Having been to Hong Kong in June, I also had a personal tour around the Pearl River Delta region in June and passed through Zuhoi, Guangdong, and Shenzen (also passed through Macau). China has been developing very quickly in the past 15 years, but only in and around the SEZs (there are 4 of them). The area around Macau which is Zuhoi is a SEZ, as well as Shenzen. The other 2 SEZs I can't remember off the top of my head.
Things in China in the SEZ areas are pretty modern now, we wide boulevards and parks in the urban areas. They also have pretty modern highways (toll mostly) that span over to a neighboring large city. This is in Guangzou province of course, I'm sure its a whole lot different in other provinces.
Having toured through the industrial areas and checked out how they dealt business and manufactured the different things that we buy in the US and take for granted, the Chinese still have a long way to go to become proper businessmen. I witnessed something that appeared to me like lawnessnes, bartering, etc. I have also seen PLA soldiers watch some pretty crazy stuff happen and ignore it/don't care. I think they only start caring when you kill or rob someone on plain sight.
I had a discussion with a Hong Kong businessman who worked at a Shenzen factory as a manager, and he seems to agree that the Chinese have a lot to learn to become businessmen and know how to properly attract business, make deals, etc.
Anyway, a lot of other parts of China are still pretty backwards as we remember it from 25 years ago, and one can see things less technologically developed as you move further away from a SEZ. It will take at least another 15-20 years before we see technology trickle down to the rest of the Chinese population. There isn't much Hong Kong influence in China, except their model city Shenzen. "Sole proprietorship" businesses, restraunts and malls in Shenzen try to follow the Hong Kong model but are still playing catchup. An average Chinese person who lived in the Shenzen area is restricted in what he can possibly buy too; things that are made to be exported will not be found in the local market. Nice, high tech stuff is probably a 5 year old model. They are also restricted in how many imported cars they can buy in a time period, so most have to contend with the poorly built local makes. Their banking system is also another limiter; most people there do not keep their money in the banks because when they do need a large sum of money, they can't get it in that day (they can only get a small amount out each day). This contributes partly to a high petty crime rate.
The atmosphere of Hong Kong is still pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago, still free, laizefare business, businesses that follow the latest trends, etc. Hong Kong has all the latest technology, embraces it, but they did not develop them. Hong Kong uses technology from Europe, America, and Japan. One can see a very good example of how Hong Kong embraces technology very easily; practically everyone there has a cellular phone (from children to seniors). Cellular coverage is excellent too, little or no interference, you can be anywhere (underground to deep inside a building) except the mountains and still get reception. I borrowed a cheap Nokia phone from a friend and used it underground on the MTR subway, as well as on the train while it was moving and had zero problems with reception. IMO, Hong Kong does not get its influence from China, but Japan instead. They blend the influence into their way of managing business and other administrative things. They also get the latest gadgetry and TV shows from Japan only a few months after it comes out usually. It will be a while before Hong Kong and China influence each other, at the moment, nothing much has changed and its definately too soon to know.
I have my DSL (silver) loop through Verizon, but I'm using a large Texas based ISP (also one of the largest commercial usenet providers) through it. With DSL, it is possible in many areas to get a loop through a ILEC (Ma Bell) and get a different ISP. As long as the ISP has the FR or ATM link to the ILEC that is possible. Most ISPs these days market their DSL with CLEC loops such as Covad or Northpoint, even though many are able to provide service with ILEC loops also.
SBC, the San Antonio based company is currently phasing out their DHCP service in favor of PPPoE. I have heard that it has affected some current SWBell customers already (SWBell mailing out current customers with new PPPoE modems). I do not know if this affects PacBell. Because of this phase out, many ISPs are no longer able to sign up new customers to use a SWBell loop. IIRC, many ISPs provide service via NAT, static, or DHCP IP assignments. SWBell has changed their COs VPI's to a way that it will only work with PPPoE, it does not affect current SWBell loop customers running through another ISP though. Now why will it not affect current customers but not allow new customers to be signed up I don't know. SWBell.net are signing up new customers to use the damned PPPoE and are no longer doing DHCP. Other ISPs which do offer service in PPPoE (I don't know if FreeDSL counts, but thats one of them) are able to use SWBell's loop though. The bottom line is that but doing this, SWBell effectively forces people who are unable to get a CLEC service, to get SWBell's loop AND their ISP (there aren't many PPPoE capable ISPs).
This practice has made a lot of people (ie: friends I know) quite upset because they can only get PPPoE and mate it with a PPPoE ISP. I don't know if the lawsuit covers this side of the issue, but it would be nice if it does. As to the ranting about the speeds, IMO, they are whining too much. IIRC SWBell does not have minimum loop guarantees, don't know about ISP though. At least with Verizon, with Silver and up, you get minimum gurantees. Most of the people I know who have SWBell loops are very happy with their speeds, they get 1.2+Mbps most of the time. The slow speeds maybe caused by a overloaded usenet server, but I don't know. The only capping I know is the upstream, 128k for the 1.5/128 and 384k for the 6M/384 service respectively. Also another thing about SBC is the nature of their ATM network; in a congested CO, a lot of packets from the ISP will be marked DE (discard enable) and get dropped in favor for someone who is paying more for their loop who get packet priority. This will result in very poor speeds due to packet retransmission until the loop is capped to a slower speed. With Verizon's FR network, they have BECNs which will be sent to the ISP telling them to throttle back and to prevent as much packet loss as possible. The nature of cable and telcos these days is to oversubscribe their service. You are paying around 40 dollars of service, and thats what you get. The "slow" speeds you get are usually still better than a dialup. The reason for this oversubcription is mostly because telcos have to cover the costs for running the network and that they want people to get a T1 from them, thats where they make the big bucks.
Face it, the IDE design is ancient and is inadequate for today's uses. I mean its fine when you are plain ol' Joe Bob who just checks his email and does word processing. But when you want to *add* something to the computer and do some serious stuff, like a geek will, you're running into problems.
Not only does IDE have bad command queuing, it doesn't even do sync transfers. The most debated issue is the CPU usage and the transfer rate: IDE relies on the CPU more than it should because the controller is too simple and therefore braindead. You can overclock the IDE controller, but what always happens is the drive is too crappy to even handle the higher speed, but you always get the same read performance. IDE always sends date from devices back to the host controller at the same original spec speed, whereas write-to-device can vary due to oc'ing the controller.
Ok, now to the point: the engineers (I'm sure they've been TOLD to do this) keep trying to make IDE "better" by keeping this backwards compatiblity junk and at the same time trying to squeeze a wider data bandwidth for the devices. Think about ATA/66, you need those special 80 wire/40 pin cables because if you used a regular 40 pin/wire cable the signal to noise ratio will be so bad that you get tons of CRC errors. The additional wiring are for the extra shielding in order to keep the SNR well enough to avoid CRC problems. What about adding additional devices for more storage space and removable like what most of us geeks do? Okay, they draw up these brilliant schemes of secondary, tertiary, and quarternary controllers which are essentially the same in controller design as the "primary" except on a different IRQ and port. Wow, cool, now I can hook up 8 IDE devices! Ok, but I want to add some stuff like: a PCI soundcard (2 IRQs... 1 for ISA/DOS emu, and 1 for actual PCI), add NIC (there goes another IRQ), add DVD decoder card (1 IRQ). Hmmm... wait a minute, isn't IDE 0-3 using IRQ 10,11,14,15 already? So didn't that left me with IRQ 9 for video? Ok, suppose I _DON'T_ even have a NVidia based video card (which has problems sharing IRQs), and try to share IRQ 9 through "PCI steering" with the USB, also; that only gets me 2 devices working. I still have to disable the serial port(s), and the parallel port to get more of this working. It is possible to have one of the devices' IRQs share with the other, however this is all determined by the BIOS's DMI these days (in a modern PCI BIOS at least). I'm only talking about PCI here, ISA is already a forgotten issue since I'm talking about the latest and "greatest" motherboard. Aren't they trying to keep some ancient inferior, simple interface up to date and competitive just because its "cheaper"? AFAIK, it should cost no more to make a SCSI device/drive with the *same* MTBF rating as an IDE device. IDE works, only when you are keeping things *simple*, but things aren't so simple these days. The more expensive, branded, prebuilt *gasp* systems these days already come with a decent sized HD, with DVD, and usually a burner, and sometimes a Zip or LS-120. This means 2 IDE channels may already taken up. IDE seems cost effective, but it doesn't look like it to me when it comes to long term. Its more trouble than its worth when you are going to add cards into your slots. Doesn't this remind you of the saying "beating a dead horse" to you?
It all comes down to this: we all know that we are in a serious IRQ resource problem already, and adding to that we get "newer and better" IDE "standards" which contributes to this problem even more. What I think should be done is to either ditch IDE (it worked great as a cheap solution but is no longer really viable), or take care of the IRQ problem. However, there is one thing that seem to be preventing this: the industry thinks they need to maintain backwards compatibility. I feel that there will eventually come a day where someone out there in some company will crack and actually officially acknowledge of this problem and is actually willing to deal with it.
My strongly suggested action is to actually make SCSI cheaper (man, they make tons of money selling those things, when costs of manf are no more than IDE), thus allowing IDE to be rid of, and in turn allow us to connect at least 15 devices (Wide SCSI) and using only 1 controller, 1 IRQ, 1 port, and lower CPU usage tremendously.
I still have to admit that IDE is ideal for people, and some of the geeks out there who are poor and can't afford good stuff like SCSI. But the minute you can afford and want to do serious (workstation/server) stuff, there is no doubt about it: SCSI is the way to go.
This haven't been the first time Victorinox or Wenger have created specialized multi-purpose folding pocket knives. In fact, Victorinox also sells a Bike Tool Kit (Mountain bike version also available), and the Inline Skater ToolSet. Both of those products have specially designed versions of the swiss army knife, but since they are "kits", they also include additional tools for aiding the repair of a bike or a skate respectively. The kits are meant for field (emergency) use, since "real" tools can be found at the shop or at home anyway.
IMO, Victorinox have done a fine job in designing the CyperTool without sacrificing the compact size and quality you will expect from a swiss army knife. They have added enough tools to repair most of the things the average geek will have. If they were to add even more tools, it would have sacrificed the compact size and thus making it another Swiss Champ and also making it another "kit" due to the fact that they can't fit some of the tools into the knife itself.
I myself, own a Swiss Champ and that thing is pretty heavy, however it will fix almost anything I encounter almost on a daily basis; it comes in very handy when there isn't a toolbox nearby. Because I own the Swiss Champ, I am fairly familiar with the tools that are featured in the CyperTool, and therefore, I will explain some of the little features that it may include:
The pliers itself has a built in wire cutter, though it will only cut wires up to #15 copper. Since this tool is meant for "electronics" repair, the wire size restriction shouldn't be a problem since wires used in most electronics are #18+ anyway.
The large flathead screwdriver has a 2 position feature: you can make it straight (as pictured on Victorinox's page), or u can make it bent into a 90 degree angle which will allow you to provide more torque or when you are operating in tight spaces. It also features a wire stripper; again, it may only work well with #15 wires that have a soft plastic wire covering.
The universal hook featured, I don't think it comes in very useful in terms of electronics repair other than pulling wires at its side; maybe they added that into there just to take up space?
The patented mini-screwdriver can be removed, and it fits right into the corkscrew where it is stored, however they could have just make a mini-screwdriver bit for the socket type screwdriver.
The pin also fits into the plastic casing (at its backside) near where the corkscrew folds out
They may have modified the ballpoint pen to have a "push-action", but that ballpoint pen may come in useful for writing down notes when you don't have a pen at all; the pen stores next to the toothpick at the knife's backside
I believe all the screwdriver bits are stored in the black metal fold outs, and the socket screwdriver & bitholder (it may be detachable) may also be another fold out tool
The reamer/punch features a 1 bladed side that comes in useful when you are trying to "drill" holes
Both the pliers and the scissors have springs (replacable) in them so they can open back up after you push down on them.
The Inox (international name for stainless steel) used in creating most of the parts of the knife are of the highest quality; the knife blade itself is VERY sharp, and the other inox tools are very hard to wear out.
I just called the place I ordered my Swiss Champ from, and they sell the CyperTool for $67, its expensive since its new; I got my Swiss Champ for $80, I think. Checked out Shaper Edge, their number is also on that page, the sales line is open 24/7, though they say they have the 11-7 store hours.
There is long running arguement about which swiss army knife is "genuine", and I will try to settle this. Both the Victorinox and Wenger knives are genunine/official according to the Swiss government. Victorinox (based in Ibach, in a Swiss/German canton) created the very first "swiss army" knife back in 1891, and then Wenger (based in Delémont, in a Swiss/French canton) started making their own in around 1893. There was an official decision by the Swiss government to make products made by both companies to be "official" in order to keep the cantons at peace. It means the Swiss Army will use 50% of the knives from each company (only recruits get a knife). The way the Swiss government defines it as official is by the use of the Swiss Cross; it is illegal to use the Swiss Cross without authorization by the Swiss government. Because of this agreement, Victorinox and Wenger agreed to use "Original Swiss Army Knife" and "Genuine Swiss Army Knife" respectively. While the meanings used by those slogans are confusing, both are genuine Swiss Army knives.
Slashdot Mirror
Things in China in the SEZ areas are pretty modern now, we wide boulevards and parks in the urban areas. They also have pretty modern highways (toll mostly) that span over to a neighboring large city. This is in Guangzou province of course, I'm sure its a whole lot different in other provinces.
Having toured through the industrial areas and checked out how they dealt business and manufactured the different things that we buy in the US and take for granted, the Chinese still have a long way to go to become proper businessmen. I witnessed something that appeared to me like lawnessnes, bartering, etc. I have also seen PLA soldiers watch some pretty crazy stuff happen and ignore it/don't care. I think they only start caring when you kill or rob someone on plain sight.
I had a discussion with a Hong Kong businessman who worked at a Shenzen factory as a manager, and he seems to agree that the Chinese have a lot to learn to become businessmen and know how to properly attract business, make deals, etc.
Anyway, a lot of other parts of China are still pretty backwards as we remember it from 25 years ago, and one can see things less technologically developed as you move further away from a SEZ. It will take at least another 15-20 years before we see technology trickle down to the rest of the Chinese population. There isn't much Hong Kong influence in China, except their model city Shenzen. "Sole proprietorship" businesses, restraunts and malls in Shenzen try to follow the Hong Kong model but are still playing catchup. An average Chinese person who lived in the Shenzen area is restricted in what he can possibly buy too; things that are made to be exported will not be found in the local market. Nice, high tech stuff is probably a 5 year old model. They are also restricted in how many imported cars they can buy in a time period, so most have to contend with the poorly built local makes. Their banking system is also another limiter; most people there do not keep their money in the banks because when they do need a large sum of money, they can't get it in that day (they can only get a small amount out each day). This contributes partly to a high petty crime rate.
The atmosphere of Hong Kong is still pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago, still free, laizefare business, businesses that follow the latest trends, etc. Hong Kong has all the latest technology, embraces it, but they did not develop them. Hong Kong uses technology from Europe, America, and Japan. One can see a very good example of how Hong Kong embraces technology very easily; practically everyone there has a cellular phone (from children to seniors). Cellular coverage is excellent too, little or no interference, you can be anywhere (underground to deep inside a building) except the mountains and still get reception. I borrowed a cheap Nokia phone from a friend and used it underground on the MTR subway, as well as on the train while it was moving and had zero problems with reception. IMO, Hong Kong does not get its influence from China, but Japan instead. They blend the influence into their way of managing business and other administrative things. They also get the latest gadgetry and TV shows from Japan only a few months after it comes out usually. It will be a while before Hong Kong and China influence each other, at the moment, nothing much has changed and its definately too soon to know.
I have my DSL (silver) loop through Verizon, but I'm using a large Texas based ISP (also one of the largest commercial usenet providers) through it. With DSL, it is possible in many areas to get a loop through a ILEC (Ma Bell) and get a different ISP. As long as the ISP has the FR or ATM link to the ILEC that is possible. Most ISPs these days market their DSL with CLEC loops such as Covad or Northpoint, even though many are able to provide service with ILEC loops also.
SBC, the San Antonio based company is currently phasing out their DHCP service in favor of PPPoE. I have heard that it has affected some current SWBell customers already (SWBell mailing out current customers with new PPPoE modems). I do not know if this affects PacBell. Because of this phase out, many ISPs are no longer able to sign up new customers to use a SWBell loop. IIRC, many ISPs provide service via NAT, static, or DHCP IP assignments. SWBell has changed their COs VPI's to a way that it will only work with PPPoE, it does not affect current SWBell loop customers running through another ISP though. Now why will it not affect current customers but not allow new customers to be signed up I don't know. SWBell.net are signing up new customers to use the damned PPPoE and are no longer doing DHCP. Other ISPs which do offer service in PPPoE (I don't know if FreeDSL counts, but thats one of them) are able to use SWBell's loop though. The bottom line is that but doing this, SWBell effectively forces people who are unable to get a CLEC service, to get SWBell's loop AND their ISP (there aren't many PPPoE capable ISPs).
This practice has made a lot of people (ie: friends I know) quite upset because they can only get PPPoE and mate it with a PPPoE ISP. I don't know if the lawsuit covers this side of the issue, but it would be nice if it does. As to the ranting about the speeds, IMO, they are whining too much. IIRC SWBell does not have minimum loop guarantees, don't know about ISP though. At least with Verizon, with Silver and up, you get minimum gurantees. Most of the people I know who have SWBell loops are very happy with their speeds, they get 1.2+Mbps most of the time. The slow speeds maybe caused by a overloaded usenet server, but I don't know. The only capping I know is the upstream, 128k for the 1.5/128 and 384k for the 6M/384 service respectively. Also another thing about SBC is the nature of their ATM network; in a congested CO, a lot of packets from the ISP will be marked DE (discard enable) and get dropped in favor for someone who is paying more for their loop who get packet priority. This will result in very poor speeds due to packet retransmission until the loop is capped to a slower speed. With Verizon's FR network, they have BECNs which will be sent to the ISP telling them to throttle back and to prevent as much packet loss as possible. The nature of cable and telcos these days is to oversubscribe their service. You are paying around 40 dollars of service, and thats what you get. The "slow" speeds you get are usually still better than a dialup. The reason for this oversubcription is mostly because telcos have to cover the costs for running the network and that they want people to get a T1 from them, thats where they make the big bucks.
|TheMAN
Face it, the IDE design is ancient and is inadequate for today's uses. I mean its fine when you are plain ol' Joe Bob who just checks his email and does word processing. But when you want to *add* something to the computer and do some serious stuff, like a geek will, you're running into problems.
Not only does IDE have bad command queuing, it doesn't even do sync transfers. The most debated issue is the CPU usage and the transfer rate: IDE relies on the CPU more than it should because the controller is too simple and therefore braindead. You can overclock the IDE controller, but what always happens is the drive is too crappy to even handle the higher speed, but you always get the same read performance. IDE always sends date from devices back to the host controller at the same original spec speed, whereas write-to-device can vary due to oc'ing the controller.
Ok, now to the point:
the engineers (I'm sure they've been TOLD to do this) keep trying to make IDE "better" by keeping this backwards compatiblity junk and at the same time trying to squeeze a wider data bandwidth for the devices. Think about ATA/66, you need those special 80 wire/40 pin cables because if you used a regular 40 pin/wire cable the signal to noise ratio will be so bad that you get tons of CRC errors. The additional wiring are for the extra shielding in order to keep the SNR well enough to avoid CRC problems. What about adding additional devices for more storage space and removable like what most of us geeks do? Okay, they draw up these brilliant schemes of secondary, tertiary, and quarternary controllers which are essentially the same in controller design as the "primary" except on a different IRQ and port. Wow, cool, now I can hook up 8 IDE devices!
Ok, but I want to add some stuff like: a PCI soundcard (2 IRQs... 1 for ISA/DOS emu, and 1 for actual PCI), add NIC (there goes another IRQ), add DVD decoder card (1 IRQ). Hmmm... wait a minute, isn't IDE 0-3 using IRQ 10,11,14,15 already? So didn't that left me with IRQ 9 for video? Ok, suppose I _DON'T_ even have a NVidia based video card (which has problems sharing IRQs), and try to share IRQ 9 through "PCI steering" with the USB, also; that only gets me 2 devices working. I still have to disable the serial port(s), and the parallel port to get more of this working. It is possible to have one of the devices' IRQs share with the other, however this is all determined by the BIOS's DMI these days (in a modern PCI BIOS at least). I'm only talking about PCI here, ISA is already a forgotten issue since I'm talking about the latest and "greatest" motherboard.
Aren't they trying to keep some ancient inferior, simple interface up to date and competitive just because its "cheaper"? AFAIK, it should cost no more to make a SCSI device/drive with the *same* MTBF rating as an IDE device. IDE works, only when you are keeping things *simple*, but things aren't so simple these days. The more expensive, branded, prebuilt *gasp* systems these days already come with a decent sized HD, with DVD, and usually a burner, and sometimes a Zip or LS-120. This means 2 IDE channels may already taken up. IDE seems cost effective, but it doesn't look like it to me when it comes to long term. Its more trouble than its worth when you are going to add cards into your slots. Doesn't this remind you of the saying "beating a dead horse" to you?
It all comes down to this: we all know that we are in a serious IRQ resource problem already, and adding to that we get "newer and better" IDE "standards" which contributes to this problem even more. What I think should be done is to either ditch IDE (it worked great as a cheap solution but is no longer really viable), or take care of the IRQ problem. However, there is one thing that seem to be preventing this: the industry thinks they need to maintain backwards compatibility. I feel that there will eventually come a day where someone out there in some company will crack and actually officially acknowledge of this problem and is actually willing to deal with it.
My strongly suggested action is to actually make SCSI cheaper (man, they make tons of money selling those things, when costs of manf are no more than IDE), thus allowing IDE to be rid of, and in turn allow us to connect at least 15 devices (Wide SCSI) and using only 1 controller, 1 IRQ, 1 port, and lower CPU usage tremendously.
I still have to admit that IDE is ideal for people, and some of the geeks out there who are poor and can't afford good stuff like SCSI. But the minute you can afford and want to do serious (workstation/server) stuff, there is no doubt about it: SCSI is the way to go.
TheMAN
IMO, Victorinox have done a fine job in designing the CyperTool without sacrificing the compact size and quality you will expect from a swiss army knife. They have added enough tools to repair most of the things the average geek will have. If they were to add even more tools, it would have sacrificed the compact size and thus making it another Swiss Champ and also making it another "kit" due to the fact that they can't fit some of the tools into the knife itself.
I myself, own a Swiss Champ and that thing is pretty heavy, however it will fix almost anything I encounter almost on a daily basis; it comes in very handy when there isn't a toolbox nearby. Because I own the Swiss Champ, I am fairly familiar with the tools that are featured in the CyperTool, and therefore, I will explain some of the little features that it may include:
The pliers itself has a built in wire cutter, though it will only cut wires up to #15 copper. Since this tool is meant for "electronics" repair, the wire size restriction shouldn't be a problem since wires used in most electronics are #18+ anyway.
The large flathead screwdriver has a 2 position feature: you can make it straight (as pictured on Victorinox's page), or u can make it bent into a 90 degree angle which will allow you to provide more torque or when you are operating in tight spaces. It also features a wire stripper; again, it may only work well with #15 wires that have a soft plastic wire covering.
The universal hook featured, I don't think it comes in very useful in terms of electronics repair other than pulling wires at its side; maybe they added that into there just to take up space?
The patented mini-screwdriver can be removed, and it fits right into the corkscrew where it is stored, however they could have just make a mini-screwdriver bit for the socket type screwdriver.
The pin also fits into the plastic casing (at its backside) near where the corkscrew folds out
They may have modified the ballpoint pen to have a "push-action", but that ballpoint pen may come in useful for writing down notes when you don't have a pen at all; the pen stores next to the toothpick at the knife's backside
I believe all the screwdriver bits are stored in the black metal fold outs, and the socket screwdriver & bitholder (it may be detachable) may also be another fold out tool
The reamer/punch features a 1 bladed side that comes in useful when you are trying to "drill" holes
Both the pliers and the scissors have springs (replacable) in them so they can open back up after you push down on them.
The Inox (international name for stainless steel) used in creating most of the parts of the knife are of the highest quality; the knife blade itself is VERY sharp, and the other inox tools are very hard to wear out.
I just called the place I ordered my Swiss Champ from, and they sell the CyperTool for $67, its expensive since its new; I got my Swiss Champ for $80, I think. Checked out Shaper Edge, their number is also on that page, the sales line is open 24/7, though they say they have the 11-7 store hours.
There is long running arguement about which swiss army knife is "genuine", and I will try to settle this. Both the Victorinox and Wenger knives are genunine/official according to the Swiss government. Victorinox (based in Ibach, in a Swiss/German canton) created the very first "swiss army" knife back in 1891, and then Wenger (based in Delémont, in a Swiss/French canton) started making their own in around 1893. There was an official decision by the Swiss government to make products made by both companies to be "official" in order to keep the cantons at peace. It means the Swiss Army will use 50% of the knives from each company (only recruits get a knife). The way the Swiss government defines it as official is by the use of the Swiss Cross; it is illegal to use the Swiss Cross without authorization by the Swiss government. Because of this agreement, Victorinox and Wenger agreed to use "Original Swiss Army Knife" and "Genuine Swiss Army Knife" respectively. While the meanings used by those slogans are confusing, both are genuine Swiss Army knives.