Think "AWS in a box", with the high level features you’d get there. API, Terraform, "managed" products like load balancers, database, etc. You get all that in a turnkey rack delivered to the datacenter or office doorstep.
It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.
Having worked in the space, 6kVA is the norm from 10-15 years ago, 12kVA is the standard for regular compute workloads. With HPC/AI all bets are off though.
You forgot the part where they send you two distinct snail mails, one with the username and one with a one-time password, for a double chance the post will lose one of the envelopes!
Or the part where they silently truncate your new password to 6 digits because muh security.
I guess France and Germany are siblings in kafkaesque administrative shenanigans.
In Germany if they silently truncate your password and you contact their customer service, they will scream at you for not remembering your password. I guess this beats France.
They need much much less data than your phone. They could process several transactions with less data it would take for your phone to load the HTML of the payment page, let alone the Javascript or the bank's logo.
Also, such terminals often use multi-carrier data plans that can use the best carrier available, while your own phone is stuck with one of the options (of course, you always have the worst one).
And I thing the misunderstanding here is that Europeans don't really use credit cards: we use the term "credit card" when we should use "debit card", but that's language for you. Literally, you have to go out of your way to get an actual credit card instead of the ubiquitous debit card everybody has.
And in Europe, when people hear Mastercard or Visa, they just associate the name with refused payments at points of sale depending on the luck they had with the merchant, or the foreign country, etc.
I do agree that in this case, picking MC/VISA is not really important. When I changed banks a few years ago, it so happened that I switched from a Visa to a Mastercard. Nothing changed save for the logo on the card.
Well, yes, we pay "cash" in the sense we pay direct debit. So literally the same as you, we tap the card. Except we don't have to keep track of the credit balance at the end of the month: money's taken directly from the account. The bank app shows you have enough? You're set.
As to how, in the financial term: we europeans don't really have the credit culture the US has. Having a credit is something very last resort, especially for "trivial" stuff (e.g. christmas shopping, to keep your example). Most europeans will have one or two credits tops: real estate loan, and sometimes car loan. Companies (mostly US) start offering payments spread over multiple months, but it does not really have a high penetration (at least in France), being in small useless debts is something we avoid like the plague.
And how do we have enough money in the bank? We just shop after payday, not after. Or, for most people, we keep a somewhat constant amount in the daily account. It's just another way of managing your own money.
Speculation: Europe has a lower risk management cost than the US when it comes to card transactions, making it more profitable.
Smartcards with PINs were ubiquitous much much sooner (it being a French idea did not help for US market penetration), which means today the magnetic stripe on our cards is little more than decoration. Seriously, I'm 29 and I've yet to see a single magstripe payment here (while it was daily when I went to the US).
Also, we pretty much only have debit cards (don't know why, but don't know why I would want a credit card). This is even less risk for both the network and the merchant and the bank, reducing issues for all links in the chain.
Or the fact that Europe has 100M extra people in it, and a lot of countries seldom use cash nowadays.
The idea is for the US to not be able to shutdown CC transactions at points of sale in Europe on a whim. All cards in europe are dual-issued under Visa or Mastercard, and under a national card payment processor. In France, that's CB (Carte Bancaire). When you pay in europe, it uses the European network. Outside, it uses Visa/Mastercard.
So sorry, we do definitely get what this entails :)
Yeah that's pretty much the only reason people use Wero: transferring money faster than a snail between people. This was filled by the likes of Lydia before, but their shenanigans trying to become a bank pushed people to Wero (which is indeed a rename of something else I don't remember, but I used for less than a year).
The real deal is the card payment networks that your plastic thing can use at a merchant's point of sale. All the rest is moot as we already have SEPA for e.g. online payments (it does have its issue for sure, but it's something).
Pedantic but systemd is inspired by MacOS launchd, not by Windows services. It has nothing akin to the registry, which even microsoft admits is a pain on windows.
Oh, and usually people shit on windows for many reasons, but some of the very core features of the OS are robust and the Linux crowd could take a hint. Like, you know, the notion of service at the OS-level and not some random bash script that nohup'd a binary. Oh wait, that's what does Windows, MacOS and Linux with systemd.
I didn't say it was inspired by the registry, I just drew a comparison. In both cases you have a huge binary thing that you have to interact with through secondhand tools rather than directly.
We generally aren't in the habit of using "random" scripts to do anything. They're usually carefully developed to do exactly what we need them to do, precisely, and nothing more. Not the giant pile of buggy ass code and security nightmare that is systemd.
By the way, you don't seem to be aware that you can use any language you want to create startup "scripts" including compiled binaries, if you hate shell scripting so much.
Do you even know any shell script? Serious question. Many 'bash' haters know nothing about the language--starting with calling it 'bash' instead of 'shell script.' There are several different flavors just of shell scripting languages, and bash is only one.
It’s a step higher than a vSphere/Proxmox cluster.
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