Being in the middle of a big, still largely unresolved, fight with Nokia over the expensive piece of crap that is an N97, I just wish I’d seen this video before I ever even thought of getting an N97.
The real tragedy is that Nokia have pretty much lost one of their biggest fan-boys at a time when they really cannot afford to.
I just downloaded and installed Namebench, a new open source project that benchmarks DNS servers, with a view of seeing how well my DNS is performing these days. All of these developments stem from the recent launch of Google’s public DNS service and the sudden realisation that a large part of the reason for interweb slowness, if you’re not in Africa, is the length of time it takes for a DNS query to complete. I do most of my mobile connectivity via iBurst, so I guess I like them to be speedy, unfortunately as the results below show, my closest DNS provider, my ISP, iBurst, has really bad average DNS response times…
And it’s got fuck all to do with latency over a wireless link – the same connection shows an average DNS response time that is 217% faster from Datapro, and MTN just a little bit behind that. It’s the Windows servers iBurst is using to try run an ISP. Sad.
Science and Technology minister Naledi Pandor is the latest victim of unreliable and aging German luxury automobiles, a condition known in car manufacturing circles as the “H1WAN12 (Have 1, Want A New 1 Too) Swine Fool Panic”. Recently she too was forced to order two Mercedes Benz ML350s to ferry her growing ass from meeting to meeting, following the apparent gearbox failure of the two previous cars designated for the Minister.
The cars were both running with the enormously high mileage of 141000km and 106 000km which explains their sudden calamitous failure. The new replacement cars include the latest in ministerial comforts aimed at improving leaders’ ability to make poor decisions in traffic – metallic paint, command navigation, media interface, DVD player, technical off-road package, heated front seats, Xenon active lights, sunroof, run flat tyres and private glass. A spokesperson for the manufacturer, Masipa Dense has expressed shock and horror that the minister did not take the heated rear-seat option. The new cars were purchased at a cost of 28 RDP houses.
In a similar yet apparently unrelated incident, minister Nathi Mthethwa was also a victim of German engineering when the 2003 BMW X5 and 2006 Audi A8 he recently inherited turned out to be “mechanically unsound”. He replaced these with two “BMW ministerial-edition” X5s totalling the humble sum of R1.4 million, or 26 RDP houses. Audi has declined to comment, but industry insider Jeremy Clarkson has indicated that Audis are driven by cocks these days, a fact that goes a long way towards explaining Charles Nqakula – the minister who the vehicles were in fact inherited from.
Not to be outdone, Minister of basic education, Angie Motshekga dipped into the public treasury for a more sensible approach when considering the nature of the unreliable and trouble-plagued German vehicles. She chose instead to only take one R900 000 BMW 730D and rather replace her previous vehicle with a more reasonable and cheaper option manufactured by Indian mega-company Tata: Her Range Rover Sport TDV8 cost a rather sane R800 000. Reasons given for the choice state that the 4×4 ability of the vehicle will allow her to visit extreme rural areas to ensure the children in those remote regions are given their half-bowl of miele-pap every morning before walking barefoot to attend lessons with no equipment in the open veld beneath the trees.
Collins Spindokotela, minister for the evaluation of corruption, has defended the purchases as within the rules dictated in the ministerial handbook, and indicated he would rather see the frivolous spending being made on good Italian cars which are “…just as unreliable, but much prettier on the eye.”
In perhaps the most fitting tribute to the shaky world economy, Chairperson of the Finance Portfolio Committee, Nhlanhla Nene, is brought down to earth.