The compound effect over a year is to make prices over 2.3 million times higher. It is hard to imagine. Robert Mugabe must think it is good because he has appointed Gideon Gono as governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe for another 5 year term. I wonder what Gono's 5-year salary package looks like.
Just bought a newspaper. The marked price: US$2/Zimbabwe $20 000 000. The next month it will probably be 64 million.
If it weren't for the good citizens of Zimbabwe, who are suffering the bad effects of Mugabe rule, it would be a big joke.
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Thinking of the stubborn paranoia of Robert Mugabe fuelling group-think and fear verses the promise of a better quality of life that Morgan Tsvangirai espouses free of imaginary enemies of racial divide, or the camaraderie of the African Nationalist Congress where historical connections with the fight against racial discrimination suffered by people with pigmented skin mean more than critical analysis and the totally non-racist humane and logically sound beliefs of the Democratic Alliance whose' leader, Helen Zille, was judged the World's Best Mayor, while Mugabe remains in power into his old age, and the ANC wins the high percentage of support in spite of numerous failures in delivery, high levels of violent crime and the resulting severely damaging brain drain of more than a million of the most productive citizens, and it strikes me that the same applies to the tenaciousness of Microsoft Windows as the dominant microcomputer operating system compared to the Open Source flagship, Linux, which suffers the position of being the alternative to Windows and Macintosh rather than its deserved place at number one, makes me realise that political insanity is a pervasive condition.
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With a bit of time to spare I decided to do some housekeeping on my old desktop computer. I had upgraded this computer from Windows 98 over six years ago by installing a second hard disk drive and Windows XP Home.
I still use this computer for compiling Windows programs and for routine testing of printers and software. Over the years the 'desktop' got covered with icons. Did you know that you can continue adding icons to the desktop long after the desktop is full?
My first step was to clean up the desktop by deleting shortcuts and unwanted files, and by sorting and filing documents that I wanted to keep. The desktop looked as good as new. But playing a game of on-line poker on this cleaned-up desktop proved to be unacceptably slow. It could be blamed on the fact that I was working from the other side of the building, connecting via wireless and two or three network switches and having the XP desktop rendered on my EeePC with VNC, but I decided to uninstall unused software to improve the speed.
I uninstalled a few programs but found that there were a lot of unwanted programs running that were not listed in the Add/Remove Programs utility. The easiest way to disable the startup of these craplets is by using MSConfig. Doing so I disabled all the startup programs and services except VNC. I then restarted Windows and waited.
I gave up waiting and went to the misbehaving computer to see what the problem was. I was surprized to see the following message on the screen:
Since Windows was first activated on this computer, the hardware has changed significantly. Due to these changes, Windows must be reactivated within 3 days. Do you want to reactivate now?
I tried re-enabling all the things that I had disabled using MSConfig but still got the same message. So, I tried to reactivate via the Internet but get the message:
Unable to activate online.
So now my only option is to telephone Microsoft and recite 54 seemingly random characters and listen to and type in another 40-character key. I'll ask Odessa to do it for me tomorrow.
I do wonder what will happen in another 6 years, when M$ no longer support XP, will they still be manning the support lines to give free activation keys?
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