Foot, meet mouth.

EDIT: This now available at Baltlantis.

I have spoken before about the need to apply Occam's Razor to Russia - more specifically, the Heinlein conjecture, which states that one should never attribute anything to malice that can be adequately explained by stupidity. I never cease to be amazed by the ability of Russian institutions of greater or lesser officialdom to embarass themselves in spectacular ways. Really, it's a government full of Boris Johnsons.

I've stayed away from the whole Kosovo issue, because I don't have enough information to make a good judgement on it; I have the impression that the process happening now is more Kosovo's separation from Serbia rather than actual independence - since it'll be run by the EU (and even its flag is a version of the European one). But Serbia is pissed off.

Russia's reaction is mixed. On the one hand, it has been trying to use Serbia as a client state for ages - during the NATO bombings, I've heard rhetoric that Serbia is the only major nation in Europe that is both Slavic and Orthodox; Greece being the latter but not the former, and Poland the former but not the latter. So if Serbia is indignant, Russia is too. Especially since Kosovo is now the dominion of the West, so they get to trot out the old lines about imperialist pigs again.

On the other hand, they are gleefully pointing to Kosovo as a precedent, and demanding international recognition for Abkhasia, South Ossetia and Transdniestr. I've even heard a few local voices piping up again with the idea of an Independent Republic of Ida-Virumaa, which incidentally I would just love to see them try. So Russia finds itself in propaganda heaven, a win-win situation.

And then Russia's state-owned television channel puts out a news show where the anchor spews out the following:

Today the people of Belgrade surely remember other public gatherings. They remember the madness of the crowd that brought down old man Milosevic. The same football fans, by the way. How a country giddy with liberal promises cried at the funeral of the Western puppet Zoran Djindjic - the man who destroyed the legendary Serbian army and secret services, who sold the heroes of Serbian resistance out to The Hague for abstract economic assistance, and who got a well-deserved bullet for it.

Youtube link if you understand Russian. Zoran Djindjic was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Serbia after the end of Milosevic's regime, murdered in 2003.

Holy. Fucking. Shit. This is Russian state TV. Not just a media puppet - this is the official channel of the Kremlin.

The show in question went out at midnight Thursday/Friday. Naturally, the Serbian government is livid. The NewsRu article linked above has a quote from the former Balkan bureau chief of the Russian state newswire, Sergei Gryzunov, saying that this quote is a call for the murder the current Serbian president, Boris Tadic (who was a close supporter of Djindjic's).

So the main question now is, was this an authorized statement, or was the anchor overexcited and taking advantage of the poorly-censored midnight time slot? If it's the latter, we should see news of his dismissal shortly. I lean towards this explanation, because of the reason stated above, but then haven't we seen similar sort of preposterous spew out of the Russian state media directed towards Estonia or Georgia? The only difference now is that Serbia is, ostensibly, on Russia's side.

These people are hilarious, but occasionally their delusion can be scary.

Who needs SSD?

This baby is going straight to the top of the Do Want list.

I haven't gotten an Eee PC so far for two reasons: the screen is desperately tiny, and it has preposterously little storage. An ultraportable device is, by definition, a device I will use for entertainment on the road, and that means music & video. I can handle a lack of an optical drive, but I need more storage than that. Even an SDHC card would not bring the Eee PC's total storage levels to an acceptable level.



I keep getting into these discussions regarding music players. I've always had to stay ahead of the curve in terms of music storage; at first it was a portable CD MP3 player - a Samsung YP-55 that had the worst skip protection ever. But in '02 I went to California and was introduced to Fry's Electronics, which I walked out of holding a Creative Nomad Zen.* It had an aluminium shell, magnesium frame, and a 2.5" laptop hard drive inside. Ever since I have not been satisfied with any device carrying less than 20gb. I went on to have a couple of Archoses after that.

People keep saying that hard drives are inferior to Flash memory, because solid-state storage has no moving parts and is therefore shock-resistant. Here's the thing: today's 1.8" hard drives, the ones designed for pocket devices, seem absolutely good enough. Not only have I never had a 1.8" drive fail on me, I have never heard of anyone who had a drive failure. The hard drives that I saw crash and burn were all fullsize 3.5" inch ones that spent their lives in stationary tower cases. Actually, that's not quite true: the HD in my Dell laptop started making weird noises and was replaced under warranty.

Both my Archoses are fine, and the Nomad Zen was perfectly operational when I crashed my car and left it somewhere in the twisted wreckage.

A 1.8" hard drive, currently available in sizes up to 80gb at least, is good enough for any ultraportable device. It's also cheap.

SSD is expensive and small. It is also shorter-lived than a hard drive, because solid-state memory is designed for a limited number of read-write cycles - this is a big reason why the Eee PC ships with Linux; Windows XP's constant swapping shortens the SSD's lifespan. And it doesn't really provide any more real-world reliability.

Now, SSD is still a cool technology that deserves to be developed further and made cheap & ubiquitous. But as long as the price per gigabyte is an order of magnitude higher than a hard drive, I don't want it. I want an Eee PC with a bigger screen, more RAM and at least 20GB onboard; HP's case design is a nice bonus. I don't care if it really has a VIA C7 instead of an Intel chip; I spent four years running XP Pro on a Duron 1300 with 128mb RAM and onboard graphics. If they can really sell the HP Compaq 2133 for $630, I want one.

Whitey's going down.

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* I was in San Diego on a business trip, and got two hundred bucks in per diem (the company wasn't allowed to pay me a salary, since I was there on a B1/B2 visa). Since they also provided food, board and entertainment, I hardly ever needed to spend my own money on anything. So I used that, along with my own cash, to stock up on electronic toys. The funny bit was that the cashiers at Fry's had absolutely no fucking idea how to ring up $500 worth of merchandise without a credit card. Looking back on it, I expect they thought I was paying with drug money.

The Estonia Syndrome

...here.

Links/plugs/feedback welcome.

Poignant

Wahaahahahahhaahaaa. :D

Anyway... other template wasn't working, so back to this one. Did I get everyone in the blogroll? If you have a blog in English that is more or less themed on Estonia - or you know of one - leave a link in the comments.

Big, relevant article coming soon, possibly in the form of a link to a slightly more authentic-looking publication.

PR stands for Putin's Russia

An interesting point by Juri Maloverjan of BBC's Moscow bureau. He has been going around Russia (proper - not just Moscow and St. Petersburg) filing reports on preparations for the presidential elections, and has noticed a pattern.

Most of the people willing to go on record said largely the same thing: their lives personally are hard and unfair, but the situation in general has improved so much in Putin's time that they are definitely going to vote for Putin. Or, you know, Medvedev. Whatever.

The value of good PR?