German cars, in particular, really suck these days.
Spot on. Every single piece of German equipment I have bought in the last 8 years has arrived with a factory defect and/or broke down within the next year after the warranty expired. For example the German washing machine was marked with a crayon on the side that it is defective and needs to be returned to the factory line and it was shipped none the less. Cars are the same. I used to have an Astra and it was the same story. German cars (and especially the ones built in Germany) suck. There is a reason why Germans are at the bottom of the reliability league tables (with only the large French cars ahead of them). The underlying cause is the German workforce (same as with French). When your workforce has grown slacking on the job and knowing that the union will not allow it to be fired no matter what, you get a "quality" product.
As far as the fascination especially with the German cars it dates from the days when the German cars were not actually German. In the days when their build quality was stellar and ahead even of the Japanese they were built by Turkish gastarbeighters. In those days (late 60-es and 70-es), German build quality was unrivaled. Guess why - non-unionised workforce working its arse off and doing everything it can not to make a single mistake in order not to get fired.
Back to German cars and the subject of the article. It is not just german manufacturing that sucks worse and worse. German engineering has joined it. The Germans are the only country in the world where the average fuel consumption of new cars has actually increased over the last 10 years. In fact year on year a German car is on the average less fuel efficient than the last year model: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7095299.stm. Even the US car industry does better.
Yep, and that is why Bush is signing it. The bill has nothing to do with emissions, greenhouse gases, damage to the environment and so on. It all has to do with reducing USA dependency on Gulf Oil.
As far as the MPG, my Honda FRV (diesel) which is a big 6 seater (it still does 0-60 in 9s) does 50+ in summer and 40 winter. My wife's car which is a 2003 Daihatsu Siron once again hits 0-60 in sub-9s and does 52 MPG in the summer (if you do not drive in a binary manner). So frankly 35 MPG is a joke. Any self-respecting non-US car manufacturer is way past that already.
"I'm only open 8-5, M-F"? People got sick when they got sick. Depends where are you. In the UK - hell yeah. It was that way and is that way. Here if your kid id in a comatose state with 40+C you will be asked to take it to the GP during the opening hours and will wait there for 2 hours until your appointment or until your kid needs to be ferried to AE in an ambulance. And the doctor visitng anybody besides pensioners at their home? Forget it.
Other countries - definitely not. Completely different story. My granddad was a village GP for nearly 30 years. I remember visiting him as a kid. It was more than 15 years after he retired and there were still people knocking on the door in the middle of the night. Every time he stood up, put his old raincoat, got his old handbag in hand and went. The last time he did it was just a few weeks before he died. No "8-5. M-F", no "call the HotLine, I am unavailable".
Both are cases at each end of the scale. The balance is somewhere in the middle. Work should not encroach onto your personal life beyond a certain limit. At the same time there are emergencies and they should be handled by everyone who can with some reasonable distribution of duties. It should not be piled up onto one person.
OK, it is not a fighter jet, but it is a supersonic currently in use and production. USA has dropped the intake reqs that made 1.6M speeds possible from the shopping list 20+ or so years ago. Russians have not. As a result they have a number of production aircraft that can hit speeds closet to the speed of the Blackbird despite the engines being turbofan, not ramjet.
Yep. 40 years ago it was science and design. Now it is engineering. This is what makes the difference.
The only relatively new design for a jet aircraft is the Sukhoi Berkut and even that is not so revolutionary after all. It is 1970-es idea, not even 1990-es.
By the way as far as fighter jets (in the top level article) not being able to hit above 1.6 that is valid only for the american ones. Mig 31 hits almost the same speed as the Blackbird. The White Swan hits 2.2M, Mig 25 hits above 2.5M as well. Once again, most of them are 40 year old designs. We are engineering improvements on top of that, but there is no scientific development and no design breakthroughs.
How often have *you* wondered why fonts on windows and OSX still look better - For the last 3 years none, I suggest you wake up from your slumber and look around.
When was the last time that you tried to use, say, firefox, via X11 across even a fast LAN network? - At the moment actually. When I am at home I use remote X instead of local even on my laptop which has a faster CPU (Dual Core2) than my aging server. Remote X and a well set-up Xterm is considerably faster than running X locally. The reason why Firefox is slow in most lame remote X setups is fonts and flash. The first thing you need to do when dealing with Xterms is to set up a font server. The second is to set-up pulse and provide flash with working audio. If you do not, it will drag its feet horribly because it will keep trying to open the audio and fail at it.
Oh, and ever notice how an X11 UI (regardless of windowing toolkit) feels sluggish and less "solid" than the competition? - you really need to awake from hibernation mate and get a clue. For your information Vista has now turned most 2D accelerated ops and all 2D accelerated font rendering. As a result X11 setup on relatively recent hardware beats it flat at trivial things like moving a window, redrawing a window, drawing text in a window and so on. The margin is more than 50%. This is all over the computer press by the way so I suggest you actually read it, look at some real benchmarks and stop talking out of your arse
Actually, I have done it myself and have seen a large portion of my dad's collegues do it in Russia (with slightly lower temperature differences - +220-230F to -4F).
After a "proper" sauna (not the modern IR shit) you have to quickly chill down. If you go into hot water or try to chill down slowly you feel like shit after that. Now, ice cold water or even snow is a completely different story. It is the ultimate refresher. One of my dad collegues had a sauna near Moscow and we went there nearly every weekend during the winter when I was a kid. Coming out of 110-120C+ into -25-30C, breaking the ice on the water bucket with your bum and throwing snowballs at each other (that is 240F difference so a bit less than on the south pole). Totally nuts. Especially if you do it after a 20-30km ski run.
Close but no cigar. The goal (and it is stated in the report) is to decrease the dependency on foreign energy sources.
What is interesting here is that it is actually not Britain being afraid of the Gulf going tits up, it is afraid of Russia. Even with the new Norwegian pipeline that came online last year the net North sea gas production is forecast to continue decreasing. As a result the UK which has moved most of its electricity production to gas as has 90% of households using gas will have to start buying gas from the European gas grid which is mostly fed by Russia (though by that time the North African counties may joing it as a secondary supplier). Considering Britain's habit to fund nearly every antigovernment and separatist nut in Russia this will make for an interesting political situation indeed.
It is quite obvious that you have not seen what happens when you lift the lid on a drive from those days after some sorry bastard has disabled the safety that disallows you to do that while the disk is still spinning. The effect is roughly the same as from a hand grenade. A portion of the outer casing looks like it was shot from the inside and chunks of the original drive plates are sticking from the wall or from the sorry bastard who happened to be on that side of the case. I have seen that happen on a couple of occasion (with later hard-drives for Vaxen and early VMs).
I have a summer house on the slope above a balancing hydroelectric. The thing is huge. A cascade of 5 dams along a mountain valley. The main "tank" on top is nearly 10 miles long and 3 miles wide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Belmeken_004.jpg. The actual generators and temporary storage dams down in the valley are several miles in length as well. And all this just barely manages something like 30-40MW of balancing capacity.
Frankly using hybrid cars for this is a total joke. If you want to "help" the grid (and get payed for that) put some solars or a wind turbine on your house.
Wrong, they do if they know where to pay and how much and if they consider the payment reasonable. Cellular industry mentality. Every bit of IP has to be payed for and accounted for. Essentially the software industry mentality of the early 80-es redux. They are not alone in this. Most of the industry is just as bad if not worse.
As long as there is no way to finance the opposition from the outside and as long as the local financial powers do not finance the opposition there is no need to dissolve the senate. It will be the correct senate singing happily the emperor's orders.
Frankly, he is doing all the right moves. Demonstrating his allegiance to the constitution, stepping aside after the end of the second term, no stupid Chavez style antics and so on. Unless Russian economy falters (and it will take a couple of Afganistan level conflicts to do that), there is no way to unseat him (and his group).
First of all, the casino SPAM has not decreased. It has changed target markets. I got 10+ mails over the last month that managed to get past my antispam filters with gambling spams and scams. This is compared to under 3 for the preceding year. Mortgages - that disappeared at least one year before the credit crunch started. And so on.
The reason SPAM is decreasing is that the return on investment for spammers steadily decreases. People are responding to it less and less. As a result the vast botnets built for spamming are now geared towards phishing, identity theft (botnet ops are actually scanning computers for useable documents) and from time to time a bit of SPAM for the purposes of botnet expansion.
If I see a post from him on BUGTRAQ I skip it straight away. Out of all security gadfly individuals he is the most overinflated one. If humans were baloons with egos inside his would have promptly reached escape velocity due to the amount of hot air in it.
Just read his posts on BUGTRAQ. Any of them over the last 3 years.
I suspect he did not. In fact I suspect none of his immediate surrounding did. As many people pointed out they had no need whatsoever to do it.
Now, cronies and henchmen in remote regions are a completely different story.
Realistically, the feudalism never went away in the Soviet Union (and Russia for that matter). Many of the remote places and nearly all of the so called "autonomous republics" and "autonomous areas" are ruled in a feudal manner. In fact usually the rule inherited from father to son.
It is essential for a vassal to demonstrate his true loyalty to the ruling feudal. In the middle ages it was the oath of allegiance. Now it is votes. This is exactly what is happening here. Chechnia, various tatar states and other fiefdoms demonstrating their loyalty to the king. Move along people, there is nothing we can do to fix it for at least a 100 more years. Old habits die hard. Really hard.
Also, they are a blip on the overall statistics radar. In total we are talking about less votes than Moscow and St Petersburg which were not rigged and had the highest opposition representation which were not rigged this way. In fact I would expect less than 2-3% of the overall vote to be subjected to such rigging (the fiefdoms in question are not particularly large).
The real killer was the strict prohibition on foreign funding.
There were anything between 30-200 million of American money behind every mid-right wing win in Eastern Europe for the last 15 years (I have personally seen some of it). Without this level of support none of the right-wing "blue" muppets would have gotten even close to winning an election in Bulgaria, Romania, etc. By yanking the plug and making sure that none of the local oligarghs gives money to the opposition Putin has guaranteed his win. The 7% was simply a topup just to make sure.
In most of Europe (except surprise, surprise, UK) for this to be enforceable they have to pay you for 5 years your normal salary. Nobody in his sane mind does that so nobody tries to put mad clauses about non-compete into contracts. UK is once again one of the few significant exemptions.
1. You are wrong. It is money. Removing a truck stuck between two listed cottages costs a lot of it.
2. I do not see what their problem is. UK authorities are experts in building road obstructions and making roads unusable for anything but a Daihatsu Ferosa or Suzuki Jimny (it has to be 4x4 to go well over the sleeping cops, tall so you can see the obstructions and narrow so you can squeeze between the poles). I live in Cambridge and we have anti-truck measures all over the place. Two metal poles with the distance between them barely enough to let a family car. I tried to drive through one of those with a Honda FRV and the only way through was to fold the mirrors (and I barely managed to get through). Nothing at all prevents the council in question from doing this. Nothing, except the fact that most people who live in places like this drive the biggest Chelsea tractors money can buy and there will be another outrage. The outrage of local citizens scraping their precious RangeRovers.
EU versions operate nearly universally on 2.4. I wrote this pissed off coming back from a shop looking for guess what - a keyboard with decent crypto layer. 5 wireless wankoffs, all with an wankoff encryption and all tossing all over the 2.4 band. 1 MSFT, 1 Logitech, 3 Chinese nonames. All 2.4
There is a well established connectivity layer for such devices which has reasonable encryption, key management and interference/frequency control. It is also widely interoperable. It is called Bluetooth.
So some blowhard that does not have any f*** clue whatsof***ever decides to go the cheapskate route and use Rot13-like wankoff instead of the well established system. As expected - the first kid coming about cracks it with ease.
And that is the actual story. Rinse, repeat. Microcrap, Logicrap, Whatever chinese radio crap, etc. All of them on 2.4GHz buggering up WiFi, Blueotooth and other well behaved stuff.
There are only two BT keyboard on the market in the UK at the moment. One is by Apple and you have drag your arse to an applestore as they refuse to ship it and the other one is by targus and is a supermicro keyboard. Situation with mice is not much different. Same story with IR which while not having encryption does not have a lot of eavesdropping problems either. There is nothing available. Only crap.
So frankly, I would very gladly buy the kid whoddunit a beer because this helps reduce the crap on the market and the market to switch to a proper connectivity layer.
I keep a stock of those for AntiSPAM testing and this one ended up being on the top of the folder. It is a fairly unusual sample which I have kept for testing since 2001.
Want me to sell it to you? Bargain basement price with the headers and mail system logs? Unique example of early 21st century Nigerian literature. Good bargain all around:-)
THE DESK OF THE EXECUTIVE GOVERNOR CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA. PROF.CHARLES SOLUDO
ATTN: LEV,
YOUR IMMEDIATE CONTRACT PAYMENT #:MAV/NNPC/FGN/MIN/009
From the records of outstanding contractors due for payment with the Federal government of Nigeria your name and company was discovered as next on The list of the outstanding contractors who have not received their payments.
I wish to inform you that your payment is being processed and will be Released to you as soon as you respond to this letter. Also note that from my Record in my file your outstanding contract payment is US$23.5 million dollars(twenty three million five hundred dollars).
Please re-confirm to me if this is inline with what you have in your Record and also re-confirm to me the followings
1) Your full name. 2) Phone, fax and mobile #. 3) Company name, position and address. 4) Profession, age and marital status.
As soon as this informations are received, your payment will be made to you in a certified bank draft from central bank of Nigeria and a copy will be given to you for you to take to your bank and confirm it.
You must call me on my direct number as soon as you receive this letter for a serious discussion with me and also get back to me immediately with the private e-mail(draftpaymentoffice@myway.com)
Sorry mate, a "No off" trip. I can't be bothered to travel to the USA in the current paranoia. It was bad enough as it was prior to 9/11, now it is not worth it. So any of my American collegues who wants to have a meeting with me ends up having it either over conference facilities or in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
Spot on. Every single piece of German equipment I have bought in the last 8 years has arrived with a factory defect and/or broke down within the next year after the warranty expired. For example the German washing machine was marked with a crayon on the side that it is defective and needs to be returned to the factory line and it was shipped none the less. Cars are the same. I used to have an Astra and it was the same story. German cars (and especially the ones built in Germany) suck. There is a reason why Germans are at the bottom of the reliability league tables (with only the large French cars ahead of them). The underlying cause is the German workforce (same as with French). When your workforce has grown slacking on the job and knowing that the union will not allow it to be fired no matter what, you get a "quality" product.
As far as the fascination especially with the German cars it dates from the days when the German cars were not actually German. In the days when their build quality was stellar and ahead even of the Japanese they were built by Turkish gastarbeighters. In those days (late 60-es and 70-es), German build quality was unrivaled. Guess why - non-unionised workforce working its arse off and doing everything it can not to make a single mistake in order not to get fired.
Back to German cars and the subject of the article. It is not just german manufacturing that sucks worse and worse. German engineering has joined it. The Germans are the only country in the world where the average fuel consumption of new cars has actually increased over the last 10 years. In fact year on year a German car is on the average less fuel efficient than the last year model: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7095299.stm. Even the US car industry does better.
Yep, and that is why Bush is signing it. The bill has nothing to do with emissions, greenhouse gases, damage to the environment and so on. It all has to do with reducing USA dependency on Gulf Oil.
As far as the MPG, my Honda FRV (diesel) which is a big 6 seater (it still does 0-60 in 9s) does 50+ in summer and 40 winter. My wife's car which is a 2003 Daihatsu Siron once again hits 0-60 in sub-9s and does 52 MPG in the summer (if you do not drive in a binary manner). So frankly 35 MPG is a joke. Any self-respecting non-US car manufacturer is way past that already.
"I'm only open 8-5, M-F"? People got sick when they got sick. Depends where are you. In the UK - hell yeah. It was that way and is that way. Here if your kid id in a comatose state with 40+C you will be asked to take it to the GP during the opening hours and will wait there for 2 hours until your appointment or until your kid needs to be ferried to AE in an ambulance. And the doctor visitng anybody besides pensioners at their home? Forget it.
Other countries - definitely not. Completely different story. My granddad was a village GP for nearly 30 years. I remember visiting him as a kid. It was more than 15 years after he retired and there were still people knocking on the door in the middle of the night. Every time he stood up, put his old raincoat, got his old handbag in hand and went. The last time he did it was just a few weeks before he died. No "8-5. M-F", no "call the HotLine, I am unavailable".
Both are cases at each end of the scale. The balance is somewhere in the middle. Work should not encroach onto your personal life beyond a certain limit. At the same time there are emergencies and they should be handled by everyone who can with some reasonable distribution of duties. It should not be piled up onto one person.
Yep. And from there on two thirds of the GUI are crippled when working in 2D. It is not even funny. Slow as hell.
OK, it is not a fighter jet, but it is a supersonic currently in use and production. USA has dropped the intake reqs that made 1.6M speeds possible from the shopping list 20+ or so years ago. Russians have not. As a result they have a number of production aircraft that can hit speeds closet to the speed of the Blackbird despite the engines being turbofan, not ramjet.
Yep. 40 years ago it was science and design. Now it is engineering. This is what makes the difference.
The only relatively new design for a jet aircraft is the Sukhoi Berkut and even that is not so revolutionary after all. It is 1970-es idea, not even 1990-es.
By the way as far as fighter jets (in the top level article) not being able to hit above 1.6 that is valid only for the american ones. Mig 31 hits almost the same speed as the Blackbird. The White Swan hits 2.2M, Mig 25 hits above 2.5M as well. Once again, most of them are 40 year old designs. We are engineering improvements on top of that, but there is no scientific development and no design breakthroughs.
How often have *you* wondered why fonts on windows and OSX still look better - For the last 3 years none, I suggest you wake up from your slumber and look around.
When was the last time that you tried to use, say, firefox, via X11 across even a fast LAN network? - At the moment actually. When I am at home I use remote X instead of local even on my laptop which has a faster CPU (Dual Core2) than my aging server. Remote X and a well set-up Xterm is considerably faster than running X locally. The reason why Firefox is slow in most lame remote X setups is fonts and flash. The first thing you need to do when dealing with Xterms is to set up a font server. The second is to set-up pulse and provide flash with working audio. If you do not, it will drag its feet horribly because it will keep trying to open the audio and fail at it.
Oh, and ever notice how an X11 UI (regardless of windowing toolkit) feels sluggish and less "solid" than the competition? - you really need to awake from hibernation mate and get a clue. For your information Vista has now turned most 2D accelerated ops and all 2D accelerated font rendering. As a result X11 setup on relatively recent hardware beats it flat at trivial things like moving a window, redrawing a window, drawing text in a window and so on. The margin is more than 50%. This is all over the computer press by the way so I suggest you actually read it, look at some real benchmarks and stop talking out of your arse
Actually, I have done it myself and have seen a large portion of my dad's collegues do it in Russia (with slightly lower temperature differences - +220-230F to -4F).
After a "proper" sauna (not the modern IR shit) you have to quickly chill down. If you go into hot water or try to chill down slowly you feel like shit after that. Now, ice cold water or even snow is a completely different story. It is the ultimate refresher. One of my dad collegues had a sauna near Moscow and we went there nearly every weekend during the winter when I was a kid. Coming out of 110-120C+ into -25-30C, breaking the ice on the water bucket with your bum and throwing snowballs at each other (that is 240F difference so a bit less than on the south pole). Totally nuts. Especially if you do it after a 20-30km ski run.
They are panicking over the wrong thing anyway.
Who cares if the cell site has power or not if one of the "huts" on the backhaul to the network has run out of juice.
Close but no cigar. The goal (and it is stated in the report) is to decrease the dependency on foreign energy sources.
What is interesting here is that it is actually not Britain being afraid of the Gulf going tits up, it is afraid of Russia. Even with the new Norwegian pipeline that came online last year the net North sea gas production is forecast to continue decreasing. As a result the UK which has moved most of its electricity production to gas as has 90% of households using gas will have to start buying gas from the European gas grid which is mostly fed by Russia (though by that time the North African counties may joing it as a secondary supplier). Considering Britain's habit to fund nearly every antigovernment and separatist nut in Russia this will make for an interesting political situation indeed.
It is quite obvious that you have not seen what happens when you lift the lid on a drive from those days after some sorry bastard has disabled the safety that disallows you to do that while the disk is still spinning. The effect is roughly the same as from a hand grenade. A portion of the outer casing looks like it was shot from the inside and chunks of the original drive plates are sticking from the wall or from the sorry bastard who happened to be on that side of the case. I have seen that happen on a couple of occasion (with later hard-drives for Vaxen and early VMs).
Slashdot needs a "+1 Troll" besides the "-1 Troll" mod. For posts like yours. Applause.
Yep.
I have a summer house on the slope above a balancing hydroelectric. The thing is huge. A cascade of 5 dams along a mountain valley. The main "tank" on top is nearly 10 miles long and 3 miles wide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Belmeken_004.jpg. The actual generators and temporary storage dams down in the valley are several miles in length as well. And all this just barely manages something like 30-40MW of balancing capacity.
Frankly using hybrid cars for this is a total joke. If you want to "help" the grid (and get payed for that) put some solars or a wind turbine on your house.
Wrong, they do if they know where to pay and how much and if they consider the payment reasonable. Cellular industry mentality. Every bit of IP has to be payed for and accounted for. Essentially the software industry mentality of the early 80-es redux. They are not alone in this. Most of the industry is just as bad if not worse.
He does not need to dissolve the senate.
As long as there is no way to finance the opposition from the outside and as long as the local financial powers do not finance the opposition there is no need to dissolve the senate. It will be the correct senate singing happily the emperor's orders.
Frankly, he is doing all the right moves. Demonstrating his allegiance to the constitution, stepping aside after the end of the second term, no stupid Chavez style antics and so on. Unless Russian economy falters (and it will take a couple of Afganistan level conflicts to do that), there is no way to unseat him (and his group).
Just read the article.
Gadi at his best.
First of all, the casino SPAM has not decreased. It has changed target markets. I got 10+ mails over the last month that managed to get past my antispam filters with gambling spams and scams. This is compared to under 3 for the preceding year. Mortgages - that disappeared at least one year before the credit crunch started. And so on.
The reason SPAM is decreasing is that the return on investment for spammers steadily decreases. People are responding to it less and less. As a result the vast botnets built for spamming are now geared towards phishing, identity theft (botnet ops are actually scanning computers for useable documents) and from time to time a bit of SPAM for the purposes of botnet expansion.
If I see a post from him on BUGTRAQ I skip it straight away. Out of all security gadfly individuals he is the most overinflated one. If humans were baloons with egos inside his would have promptly reached escape velocity due to the amount of hot air in it.
Just read his posts on BUGTRAQ. Any of them over the last 3 years.
I suspect he did not. In fact I suspect none of his immediate surrounding did. As many people pointed out they had no need whatsoever to do it.
Now, cronies and henchmen in remote regions are a completely different story.
Realistically, the feudalism never went away in the Soviet Union (and Russia for that matter). Many of the remote places and nearly all of the so called "autonomous republics" and "autonomous areas" are ruled in a feudal manner. In fact usually the rule inherited from father to son.
It is essential for a vassal to demonstrate his true loyalty to the ruling feudal. In the middle ages it was the oath of allegiance. Now it is votes. This is exactly what is happening here. Chechnia, various tatar states and other fiefdoms demonstrating their loyalty to the king. Move along people, there is nothing we can do to fix it for at least a 100 more years. Old habits die hard. Really hard.
Also, they are a blip on the overall statistics radar. In total we are talking about less votes than Moscow and St Petersburg which were not rigged and had the highest opposition representation which were not rigged this way. In fact I would expect less than 2-3% of the overall vote to be subjected to such rigging (the fiefdoms in question are not particularly large).
The real killer was the strict prohibition on foreign funding.
There were anything between 30-200 million of American money behind every mid-right wing win in Eastern Europe for the last 15 years (I have personally seen some of it). Without this level of support none of the right-wing "blue" muppets would have gotten even close to winning an election in Bulgaria, Romania, etc. By yanking the plug and making sure that none of the local oligarghs gives money to the opposition Putin has guaranteed his win. The 7% was simply a topup just to make sure.
In most of Europe (except surprise, surprise, UK) for this to be enforceable they have to pay you for 5 years your normal salary. Nobody in his sane mind does that so nobody tries to put mad clauses about non-compete into contracts. UK is once again one of the few significant exemptions.
1. You are wrong. It is money. Removing a truck stuck between two listed cottages costs a lot of it.
2. I do not see what their problem is. UK authorities are experts in building road obstructions and making roads unusable for anything but a Daihatsu Ferosa or Suzuki Jimny (it has to be 4x4 to go well over the sleeping cops, tall so you can see the obstructions and narrow so you can squeeze between the poles). I live in Cambridge and we have anti-truck measures all over the place. Two metal poles with the distance between them barely enough to let a family car. I tried to drive through one of those with a Honda FRV and the only way through was to fold the mirrors (and I barely managed to get through). Nothing at all prevents the council in question from doing this. Nothing, except the fact that most people who live in places like this drive the biggest Chelsea tractors money can buy and there will be another outrage. The outrage of local citizens scraping their precious RangeRovers.
US versions operate on 900.
EU versions operate nearly universally on 2.4. I wrote this pissed off coming back from a shop looking for guess what - a keyboard with decent crypto layer. 5 wireless wankoffs, all with an wankoff encryption and all tossing all over the 2.4 band. 1 MSFT, 1 Logitech, 3 Chinese nonames. All 2.4
You are telling the wrong story.
There is a well established connectivity layer for such devices which has reasonable encryption, key management and interference/frequency control. It is also widely interoperable. It is called Bluetooth.
So some blowhard that does not have any f*** clue whatsof***ever decides to go the cheapskate route and use Rot13-like wankoff instead of the well established system. As expected - the first kid coming about cracks it with ease.
And that is the actual story. Rinse, repeat. Microcrap, Logicrap, Whatever chinese radio crap, etc. All of them on 2.4GHz buggering up WiFi, Blueotooth and other well behaved stuff.
There are only two BT keyboard on the market in the UK at the moment. One is by Apple and you have drag your arse to an applestore as they refuse to ship it and the other one is by targus and is a supermicro keyboard. Situation with mice is not much different. Same story with IR which while not having encryption does not have a lot of eavesdropping problems either. There is nothing available. Only crap.
So frankly, I would very gladly buy the kid whoddunit a beer because this helps reduce the crap on the market and the market to switch to a proper connectivity layer.
Nope, it is an original.
:-)
I keep a stock of those for AntiSPAM testing and this one ended up being on the top of the folder. It is a fairly unusual sample which I have kept for testing since 2001.
Want me to sell it to you? Bargain basement price with the headers and mail system logs? Unique example of early 21st century Nigerian literature. Good bargain all around
THE DESK OF THE EXECUTIVE GOVERNOR
CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA.
PROF.CHARLES SOLUDO
ATTN: LEV,
YOUR IMMEDIATE CONTRACT PAYMENT #:MAV/NNPC/FGN/MIN/009
From the records of outstanding contractors due for payment with the Federal government of Nigeria your name and company was discovered as next on The list of the outstanding contractors who have not received their payments.
I wish to inform you that your payment is being processed and will be Released to you as soon as you respond to this letter. Also note that from my Record in my file your outstanding contract payment is US$23.5 million dollars(twenty three million five hundred dollars).
Please re-confirm to me if this is inline with what you have in your Record and also re-confirm to me the followings
1) Your full name.
2) Phone, fax and mobile #.
3) Company name, position and address.
4) Profession, age and marital status.
As soon as this informations are received, your payment will be made to you in a certified bank draft from central bank of Nigeria and a copy will be given to you for you to take to your bank and confirm it.
You must call me on my direct number as soon as you receive this letter for a serious discussion with me and also get back to me immediately with the private e-mail(draftpaymentoffice@myway.com)
Regards and Stay Bless,
PROF CHARLES SOLUDO.
Executive Governor, Central Bank Of Nigeria.
Sorry mate, a "No off" trip. I can't be bothered to travel to the USA in the current paranoia. It was bad enough as it was prior to 9/11, now it is not worth it. So any of my American collegues who wants to have a meeting with me ends up having it either over conference facilities or in Europe.