the Sampo net bank use a list of passwords? Or do you always use the same password? It's not clear from your post.
We get our password list by post. You could argue that that's also risky, but we trust our postal service in Finland.
The two banks I have money at, do it this way:
Bank #1: List of one-time passwords and 24 different "transaction" passwords delivered by post. You use your access code and one of the one-time passwords to access your account. Then if you want to make a payment, you need one of the 24 transaction passwords - you are told which one to use for each transaction (they have a letter of the alphabet associated with each one). This list lasts me about 2-3 months, but they obsolete it at a certain point even if I have one-time passwords left. When I get my new list, it also contains a new set of 24 transaction passwords.
Bank #2: Here I get a list of 1-time "do-anything" passwords. I use my access code and access password to login to my account, but I can't do anything useful, not even see my funds, nada. If I want to do anything, I need to apply one of the one-time passwords.
Yes, that could be done, but that's not really the same as having the user's computer compromised. Oh, well, maybe this is just semantics. I really dunno. I am in my 10th year of online banking, and my assessment is that it's hard to be a victim of any sort of attack, if one just keeps hi/her eyes open, at least a little bit.
Over the wire? That would be crazy. Nobody does that - here, at least. I am really curious what bank would do so - any examples you know?
Session hijacking is something I thought about, but it seems pretty easy to protect against.
even if a user's computer has a keylogger installed, the bad guys would only be able to steal the access code, not the password of the user - because the passwords are from a list and are unique for each session. At least that's how they do it in all banks in Finland. Once the user is logged on, to start a new (parallel) session, a new password would be requited, even if the bad guys would manage to steal the one-time password just when the user is logged on.
Though I disagree on principle with the implication of your post... it made me laugh (and I needed that, got a bad flu), so high-fives to you and the banjo players.
You are right! Why can't we all just take it into the ass and just shut the hell up? Lenovo's gotta sell some new laptops - how will they do it if we all stayed with our snappier, faster OS?
Complaining about Vista's slowness is un-American!!!
(I'm not American.)
Breaking binary compatibility would make development considerably *easier*, not harder.
You can read my comment (which I wrote after doing some due diligence here
In fact, I can quote myself: I'd like to point out that "Siliconmotion SM223" is NOT the SSD manufacturer - only the interface to the memory itself is Siliconmotion SM223. Here http://www.siliconmotion.com.tw/en/en2/products_FMCC.htm you can see that SM223 is "Compact Flash card controller with UDMA support".
We basically don't know what the storage Flash RAM is, who manufactured it and what are its specs. That's a pity, because I am extremely curious to see what is the number of guaranteed rewrite cycles. That's the spec I am most curious about. After all, the SSD of my Eee is going to store the most critical part of the computer (as I am guessing it's more reliable than the SDHC card). We have no clue what CF card or chip is in the Eee. It could even be a MLC Flash with some 5000-10.000 write/erase cycles, for all we know.
Did you install XP yourself or was it preinstalled? Perhaps the preinstalled XP doesn't have the swap?
everybody except me, im the idiot taking the time to click the link and write this little rant. and you're the idiots taking the time to mod me -1 troll and +5 underrated. It's called "circlejerk".
I bought one! German model, so the keyboard is mostly compatible with my Finnish needs. I got the 4GB Flash + webcam (not the Surf) model. I am really excited about this purchase, similar to the time I got my first ever PC.
I'll be looking for informative websites for Eee PC users now. I am curious about the longevity of the built-in Flash RAM.
As a new Eee PC user (bought it today, not yet delivered, hopefully during the week-end)... how does the XP install handle the lack of pagefile.sys on the system drive (or did you actually leave that on? I am extremely worried about Flash RAM's longevity - it has a limited number of writes (100.000 on the best Flash RAMs I know of, which is an achievable limit, even on sectored Flash)?
And what does Asus themselves say about this issue, Flash RAM and temporary files?
I hope you notice my question.... thanks in advance.
You are 100% right. I remember the announcements for the Eee PC and the RRP was about 100$ less than you can buy them for, now that Asus has actually ramped UP the production. To tell you honestly, I don't even remember when I have seen a product selling above RRP. Maybe sometimes in the 80s the ZX Spectrum in Trieste (Italy) computer shops, due to the huge demand from Ex-Yugoslavia visitors.
When Everex gets their subnotebook in order (it's having some overheating problems) and drop the price to match that of the Eee PC, we'll start to have some competition and the prices MAY start to drop, but my feeling is that the demand is so huge that it will take some time to reach that point.
I just bought my Eee PC today.
Exactly. I am actually impressed by the vision & associated balls that Asus had with the EEE - and to some extent Everex with the CloudBook. These machines are the new wave, one very huge wave at it, too. They won't mean the end of desktops, because many will still like gaming, but guess what? They might just do it on the smae OS that runs their subnotebooks - Linux (for instance).
I won't lie to you, I'm not mad about Octave's graphing capabilities and the integration with gnuplot. I think for now I'll stick with Matlab - provided I can run it sufficiently well on the eee - which I just bought!!
Well guess what?
I just bought a GERMAN eee PC! Before reading your post - but for those exact reasons. Yay me, I guess? Looking forward to get my lustful hands on the thing...
MS didn't think this through very carefully - it seems like a giant "oops!" waiting to happen.
Though I'm really looking forward to Linux with Wine being better at running existing Windows applications, than Windows 7. That's an amusing thought, isn't it? I'm also giggling inside at the thought that the company to jump on the idea of Windows 7 will be HP, since they have developed a habit to embrace doomed technologies of this sort.
I keed, I keed... Besides, I really doubt the veracity of this rumour. MS would be crazy to do this (they might as well rewrite their corporate strategy as "shoot ourselves in the feet with machine guy").
I didn't even dream some 15 months ago that I would ever say this, but OO.o (and StarOffice) are _better_ at this point, than the current version of Office - at least it's easier to create formulas and the documents look better. The installation is smaller, and the end product is a standardized document format (ODF) _supported by a number of vendors_ so it's future-proof. And macros in OO.o Write seem to work better than those in Word.
I just realized last night that there's matlab for Linux (wrote it in another comment). I didn't know as I'm stuck with Matlab 5.x :o)
Sorry, I didn't realize those bozos at Verkkokauppa STILL haven't replenished their stocks of eee PCs.
Taiwan it is, then. Fuck verkkokauppa. I might even save an euro or two by buying from Taiwan.
OO.o for Aqua is still in alpha, so I consider it still as not being an option. The non-Aqua requires a crudgy X11 install and that "can be a difficult process" (quoting the OO.o for MacOS X website).
I don't pies in the sky but something that works. eee PC + Linux work, now. There's even Matlab for Linux!
Those are bogus Verkkokauppa prices they put there when they ran out of the eee PC. The real price (while the device was still available) was below EUR 400. And I thought they had them back in the warehouse by now (was out of the country for a while on holiday). Well shit, looks like I'll be ordering from Taiwan after all. F* you verkkokauppa, I'm sorry to say.
I might call datadog.fi and ask them if they plan on selling the eee PC. They have consistently had the lowest prices in Helsinki, so it might be worth waiting a week. But not more than that.
If MS wants to see Windows Vista on the eee PC, they will have to trim it and adapt it. Or, you know, support this light version of Windows XP.
All in all, the GP was spot on and showed much more thinking before posting than you did.
Hey, that's a great book! Thanks for the heads-up.
I just found out there's a Linux version of Matlab. Problem solved.
I'm buying one (or two - must think of mom) Asus eee PCs. I've never felt so good about buying a computer in many years. I was very close to buying it online the past week but finally I decided I'll buy it locally in Helsinki.
The straw that broke the camel's back was the problems I had with formulas in Word for Mac on my brother-in-law's iBook. Nice machine but OO.o works much better for me - and since it runs on Linux, and I always wanted a LIGHT notebook... eee PC just won out as the logical option for my on-the-move needs. If I could run a Matlab equivalent on it (and I will definitely look into that) this little gem might replace one of my desktops as well.
By the way, this is my first experiment with Linux as a desktop OS. I have a router with CentOS at home, but as my WinXP-running desktops die out, I'll be replacing them with Linux. Sorry MS, no Vista for me.