There are a lot stereotypes about Soviet periods of Russia (and of course those republics as a part of Soviet Union), but what’s really hilarious and comes to a standstill when you see the architecture of that non-existent country.
Just check out some photos of 50’s and present time of Moscow State University, which was built in 1954. I’ve resized some of them via Flickr account, however you can find out more pictures here. The author tries to compare the composition of MSU environment planned in 50’s with chaotic ensemble of New York skyscrapers. You can use Google Translator to check the post.
IMHO,looks gorgeous!
Design, Links
Architecture, Russia, Thoughts
Dmitry Chestnykh gives a nice review of Russian piracy, and the reasons of its appearance, stating “laziness” as its main cause.
Definitely, a lack of shopping services and/or its inability of serving transaction procedures is also one of the statements, here I agree with Dmitry.
However, I’m curious how many people really buy software products in Russia, because a simple googling will give bunch of forums and portals where you can find tones of cracks; thus using a cracked software becomes really easy. Prising policy is definitely another cause, but it’s 21th century - we’ve got lots of open-source software solutions which in some points are better then paid software products.
And when are they going to purchase software or any other products paying for them?..
Blogging
Russia, Software, Thoughts
It’s time when I have to move from Del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks. Twitter Atom subscription gives quite good opportunity of tracking all the interesting things caught from Twitter on daily basis. A combination of GoogleReader and Twitter gives a nice service with:
- Tags and categories can be made in GReader.
- Accessing your bookmarks from phone by following Twitter updates.
- Encapsulated Google Search in GReader won’t give a chance to miss any information once it was tracked through RSS/Atom feeds.
- You can update your twits from phone/IM: fast and easy and clicking less.
Gadgets, Links
Google, Thoughts, Twitter, Web
So, what are the changes for the last year in Frederick?
- I’m on my 4th year, doing bachelor.
- To end up with 60 ECTS credits, I’d have to take 7 subjects in average this year
- Small amount of subjects added
- Price increas, so far up to 4200 CYP annually (if there’s no scholarships)
- Want to participate in Frederic Research Centre - easily, just catch needed supervisor!
- MSc in Information Technologies from Frederick will be launched by the next year.
- MSc in IT exists in FIT, but it’s provided by Herriot Watt University.
As you can see, nothing special so far added or changed, thus the hype slowly goes down with the fact that Frederick Institute of Technology (FIT) has become Frederick University Cyprus (FUC).
Blogging
Frederick Institute, Frederick University, News, Personal, Thoughts
It’s been a while since these talks started. There have been a lot of “for” and “against” opinions concerning the creation of a particular operating system which can be called Russian.
On the 15th of September, in Sochi, the Academy of Information Technologies and Federal Bureau of Technical and Export Control authorized Mandriva Linux distro as a stable Linux version for corporate use.
As the result, Mandriva now can become a “standard” version of Operating System for governmental sectors in Russia.
Personally, I’ve never used it and can’t compare its functionality with other OS’es, but the worst nightmares of ROS didn’t appear to be true, like:
- Creating a brand new OS from scratch
- Upgrade MSVS distro of Linux
Will Mandriva be an only version of Linux distro used in government sector or not - that’s the question, but a good thing is that Linux is acknowledged as OS alternatives on government levels.
Measuring the level of Linux integration, a good example is a massive integration of Linux in China - project Red Flag Linux. Hopefully, this first step in Russia will make Open Source systems more popular then now.
Blogging
Linux, News, OS, Personal, Thoughts
“It may be the case that non-experts are more cynical about information outside of their field and the difference comes from a natural reaction to rate unfamiliar articles as being less credible.”
While Slashdotters are arguing about this slowly bringing the discussion to the point “do you like Wikipedia or not?”, we can see how popular this Wikipedia project has become, the number of languages the articles have been translated to. And it keeps on growing and improving its content and quality.
A bizzare thing is that according to some of the researches, the articles contributed to Wikipedia encyclopaedia by non-experts are more valuable in case of information mentioned in their articles.
Whether this is better or worse than traditional, expert-based encyclopedias depends on who you ask. Nature did a highly-publicized comparative study between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica last year in which they found that the two were similar in terms of accuracy.
In my opinion, an intuitive way of filtering the information by the person gives more useful data for an article then expert’s view on it. A user can easier identify what kind of data is needed by other users.
etc
Interests, IT, News, Thoughts, Wikipedia