Same here: Radio and TV. Saw some ads. Nobody yet asked me why they need to advertise. I have an idea about this: I didn't saw Apple adverts either until recently. Yes, it mostly is for the iPod, but it will introduce many customers to other Apple products.
Of course, it's only a theory. Frankly: Microsoft even bothered to translate their (radio) ads to the tiny language that is talked here. The ad (for Office) is braindead, but whatever...
So, did I: I grew op on Sierra games where reading was mandatory and in the earlier incarnations you couldn't do without writing either.
Alas, this game genre is dead and most importantly: all games these days are translated. Kid don't play games in English anymore because they can go for French or German (both languages are used where I live) without any problem. It's a shame, and I personally tried to get the little brother of my wife to switch to English, but he doesn't want to do it. "It's too hard":-( Kiddo, we had to when we wanted to play computer games... *sigh*
I think I'll start saving for a quad system, featuring quad core-cpu's....;-) Hey, I don't know what all this thing is about "modern applications not supporting Hyperthreading". First Hyperthreading is a ugly hack not comparable to real SMP, and second: running more than one application will have an advantage when having multiple CPU's. I was astonished with the difference when I first had a (non-dual core) SMP machine. I wouldn't want to go back. Now, if I could get SMP laptops;-))
Nine months ago, we started hearing from partners like Dell that spyware was a major issue. Our own data from [Dr Watson] crash reports was telling us that 30 percent of all machines had some form of spyware. It reached a point where we had to do something.
9 months? 30%? That was their threshold for thinking to "do something"? Uhm... Okay, I understand that rewriting (reenigineering?) IE is a huge task, so nine months might be correct. However, I find that if 30% (that's about 1 in 3 computers!) is a bit late to think that "we need to do something". 10% should have been enough to make them realise that.
Not that I care: I've never been an Internet Explorer user. Netscape, then Mozilla (pre 1.0) and now Firefox.
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No... "No tomorrow" means 2 years max. Don't kid yourself. The G4 and G5 won't be supported for 5 years. They expect the complete switch to be done in 2007. I watched the keynote in Quicktime... G3 (like my machine), G4 and G5 users will be left in the dark after that. Yeah, they will assure a bit of compatibility, but expect it to be crappy so that you have to buy new hardware.
That's probably what I would have voted. However, for some strange reason, the voting lists are made in the spring of the year before the actual voting. I got my nationality in November 2003. Result: I couldn't vote. A real bummer, because one of the reasons I wanted to become Luxembourger was that I could finally vote for the nationals.
Not that surprising if you consider that Luxembourg is one of the rare countries where voting is compulsory.
You probably knew that I was actually aware of that.:-)
Additional source of dilemma is that the constitution does give more power to European parliament and National parliaments
I didn't read the constitution, but this is indeed what I heard too. This is indeed one of the points why I'd like to vote "Yes".
he will, by his very own words, not have any political decency.
Since when does a politician care about decency? Ponder about that for a while. Pulling through the software patent law was not what I call "decent". It was just morally wrong and illegal. I'm pretty sure he'll find a way out. Losing face or not... The earliest he would pay such "indecency" would be at the next national elections. That's still pretty far ahead in the future. Or do you really think that Luxembourgers will go out on the streets protesting that he should resign?
Personally, what I'd like to see is that they throw away the current constitution and take the "white bearded thinkers" of Europe. Put them together in a big building and let them work out a maximum 5 page document (A4. Font should be 12pt Times Roman) that will be our constitution. They aren't allowed to leave that building until they have such a document and they all agree on it. Those thinkers should be philosphers, scientists and economists: no lawyers and politicians allowed. Of course, that's just a pipe dream;-)
You don't really have to convince me. I've been thinking exactly the same as you. I made Journal Entry recently about the issue. There are some interesting views of my US friends attached to that journal. My main issue is the size, though the software patent stunt the EU pushed through illegaly still weight very heavy in my vision of the EU.
As for getting rid of Jucker. Well, I didn't vote for him in the first place because I didn't have voting rights back then even though I was already a Luxembourger and was of voting age. I was very surprised that the CSV actually won.
The problem is I am really Pro-Europe. For me it is a real dilemma.
In the end it's a non binding referendum, so the government still will do whatever it wants. I don't trust Juncker to keep his word on resigning and following the "will of the people".
You don't understand corporate accounting. Global companies (like Microsoft) can pretty much shift around their "money" at will over the world. If they'd get a big fine on "European profits", Microsoft will just make sure the official reports state that they made no profit (or even better a loss) in the European sector. Added bonus: "See, we are really hurt by your sanctions... It's bad for the European economy".
Regardless of what Juncker thinks... I think that a 500page constitution is a bit insane, and I will be voting on 10th July.
Alas, I haven't made up my mind yet. "No" versus the size or "Yes" because I think Europe is the future. Logically seen, I shouldn't "sign" anything that I haven't read, so the only logical vote is "No".
(besides, shouldn't your handle be "ArsèneLupin"... That is without two "n")
I'm in a similar boat as you: my iBook died . Chances of repair are about 0.01% and I'm being optimist. A new iBook, now? Unless they drop the price 50%, I'm not going to buy a new one. Even though I love OS X and the Apple Experience.
If they want to sell their machines now, they will have to drop prices as if there is no tomorrow. (Because, there is no tomorrow for the G4 and G5)
A G5? Sure I'll buy one... No problems... Well, I will buy one at half the current price. Currently the cheapest iMac is 1.319,00€. For a mere 659,5€, Apple will get my cash for such a machine. Once OS X isn't supported on it anymore, I'll just install OpenBSD (or NetBSD.. but probably OpenBSD)
No, I'm from Luxembourg. I just convert units because I assume by default that all slashdotters are from the United States.
In case you didn't know: 10l/100km is about 25MPG. The conversion formula is easy either way: just devide 250 with the value and you know the "other form". Example: 6l/100km = 250/6 MPG = 41,6 MPG (Peugeot 206)... Or inversely: 12MPG = 250/12 l/100km = 20,8l/100km. (Some insane SUV *grin*) I know that the 250 value is based on rounded conversions, but it's good enough to make quick calculations.
I only have that car... I have no choice... Since I got my new job I do 60km a day at least and it's getting very expensive.
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
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I'm getting sick of this... Can't it just let me post?
Hey... My AMD64 has a Riva TNT in it. Yes, it is a server. I had it lying around in my spare parts bin (the Riva TNT, not the AMD64)
My desktop machine (AMD-MP) has a graphics card with a fan, and it amounts for at least 50% of the noise that machine makes. Can anyone tell me what is a good fanless modern graphics card that still will allow me to play Halflife2?
I can't tell for the AMD, but I can assure you that the PPro won't melt. I had a PPro200 that started to behave eratically. I couldn't find the reason, until one day I had to open it and found out that the CPU fan was not spinning. I feared that I had burned my CPU. Bought a replacement fan, mounted it and the good old PPro was as reliable as ever. Some years later the motherboard died, but I still have the CPU. (I actually have two and hope to find someone who is willing to give me a Dual mobo)
did I mention my "server room" is in the basement of my house?
You lucky *cencored*. My server room is the second room in my apartment. I sleep in the first (biggest room) and used to keep the doors open. I was used to the sound of my P166 server whizzing. A year ago my girlfriend (and future wife, not even one week to go) moved in and she hated the sound. Had to close the door of the second room, and since then I am used of not hearing it. Now when I enter that room, I feel annoyed by the sound. I bought a AMD64 2400+ in replacement for the old P166, but I didn't have the time to install it. *sigh* Women really do take all your time;-)
I can tell you about cars that have only 4 cylinders and are bad at fuel economy. (Mine for example) My dad 2.6l V6 had similar mileage than my 1.8T (4 cylinder)... 25MPG... on a good day... It's getting almost unbearable paying that in Europe.
Oh, that thing I have to disable on every machine that has been infected with viruses, because it insists on restoring the viruses? I don't know if you noticed, but virtually all antivirus companies tell you to turn it off when you need to clean a machine.
I just turn it off all the time, it's broken by design.
I remember Dr Brain too.... Haven't got a copy anymore... *but* there is a "Compatibility Patch" that you can apply to Windows 2000. It works just like in XP and it only works for Administrator users (which is exactly the same behaviour as in XP)
And I would like that such shortcuts would be thought of a bit: not everyone uses an US keyboard and Ctrl + doesn't work for mine, because it ends up being Ctrl Shift +, which Firefox doesn't understand.
I've been looking for an extention to add two icons in the icon bar: one for enlarging font size and one for reducing font size. A bit like in the Mac Mail.app.
If the digits required are non-consecutive, then the odds of the bank asking for digits which the scammer has reduce considerably to 1-in-43680. But the scammer can improve their information gathering by getting the sucker to try to login a few times.
Sorry that I wasn't precise enough. Yes, the digits are indeed non-consecutive. I thought that was obvious.
The thing is: customers know that after three consecutive unsuccessfull logins, they need to unlock their account by calling the helpline. A website that would allow you to try 4 times (the minimum required to get all digits), would immediately feel fishy. After all: they should have read the general conditions of their bank and I can assure you that such a thing is explicitly stated in there. Yeah, I read mine... Go figure.
To your keylogging remark: sorry, but once a computer is compromised that way, there is no way to have any secure transaction at all. Heck, what it's worth, even with a certificate, the attacker could just extract it from the browser and send it to some email address for later usage. You cannot expect banks to make sure that the customers machine is clean. I have my own certificate on 4 different machines, because I exported them myself. It's no problem at all, but a normal user wouldn't be able to do it. Again I refer to the general conditions: it's the responsibility of the client to keep his machine clean. I worked at a bank for their webbanking (mainly server side), and I know of an instance where a client complained that he couldn't get our webbanking working. After much analysing our code, we couldn't find a solution. The bank was friendly enough to send a technician to that client (I must assume it was a big client) and guess what was the problem. The guy had a keylogger, and that broke our site. Glad to know that some keyloggers are buggy. After cleaning, our site worked just fine.
Your man in the middle attack: It's been a while since I've read into this security aspect, but don't you need a compromised machine in order to do a man in the middle attack? (See general conditions again...) Or a compromised DNS? I should pick up Tanenbaums "Computer Networks" again, because IIRC the man in the middle attack is explained there. Can this even work with https? How is the scammer going to simulate the bank without the certificate of the bank? Self-signed is pretty unlikely.
From experience I know that clients are very paranoid. I remember a bug where we generated html in a popup (a calendar, I think) on the fly. In production this ended up in showing the client that there were "both secure and nonsecure items" displayed on the page. The hotline went red when that happened. (Escaped our quality testing... bad marks for us)
Banks can do a lot to protect you. Not everything since they are not able to control the machine of the client. A certificate on the clients machine is nice, but it locks you to one browser (well, not really, since you can export as I did, but this is beyond the reach of a normal user). So doing my ebanking while on vacation is absolutely impossible. Yes, it's safer and I'm glad that my main bank account uses this system, but it is damned user-unfriendly. I told this to the bank where I worked, the client-side certificate was turned down because of this. So was my suggestion of asking the password of the user on each transaction (as my main bank does). It's a tradeoff... I agree.
It's not perfect, but it is as always a trade-off between security and user-friendlyness. I'm not saying the solutions are pefect. Of course, you can always tell me what the prefect solution is... a solution where I can do ebanking from everywhere, even from a kiosk, and having near-zero risk.
I think that's the whole point of asking N digit from M digits (where N < M). The banking system never asks more than N digits. When suddenly M digits are needed, the customer should be wary.
(Note: I use "digits" quite liberally. Usually it's a alphanumeric)
Thanks for the informative post about the state of US banking. I assumed it, but wasn't 100% sure and didn't want to fall back to needless ameribashing.
I don't know if the friendly AC is still reading, but the Euro symbol is not a problem for your US Keyboard: I can't type it directly either on slashdot. Just use html entities. € will do. Alternatively, should you need it in a normal document, choose US International Keyboard layout and type: Alt-5 ( US International English Layout )
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Of course, it's only a theory. Frankly: Microsoft even bothered to translate their (radio) ads to the tiny language that is talked here. The ad (for Office) is braindead, but whatever...
No use to trust politicians to do the right thing.
Greetings
A disgruntled European.
So, did I: I grew op on Sierra games where reading was mandatory and in the earlier incarnations you couldn't do without writing either.
Alas, this game genre is dead and most importantly: all games these days are translated. Kid don't play games in English anymore because they can go for French or German (both languages are used where I live) without any problem. It's a shame, and I personally tried to get the little brother of my wife to switch to English, but he doesn't want to do it. "It's too hard" :-( Kiddo, we had to when we wanted to play computer games... *sigh*
Oops.... Sorry, there are days I really am too optimistic for this world. :-P
It's a "workaround" for screwing up people that actually bother to delete cookies.
I think I'll start saving for a quad system, featuring quad core-cpu's.... ;-) Hey, I don't know what all this thing is about "modern applications not supporting Hyperthreading". First Hyperthreading is a ugly hack not comparable to real SMP, and second: running more than one application will have an advantage when having multiple CPU's. I was astonished with the difference when I first had a (non-dual core) SMP machine. I wouldn't want to go back. Now, if I could get SMP laptops ;-))
9 months? 30%? That was their threshold for thinking to "do something"? Uhm... Okay, I understand that rewriting (reenigineering?) IE is a huge task, so nine months might be correct. However, I find that if 30% (that's about 1 in 3 computers!) is a bit late to think that "we need to do something". 10% should have been enough to make them realise that.
Not that I care: I've never been an Internet Explorer user. Netscape, then Mozilla (pre 1.0) and now Firefox.
Slashdot related issue:
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WTF?
No... "No tomorrow" means 2 years max. Don't kid yourself. The G4 and G5 won't be supported for 5 years. They expect the complete switch to be done in 2007. I watched the keynote in Quicktime... G3 (like my machine), G4 and G5 users will be left in the dark after that. Yeah, they will assure a bit of compatibility, but expect it to be crappy so that you have to buy new hardware.
That's probably what I would have voted. However, for some strange reason, the voting lists are made in the spring of the year before the actual voting. I got my nationality in November 2003. Result: I couldn't vote. A real bummer, because one of the reasons I wanted to become Luxembourger was that I could finally vote for the nationals.
Not that surprising if you consider that Luxembourg is one of the rare countries where voting is compulsory.
You probably knew that I was actually aware of that. :-)
Additional source of dilemma is that the constitution does give more power to European parliament and National parliaments
I didn't read the constitution, but this is indeed what I heard too. This is indeed one of the points why I'd like to vote "Yes".
he will, by his very own words, not have any political decency.
Since when does a politician care about decency? Ponder about that for a while. Pulling through the software patent law was not what I call "decent". It was just morally wrong and illegal. I'm pretty sure he'll find a way out. Losing face or not... The earliest he would pay such "indecency" would be at the next national elections. That's still pretty far ahead in the future. Or do you really think that Luxembourgers will go out on the streets protesting that he should resign?
Personally, what I'd like to see is that they throw away the current constitution and take the "white bearded thinkers" of Europe. Put them together in a big building and let them work out a maximum 5 page document (A4. Font should be 12pt Times Roman) that will be our constitution. They aren't allowed to leave that building until they have such a document and they all agree on it. Those thinkers should be philosphers, scientists and economists: no lawyers and politicians allowed. ;-)
Of course, that's just a pipe dream
As for getting rid of Jucker. Well, I didn't vote for him in the first place because I didn't have voting rights back then even though I was already a Luxembourger and was of voting age. I was very surprised that the CSV actually won.
The problem is I am really Pro-Europe. For me it is a real dilemma.
In the end it's a non binding referendum, so the government still will do whatever it wants. I don't trust Juncker to keep his word on resigning and following the "will of the people".
You don't understand corporate accounting. Global companies (like Microsoft) can pretty much shift around their "money" at will over the world. If they'd get a big fine on "European profits", Microsoft will just make sure the official reports state that they made no profit (or even better a loss) in the European sector. Added bonus: "See, we are really hurt by your sanctions... It's bad for the European economy".
That's why "World Profits".
Alas, I haven't made up my mind yet. "No" versus the size or "Yes" because I think Europe is the future. Logically seen, I shouldn't "sign" anything that I haven't read, so the only logical vote is "No".
(besides, shouldn't your handle be "ArsèneLupin"... That is without two "n")
If they want to sell their machines now, they will have to drop prices as if there is no tomorrow. (Because, there is no tomorrow for the G4 and G5)
A G5? Sure I'll buy one... No problems... Well, I will buy one at half the current price. Currently the cheapest iMac is 1.319,00€. For a mere 659,5€, Apple will get my cash for such a machine. Once OS X isn't supported on it anymore, I'll just install OpenBSD (or NetBSD.. but probably OpenBSD)
In case you didn't know: 10l/100km is about 25MPG. The conversion formula is easy either way: just devide 250 with the value and you know the "other form". Example: 6l/100km = 250/6 MPG = 41,6 MPG (Peugeot 206)... Or inversely: 12MPG = 250/12 l/100km = 20,8l/100km. (Some insane SUV *grin*) I know that the 250 value is based on rounded conversions, but it's good enough to make quick calculations.
I only have that car... I have no choice... Since I got my new job I do 60km a day at least and it's getting very expensive.
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 13 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I'm getting sick of this... Can't it just let me post?
Hey... My AMD64 has a Riva TNT in it. Yes, it is a server. I had it lying around in my spare parts bin (the Riva TNT, not the AMD64)
My desktop machine (AMD-MP) has a graphics card with a fan, and it amounts for at least 50% of the noise that machine makes. Can anyone tell me what is a good fanless modern graphics card that still will allow me to play Halflife2?
I can't tell for the AMD, but I can assure you that the PPro won't melt. I had a PPro200 that started to behave eratically. I couldn't find the reason, until one day I had to open it and found out that the CPU fan was not spinning. I feared that I had burned my CPU. Bought a replacement fan, mounted it and the good old PPro was as reliable as ever. Some years later the motherboard died, but I still have the CPU. (I actually have two and hope to find someone who is willing to give me a Dual mobo)
did I mention my "server room" is in the basement of my house?
You lucky *cencored*. My server room is the second room in my apartment. I sleep in the first (biggest room) and used to keep the doors open. I was used to the sound of my P166 server whizzing. A year ago my girlfriend (and future wife, not even one week to go) moved in and she hated the sound. Had to close the door of the second room, and since then I am used of not hearing it. Now when I enter that room, I feel annoyed by the sound. I bought a AMD64 2400+ in replacement for the old P166, but I didn't have the time to install it. *sigh* Women really do take all your time ;-)
I can tell you about cars that have only 4 cylinders and are bad at fuel economy. (Mine for example) My dad 2.6l V6 had similar mileage than my 1.8T (4 cylinder)... 25MPG... on a good day... It's getting almost unbearable paying that in Europe.
Oh, that thing I have to disable on every machine that has been infected with viruses, because it insists on restoring the viruses? I don't know if you noticed, but virtually all antivirus companies tell you to turn it off when you need to clean a machine.
I just turn it off all the time, it's broken by design.
There you go
And I would like that such shortcuts would be thought of a bit: not everyone uses an US keyboard and Ctrl + doesn't work for mine, because it ends up being Ctrl Shift +, which Firefox doesn't understand.
I've been looking for an extention to add two icons in the icon bar: one for enlarging font size and one for reducing font size. A bit like in the Mac Mail.app.
I actually read the submission and my first reaction was "Wasn't the XBox 360 going to have a PPC processor?". Then I noticed that I misread the name.
Sorry that I wasn't precise enough. Yes, the digits are indeed non-consecutive. I thought that was obvious.
The thing is: customers know that after three consecutive unsuccessfull logins, they need to unlock their account by calling the helpline. A website that would allow you to try 4 times (the minimum required to get all digits), would immediately feel fishy. After all: they should have read the general conditions of their bank and I can assure you that such a thing is explicitly stated in there. Yeah, I read mine... Go figure.
To your keylogging remark: sorry, but once a computer is compromised that way, there is no way to have any secure transaction at all. Heck, what it's worth, even with a certificate, the attacker could just extract it from the browser and send it to some email address for later usage. You cannot expect banks to make sure that the customers machine is clean. I have my own certificate on 4 different machines, because I exported them myself. It's no problem at all, but a normal user wouldn't be able to do it. Again I refer to the general conditions: it's the responsibility of the client to keep his machine clean.
I worked at a bank for their webbanking (mainly server side), and I know of an instance where a client complained that he couldn't get our webbanking working. After much analysing our code, we couldn't find a solution. The bank was friendly enough to send a technician to that client (I must assume it was a big client) and guess what was the problem. The guy had a keylogger, and that broke our site. Glad to know that some keyloggers are buggy. After cleaning, our site worked just fine.
Your man in the middle attack: It's been a while since I've read into this security aspect, but don't you need a compromised machine in order to do a man in the middle attack? (See general conditions again...) Or a compromised DNS? I should pick up Tanenbaums "Computer Networks" again, because IIRC the man in the middle attack is explained there. Can this even work with https? How is the scammer going to simulate the bank without the certificate of the bank? Self-signed is pretty unlikely.
From experience I know that clients are very paranoid. I remember a bug where we generated html in a popup (a calendar, I think) on the fly. In production this ended up in showing the client that there were "both secure and nonsecure items" displayed on the page. The hotline went red when that happened. (Escaped our quality testing... bad marks for us)
Banks can do a lot to protect you. Not everything since they are not able to control the machine of the client. A certificate on the clients machine is nice, but it locks you to one browser (well, not really, since you can export as I did, but this is beyond the reach of a normal user). So doing my ebanking while on vacation is absolutely impossible. Yes, it's safer and I'm glad that my main bank account uses this system, but it is damned user-unfriendly. I told this to the bank where I worked, the client-side certificate was turned down because of this. So was my suggestion of asking the password of the user on each transaction (as my main bank does). It's a tradeoff... I agree.
It's not perfect, but it is as always a trade-off between security and user-friendlyness. I'm not saying the solutions are pefect. Of course, you can always tell me what the prefect solution is... a solution where I can do ebanking from everywhere, even from a kiosk, and having near-zero risk.
I think that's the whole point of asking N digit from M digits (where N < M). The banking system never asks more than N digits. When suddenly M digits are needed, the customer should be wary.
(Note: I use "digits" quite liberally. Usually it's a alphanumeric)
I don't know if the friendly AC is still reading, but the Euro symbol is not a problem for your US Keyboard: I can't type it directly either on slashdot. Just use html entities. € will do. Alternatively, should you need it in a normal document, choose US International Keyboard layout and type: Alt-5 ( US International English Layout )