Tag: Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan Is Changing Its Alphabet From Cyrillic To Latin-Based Style Favored By the West

If you think you’ve ever been involved in a huge and complex project, think again.  Slashdot runs the story: Kazakhstan Is Changing Its Alphabet From Cyrillic To Latin-Based Style Favored By the West.

This is a huge change in many regards – technical, cultural, social, etc.  Trying to remember when was the last time I heard about a project of this magnitude, September 3rd of 1967 in Sweden comes to mind.  That’s when the country switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to driving on the right-hand side of the road.  An icon photograph depicting the change is this one:

And that’s still easier and simpler than the alphabet change, I think.

Billing. It’s a serious matter.

Now this one is simply great.

I was reading through the funny IRC quotes at Bash.Org.Ru, which is a Russian analogue of Bash.org, when I came across the quote #4741.

Here is a rough translation for you:

Billing

Dear customers! For the last three days we had a technical problem and your used Internet traffic wasn’t calculated properly. We kindly ask you to calculate the approximate amount of traffic that you used during this period and pay cash accordingly in our office. With best regards, company management. http://isp.kz/

I smiled and almost went away. But before I did so, I noticed a small post-scriptum – it was a moderatorial note from bash.org.ru that confirmed that this message was actually posted to the official website of the provider.

So, I rushed to check it out and, indeed, it was still there.

I was laughing so hard that I almost woke up Olga and Maxim. I mean how stupid and naive that is – asking your customers to pay based on their own calculations? What are they counting at? Good will? Honesty? Or maybe they just have an excellent sense of humor. If so, they should have an update of some sort published shortly.

After all, those who thought tha Borat (.kz stands for Kazakhstan, as does Borat) was an exhageration are wrong. He is by far not. No.