You must understand situation in Poland when you read this story.
Current majority in Polish parliament comes from social-democratic SLD-UP coalition, which (the SLD part) is just rebranded communist "unity" party, ruling Poland between (AFAIR) 1947-89. Rebranded twice, I must add -- it was PZPR during soviet era, later SdRP and now SLD. The cabinet formed by this party (Miller's cabinet) fell in 2004 due to numerous corruption scandals and accusations of connections with organised crime on both national and local level.
Current cabinet is headed by prof. Belka, which was Finance Minister at the beginning of Miller's cabinet but left the cabinet due to unrealistic too-far-left plans (Belka is economist educated in US with not-so-left-wining views of economy). It has no public or parliamentary support, it is rather a result of a stalemate between President and Parliament.
Thing is, that after the fall of Miller's cabinet, SLD-UP coalition had split and further SLD split into SLD and SdPL. Depending on point in time that polls were taken, no Party of former SLD-UP coalition would pass threshold in new parliamentary elections. So when new cabinet was proposed, neither Parliament's nor President's candidates passed vote of confidence. Next step according to constitution was that either Parliament would accept President's second proposition, or it would be automatically dissolved and new elections would be held (over a year ahead of schedule).
So basically:
MPs are glued to their chairs, counting MP salaries till the end of their term;
Belka's cabinet has no Parliamentary or public support;
Belka's cabinet is simply transitional until such time that new elections can be held; I have no idea when, seems to me more and more that at default date after a full term of current parliament.
With this situation everyone here is really surprised that this cabinet does anything effective and useful, and I was personally surprised that it showed a spine in Brussels.
Robert
PS Yes, I am from Poland and if I see some more Polish or "you forgot Poland" jokes references here, there's going to be some heavy flame;)
PPS If I mangled some facts, kill me, I don't pay much attention to this heap of excrements that Polish (or any post-communist country for that matter) politics is. But it seems that EU democracy doesn't start any better, ignoring democratic procedures etc...
The problem is, women's rights, black rights, gay rights and so on all deal with human rights.
You see, there is a small problem. At the time when the above mentioned rights campaigns were started, most of the opponents simply denied their subjects humanity, hence there was no question of human rights for them.
Just look at the history of women rights, black rights, gay rights. Some of those cases are "solved" today, some of them are pending, but one thing is for sure: as soon as another category of sentient beings demands equal treatment, as subject, not as object, it gets nasty and former "master race" rarelly gives up without a fight.
I hear people complain about their client software all the time. Crashes, too slow, etc. Do they even still make devices that act like hard drives?
My Creative MuVo2 4GB works with anything that can use usb-mass-storage device: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and some other exotic OSes that can properly use USB.
It is small, but quite a lot cheaper than similarly sized iPod mini. Beware of bigger Creative hdd-based players though -- they all need some stupid client software. Grapevine says that Creative MuVo line is made by some other company for Creative, that's why they are actually good value for the money.
Reuters just reported important business news from new and emerging market.
Mr and Mrs Jones from Waukesha Wisconsin just confirmed that they won't be launching their Media Player and Online Music Service. Asked about the reasons of this difficult decisions Mr Jones told that he can't promise he won't start his own Online Music Service in the future but it is just impossible at the moment. Mrs Jones wasn't immediately available for the comment.
Robert
Re:VOIP Spam?
on
The Other VoIP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've got VoIP phone from my cable provider. Nothing special, it's Europe/Poland, so nothing as fancy as unlimited national etc, but cheaper and more reliable that monopolistic national telco. If I got spams on it I'd welcome them with "could you wait just a sec" and happily counted 0.03pln (about $0.01) per minute I get for incoming calls off my bill;)
Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES. Maybe they could transmit this much between the tower with a single client (scalability anyone?) but if our current wired infrastructure has trouble managing 100 Mbps then what good will that link be?
That's why we should finally start deploying multicast all over the Internet. It's simply stupid that 100,000 people pulling one and the same file from the server saturate its $100k link. Or think webcasts. How easy would it be with multicast...?
Science itself is not a crime, but if you use that science to circumvent laws, it is a crime.
How come exercising "fair use" is suddenly a crime? I mean, if you can watch DirecTV or other digital TV programming, you already paid for this. So how come that watching it on computer screen or time shifting is suddenly a crime?
I'm tired of reading "JS said this, wrote that". The guy is obviously speaking out of his ass and the only way he knows to attract attention is "to be controversial". I distinctly remember that Sun's BoD or shareholders tried to gag him several times because he costs the company too much, not only in public reception.
While SCO stories have some value as entertainment, JS seems to be more boring each time. How can I filter my Slashdot front page to remove stories about Schwartz?
although am not certain if Slavic is primarily East-European or not
It depends. Some people from Poland, Czech, or post-yugoslavian countries might disagree and punch you in the face;)
Thing is, the term "Slavic" crosses the boundary of what was always considered Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Traditionally, before 20th century, East Europe was synonymous with Orthodox Church (Pravoswavny as some Slavs would say), Greek/Byzantium culture, and cyryllic writing. Catholic/Protestant Slavic countries with latin writing were considered Central Europe, identifying rather with Western Europe. Balkan Slavic nations considered themselves primarily Central/Southern Europe.
After WW2 every Russian vasal country in Europe was considered Eastern Europe, even Russian ocupied part of Germany.
Most of Slavic people today would like to regain their pre-soviet culture, including their place on geopolitical map of Europe. Hence most of Western Slavs consider themselves Central/Western Europe, Southern Slavs -- Central/Southern Europe and Eastern Slavs -- Eastern Europe (even those living in North-Eastern Asia;)).
Robert
PS Western/Southern/Eastern Slavs are quite strict, scientific terms; just look at the map.
You forget that/. is site with mostly American readers and moderators. Every time someone writes something "ontopic" that isn't pleasant for Americans and doesn't agree with their American point of view, he gets modded down as "offtopic", "redundant" or even "troll" or "flamebait".
Why argue your point of view, when you can make the opposite point disappear?
So you mean, that I can buy WiFi phone for $240 (and another $50 for AP?) where I could buy analog-to-sip adapter for $80 without strings attached and cordless DECT/GAP phone with base station for $40 (and additional handsets for $20 each)?
I never said ads don't work on me. I think they work in an unintended way -- they usually make me angry, when I realise how stupid advertisers think I am.
Oh, and I am lousy driver. I managed to wreck two military 6x6 transporters during my 18 months military service. I was actually lucky, because I was a driver in Miner Patrol[1], but both accidents were on the way to collect explosives, not on the return trip;)
Robert
[1] In Europe we had lots of wars, so everywhere you go there's lots and lots of unexploded mines, artillery shells and aircraft bombs buried in the ground, some of them even older than a century. Miner Patrols collect them and explode away from human settlements -- you rarely can do it on site.
A decision to download a TV episode means you probably [don't]watch advertisements (which fund the show's broadcast and creation in the first place very often), which means you're less likely to buy advertised products, which means there's a good chance less money will be given to even have created the show or continue it.
The point is irrelevant: even when I watch public TV I DON'T watch ads. I go to make tea, or go to let the previous tea return to the enviroment. Even if I don't leave the room, after years of watching ad-filled TV my brain struggles to keep me sane and throws ads from the short-term memory the moment they're over.
And I honestly don't remember when was the last time I bought something based on TV advertisement. I never buy "popular" brand, other than brand I already used and it worked well for the money I paid. I buy detergents, food etc based on prices in a shop. I don't buy snacks, popular or not -- low-carb diet. I do research before buying anything more expensive than couple of packs of cigarettes, and I smoke one brand of cigarettes for over ten years now.
And I don't buy A/V or computer gear advertised on TV since most of the gear that is advertised there is overpriced crap. Most of my stuff that falls into this category was purchased from Polish eBay equivalent.
As for ratings, I never take part in any poll, market analysis, so I hardly influence any of them.
So, do you mean to tell me, that due to my anti-commerce behaviour I have no right to watch TV?
Yes, those damn pirates! For example, for last couple of years I engage only in illegal downloading of TV series.
I mean, it's despicable, how can people distribute and watch TV shows that are normally viewed for free!!! This must be incredible loss of revenue for rightsholders, mustn't it? Especially when they don't care enough to release those shows on DVD.
Frankly, I'd prefer them make those shows strait-to-dvd so I could buy them for 20-40 bucks a season. Maybe this way no power-hungry fatass exec would cancel shows like Farscape, Firefly, Jeremiah or Angel. No more fucking games with "ratings-scheduling feedback loop", just simple rules -- either it sells with a profit or it doesn't.
Publishing a torrent is incredibly easy, drag the folder in, pick a category, click go. It hashes it and it starts seeding within seconds.
Well, that does it, this program is simply unusable for me, if I can't run it on console of my server;)) I usually run torrents in screen session on my server, until I share it at least 3-4 times, but start to download home as soon as it's ready.
Once, I tried to download over BT directly to home, but (thanks to my asymmetric 768/128 link) it sucked so badly, that I simply don't do this.
Until they release some info about the inner workings of this app, there's not much to talk about.
There are serious problems with decentralising BitTorrent. One of the reasons that people have such good transfers on BT is that there is central tracker supervising particular file and knowing all users serving bits and pieces of this file. This way in case of high demand/high popularity files I achieve speeds over 1MB/s (yes, that's megabyte).
Depending on design choices you can have couple of trackers with subset of users on each of them, or every user seeding file has his own tracker. In first case your client wouldn't be able to use all cloud, and in second tracker would disappear when original seeder turned off his computer.
You can of course design some communication between trackers, or elections or some other magic, but it's too early to tell at the moment. I'll wait for more information.
Whatever they do, I hope that there will be some console based client for this, because asymmetric connections at homes plainly suck at upload (hence on torrent at download too), and I'd rather keep running my torrents on the server plugged into the fast network.
There's nothing (short of AI) that can make infrastructure set up and maintain itself, so I'll believe it when I see it. Or perhaps they have Windows Longhorn in mind, in which case I'd say they are rather optimistic predicting that it will be ready in 20 years.
I don't see how governing DNS by international body could be any worse than current situation where it is governed by private entity incorporated in US. Remember that PSTN is governed by international body, ITU, and it works.
One way or another, I don't see a connection between jailing bloggers in Iran and the question of DNS governance. I guess, every opportunity is good to sell your agenda.
Robert
PS Is this perhaps something related to "Chewbacca defence"?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Current majority in Polish parliament comes from social-democratic SLD-UP coalition, which (the SLD part) is just rebranded communist "unity" party, ruling Poland between (AFAIR) 1947-89. Rebranded twice, I must add -- it was PZPR during soviet era, later SdRP and now SLD. The cabinet formed by this party (Miller's cabinet) fell in 2004 due to numerous corruption scandals and accusations of connections with organised crime on both national and local level.
Current cabinet is headed by prof. Belka, which was Finance Minister at the beginning of Miller's cabinet but left the cabinet due to unrealistic too-far-left plans (Belka is economist educated in US with not-so-left-wining views of economy). It has no public or parliamentary support, it is rather a result of a stalemate between President and Parliament.
Thing is, that after the fall of Miller's cabinet, SLD-UP coalition had split and further SLD split into SLD and SdPL. Depending on point in time that polls were taken, no Party of former SLD-UP coalition would pass threshold in new parliamentary elections. So when new cabinet was proposed, neither Parliament's nor President's candidates passed vote of confidence. Next step according to constitution was that either Parliament would accept President's second proposition, or it would be automatically dissolved and new elections would be held (over a year ahead of schedule).
So basically:
With this situation everyone here is really surprised that this cabinet does anything effective and useful, and I was personally surprised that it showed a spine in Brussels.
Robert
PS Yes, I am from Poland and if I see some more Polish or "you forgot Poland" jokes references here, there's going to be some heavy flame
PPS If I mangled some facts, kill me, I don't pay much attention to this heap of excrements that Polish (or any post-communist country for that matter) politics is. But it seems that EU democracy doesn't start any better, ignoring democratic procedures etc...
The problem is, women's rights, black rights, gay rights and so on all deal with human rights.
You see, there is a small problem. At the time when the above mentioned rights campaigns were started, most of the opponents simply denied their subjects humanity, hence there was no question of human rights for them.
Robert
Just look at the history of women rights, black rights, gay rights. Some of those cases are "solved" today, some of them are pending, but one thing is for sure: as soon as another category of sentient beings demands equal treatment, as subject, not as object, it gets nasty and former "master race" rarelly gives up without a fight.
Robert
Stephen King manages to get it right, why can't Ursula? Was she broke, or merely foolish?
I think the actual word is "greedy". Greedy beyond imagination or greedy beyond common sense.
Robert
My favourite Polish writer (Andrzej Sapkowski) once said (according to him, repeating after Harry Harrison):
If you sell a book to Hollywood you can't complain if they cast pink poodle as leading character -- if you don't like it, don't sell.
Robert
I hear people complain about their client software all the time. Crashes, too slow, etc. Do they even still make devices that act like hard drives?
My Creative MuVo2 4GB works with anything that can use usb-mass-storage device: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and some other exotic OSes that can properly use USB.
It is small, but quite a lot cheaper than similarly sized iPod mini. Beware of bigger Creative hdd-based players though -- they all need some stupid client software. Grapevine says that Creative MuVo line is made by some other company for Creative, that's why they are actually good value for the money.
Robert
Reuters just reported important business news from new and emerging market.
Mr and Mrs Jones from Waukesha Wisconsin just confirmed that they won't be launching their Media Player and Online Music Service. Asked about the reasons of this difficult decisions Mr Jones told that he can't promise he won't start his own Online Music Service in the future but it is just impossible at the moment. Mrs Jones wasn't immediately available for the comment.
Robert
I've got VoIP phone from my cable provider. Nothing special, it's Europe/Poland, so nothing as fancy as unlimited national etc, but cheaper and more reliable that monopolistic national telco. If I got spams on it I'd welcome them with "could you wait just a sec" and happily counted 0.03pln (about $0.01) per minute I get for incoming calls off my bill ;)
Robert
Secondly, you can't even get 54Mbps without paying thousands of dollars per month WITH WIRES. Maybe they could transmit this much between the tower with a single client (scalability anyone?) but if our current wired infrastructure has trouble managing 100 Mbps then what good will that link be?
That's why we should finally start deploying multicast all over the Internet. It's simply stupid that 100,000 people pulling one and the same file from the server saturate its $100k link. Or think webcasts. How easy would it be with multicast...?
Robert
Science itself is not a crime, but if you use that science to circumvent laws, it is a crime.
How come exercising "fair use" is suddenly a crime? I mean, if you can watch DirecTV or other digital TV programming, you already paid for this. So how come that watching it on computer screen or time shifting is suddenly a crime?
Robert
I'm tired of reading "JS said this, wrote that". The guy is obviously speaking out of his ass and the only way he knows to attract attention is "to be controversial". I distinctly remember that Sun's BoD or shareholders tried to gag him several times because he costs the company too much, not only in public reception.
While SCO stories have some value as entertainment, JS seems to be more boring each time. How can I filter my Slashdot front page to remove stories about Schwartz?
Robert
You don't know half of it, I think it already has +4/-4 moderation. Perhaps I'm gonna post detailed stats when I'll get them tomorrow ;)
Robert
although am not certain if Slavic is primarily East-European or not
;)
;)).
It depends. Some people from Poland, Czech, or post-yugoslavian countries might disagree and punch you in the face
Thing is, the term "Slavic" crosses the boundary of what was always considered Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Traditionally, before 20th century, East Europe was synonymous with Orthodox Church (Pravoswavny as some Slavs would say), Greek/Byzantium culture, and cyryllic writing. Catholic/Protestant Slavic countries with latin writing were considered Central Europe, identifying rather with Western Europe. Balkan Slavic nations considered themselves primarily Central/Southern Europe.
After WW2 every Russian vasal country in Europe was considered Eastern Europe, even Russian ocupied part of Germany.
Most of Slavic people today would like to regain their pre-soviet culture, including their place on geopolitical map of Europe. Hence most of Western Slavs consider themselves Central/Western Europe, Southern Slavs -- Central/Southern Europe and Eastern Slavs -- Eastern Europe (even those living in North-Eastern Asia
Robert
PS Western/Southern/Eastern Slavs are quite strict, scientific terms; just look at the map.
Just out of curiosity - what language is your website in, btw? I'm guessing it's some Scandinavian language?
Not really, it's Slavic language: Polish.
Robert
Dear Anonymous moron
/. is site with mostly American readers and moderators. Every time someone writes something "ontopic" that isn't pleasant for Americans and doesn't agree with their American point of view, he gets modded down as "offtopic", "redundant" or even "troll" or "flamebait".
You forget that
Why argue your point of view, when you can make the opposite point disappear?
Robert
So you mean, that I can buy WiFi phone for $240 (and another $50 for AP?) where I could buy analog-to-sip adapter for $80 without strings attached and cordless DECT/GAP phone with base station for $40 (and additional handsets for $20 each)?
I know, WiFi sounds so sexy...
Robert
I never said ads don't work on me. I think they work in an unintended way -- they usually make me angry, when I realise how stupid advertisers think I am.
;)
Oh, and I am lousy driver. I managed to wreck two military 6x6 transporters during my 18 months military service. I was actually lucky, because I was a driver in Miner Patrol[1], but both accidents were on the way to collect explosives, not on the return trip
Robert
[1] In Europe we had lots of wars, so everywhere you go there's lots and lots of unexploded mines, artillery shells and aircraft bombs buried in the ground, some of them even older than a century. Miner Patrols collect them and explode away from human settlements -- you rarely can do it on site.
One more thing that I forgot.
When those TV shows that I like do come to Poland in 2015 or so, I will watch them for nostalgia, ads and all.
Robert
A decision to download a TV episode means you probably [don't]watch advertisements (which fund the show's broadcast and creation in the first place very often), which means you're less likely to buy advertised products, which means there's a good chance less money will be given to even have created the show or continue it.
The point is irrelevant: even when I watch public TV I DON'T watch ads. I go to make tea, or go to let the previous tea return to the enviroment. Even if I don't leave the room, after years of watching ad-filled TV my brain struggles to keep me sane and throws ads from the short-term memory the moment they're over.
And I honestly don't remember when was the last time I bought something based on TV advertisement. I never buy "popular" brand, other than brand I already used and it worked well for the money I paid. I buy detergents, food etc based on prices in a shop. I don't buy snacks, popular or not -- low-carb diet. I do research before buying anything more expensive than couple of packs of cigarettes, and I smoke one brand of cigarettes for over ten years now.
And I don't buy A/V or computer gear advertised on TV since most of the gear that is advertised there is overpriced crap. Most of my stuff that falls into this category was purchased from Polish eBay equivalent.
As for ratings, I never take part in any poll, market analysis, so I hardly influence any of them.
So, do you mean to tell me, that due to my anti-commerce behaviour I have no right to watch TV?
Robert
Yes, those damn pirates! For example, for last couple of years I engage only in illegal downloading of TV series.
I mean, it's despicable, how can people distribute and watch TV shows that are normally viewed for free!!! This must be incredible loss of revenue for rightsholders, mustn't it? Especially when they don't care enough to release those shows on DVD.
Frankly, I'd prefer them make those shows strait-to-dvd so I could buy them for 20-40 bucks a season. Maybe this way no power-hungry fatass exec would cancel shows like Farscape, Firefly, Jeremiah or Angel. No more fucking games with "ratings-scheduling feedback loop", just simple rules -- either it sells with a profit or it doesn't.
Robert
Publishing a torrent is incredibly easy, drag the folder in, pick a category, click go. It hashes it and it starts seeding within seconds.
;)) I usually run torrents in screen session on my server, until I share it at least 3-4 times, but start to download home as soon as it's ready.
Well, that does it, this program is simply unusable for me, if I can't run it on console of my server
Once, I tried to download over BT directly to home, but (thanks to my asymmetric 768/128 link) it sucked so badly, that I simply don't do this.
Robert
Until they release some info about the inner workings of this app, there's not much to talk about.
There are serious problems with decentralising BitTorrent. One of the reasons that people have such good transfers on BT is that there is central tracker supervising particular file and knowing all users serving bits and pieces of this file. This way in case of high demand/high popularity files I achieve speeds over 1MB/s (yes, that's megabyte).
Depending on design choices you can have couple of trackers with subset of users on each of them, or every user seeding file has his own tracker. In first case your client wouldn't be able to use all cloud, and in second tracker would disappear when original seeder turned off his computer.
You can of course design some communication between trackers, or elections or some other magic, but it's too early to tell at the moment. I'll wait for more information.
Whatever they do, I hope that there will be some console based client for this, because asymmetric connections at homes plainly suck at upload (hence on torrent at download too), and I'd rather keep running my torrents on the server plugged into the fast network.
Robert
There's nothing (short of AI) that can make infrastructure set up and maintain itself, so I'll believe it when I see it. Or perhaps they have Windows Longhorn in mind, in which case I'd say they are rather optimistic predicting that it will be ready in 20 years.
Robert
I don't see how governing DNS by international body could be any worse than current situation where it is governed by private entity incorporated in US. Remember that PSTN is governed by international body, ITU, and it works.
;)
;)
One way or another, I don't see a connection between jailing bloggers in Iran and the question of DNS governance. I guess, every opportunity is good to sell your agenda.
Robert
PS Is this perhaps something related to "Chewbacca defence"?
PPS Ceterum censeo Karthaginem esse delendam
1. Take four 400GB disks
2. Put them in some kind of SFF case with slow and cheap computer running Linux.
3. Add >100% markup
4. Profit!