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Sure the movie itself was a bit cheesy but I didn't think Milla Jovovich was all that bad looking.

A re-branded version of some popular Linux distro...

http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora...

It's as close to out-of-the-box as I've found.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/la...

And this one too
http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora...

On PC desktop the QA is still terrible. For example, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships with a media player which does not work properly with touchpad and which crashes when the subtitle setting is changed. Also the ACPI fan speed control is broken for a bunch of laptops. Sure, the correct solution here is simply to switch from Totem to VLC, and use a different kernel for the fan problem. Easy enough... but soon enough, some other glitch pops up. As long as Linux desktops (not only Ubuntu) are filled with these nasty surprises, the support costs will be enormous for fixing all these bugs or finding workarounds for them.

Who uses Ubuntu. I use
http://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora...

Everything works, has a great following too.

Before all this, people didn't even think about creating a real competitor for Google or Amazon.

China:
http://bidu.com/
http://aliexpress.com/

Russia:
http://yandex.ru/

Just because you don't know of them, does not mean they are not there or not popular.

an inability to make washing machines

You mean like these?

I guess it helped that old Russian vacuum cleaners looked like a rocket.
http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4128/193134567.2/0_9d4ed_46b8054b_L.jpg

And here is a washing machine:
http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4133/193134567.2/0_9d4d1_cf3056df_L.jpg

I guess it helped that old Russian vacuum cleaners looked like a rocket.
http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4128/193134567.2/0_9d4ed_46b8054b_L.jpg

And here is a washing machine:
http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4133/193134567.2/0_9d4d1_cf3056df_L.jpg

From their own site http://company.yandex.ru/about/pages/yandex.xml "yandex — yet another indexer". There's another variant, one can translate first letter from "index" word "i" -> "I" (pronoun) -> "Ya" (pronoun).

Although I seldom use their search engine directly since they focus more on searches in Russian, I can confirm that it works very well. They also have, among other things, better maintained and more detailed maps of ex-soviet countres with better traffic jam and accident tracking, an EXTREMELY convenient product search that lets you specify an insane amount of properties and features to pick the most fitting item that exists on the market and then find a good rated and cheap place to buy it, a great multilingual online dictionary and a convenient online storage service which has existed far longer than Google Drive. Their web pages have a simple, consistent and concise design, their ads are few and non-intrusive, and, on top of all this, the company has an almost cult standing among many tech students for its high wages and free CS and data mining school where they teach interested people in-depth data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms and many other related and not-so-much things.

Why do I mention all this? First, to confirm that they are popular for a very good reason and, second, because most of their services use Internet data mining techniques to gather results, so if you live in CIS, chances are you are hooked anyway and you generate many internet searches indirectly even if you don't use their search feature. Unless Google pays as much attention to foreign countries as it does to the U.S. and keeps expanding its services, it should not be surprising to see sound local competition in some countries.

Although I seldom use their search engine directly since they focus more on searches in Russian, I can confirm that it works very well. They also have, among other things, better maintained and more detailed maps of ex-soviet countres with better traffic jam and accident tracking, an EXTREMELY convenient product search that lets you specify an insane amount of properties and features to pick the most fitting item that exists on the market and then find a good rated and cheap place to buy it, a great multilingual online dictionary and a convenient online storage service which has existed far longer than Google Drive. Their web pages have a simple, consistent and concise design, their ads are few and non-intrusive, and, on top of all this, the company has an almost cult standing among many tech students for its high wages and free CS and data mining school where they teach interested people in-depth data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms and many other related and not-so-much things.

Why do I mention all this? First, to confirm that they are popular for a very good reason and, second, because most of their services use Internet data mining techniques to gather results, so if you live in CIS, chances are you are hooked anyway and you generate many internet searches indirectly even if you don't use their search feature. Unless Google pays as much attention to foreign countries as it does to the U.S. and keeps expanding its services, it should not be surprising to see sound local competition in some countries.

Although I seldom use their search engine directly since they focus more on searches in Russian, I can confirm that it works very well. They also have, among other things, better maintained and more detailed maps of ex-soviet countres with better traffic jam and accident tracking, an EXTREMELY convenient product search that lets you specify an insane amount of properties and features to pick the most fitting item that exists on the market and then find a good rated and cheap place to buy it, a great multilingual online dictionary and a convenient online storage service which has existed far longer than Google Drive. Their web pages have a simple, consistent and concise design, their ads are few and non-intrusive, and, on top of all this, the company has an almost cult standing among many tech students for its high wages and free CS and data mining school where they teach interested people in-depth data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms and many other related and not-so-much things.

Why do I mention all this? First, to confirm that they are popular for a very good reason and, second, because most of their services use Internet data mining techniques to gather results, so if you live in CIS, chances are you are hooked anyway and you generate many internet searches indirectly even if you don't use their search feature. Unless Google pays as much attention to foreign countries as it does to the U.S. and keeps expanding its services, it should not be surprising to see sound local competition in some countries.

Although I seldom use their search engine directly since they focus more on searches in Russian, I can confirm that it works very well. They also have, among other things, better maintained and more detailed maps of ex-soviet countres with better traffic jam and accident tracking, an EXTREMELY convenient product search that lets you specify an insane amount of properties and features to pick the most fitting item that exists on the market and then find a good rated and cheap place to buy it, a great multilingual online dictionary and a convenient online storage service which has existed far longer than Google Drive. Their web pages have a simple, consistent and concise design, their ads are few and non-intrusive, and, on top of all this, the company has an almost cult standing among many tech students for its high wages and free CS and data mining school where they teach interested people in-depth data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms and many other related and not-so-much things.

Why do I mention all this? First, to confirm that they are popular for a very good reason and, second, because most of their services use Internet data mining techniques to gather results, so if you live in CIS, chances are you are hooked anyway and you generate many internet searches indirectly even if you don't use their search feature. Unless Google pays as much attention to foreign countries as it does to the U.S. and keeps expanding its services, it should not be surprising to see sound local competition in some countries.

Although I seldom use their search engine directly since they focus more on searches in Russian, I can confirm that it works very well. They also have, among other things, better maintained and more detailed maps of ex-soviet countres with better traffic jam and accident tracking, an EXTREMELY convenient product search that lets you specify an insane amount of properties and features to pick the most fitting item that exists on the market and then find a good rated and cheap place to buy it, a great multilingual online dictionary and a convenient online storage service which has existed far longer than Google Drive. Their web pages have a simple, consistent and concise design, their ads are few and non-intrusive, and, on top of all this, the company has an almost cult standing among many tech students for its high wages and free CS and data mining school where they teach interested people in-depth data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms and many other related and not-so-much things.

Why do I mention all this? First, to confirm that they are popular for a very good reason and, second, because most of their services use Internet data mining techniques to gather results, so if you live in CIS, chances are you are hooked anyway and you generate many internet searches indirectly even if you don't use their search feature. Unless Google pays as much attention to foreign countries as it does to the U.S. and keeps expanding its services, it should not be surprising to see sound local competition in some countries.

The hash file here. I could find my password in there (after changing it). Who uses unsalted hashes? Is it 1991? https://mail.yandex.ru/disk/public/?hash=pCAcIfV7wxXCL/YPhObEEH5u5PKPlp+muGtgOEptAS4=

I think the time is ripe for him to unleash the Yandex browser to the world, why not?

They do just that (and some more).

But doesn't seem to be helping much.

I think the time is ripe for him to unleash the Yandex browser to the world, why not?

They do just that (and some more).

But doesn't seem to be helping much.

I think the time is ripe for him to unleash the Yandex browser to the world, why not?

They do just that (and some more).

But doesn't seem to be helping much.

As far as I know, no ones leaves functional elevators behind on abandoned sites. ;-)

Well, at least one picture shows a recent-looking label with "18.05.12", which looks to me like a due date for next inspection or something like that...

Of course it always could be something else entirely.

That's exactly what I thought of too when I saw this picture from the blog: http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4527/33213654.de/0_71e4b_3688f347_XXL.jpg> http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4527/33213654.de/0_71e4b_3688f347_XXL.jpg

another of her sitting on what looks like to be possibly a partially assembled rocket motor

When I studied in USSR, at the age of 8 (year 2, later 3) we learned multiplication tables from 2 to 9, and a table was always printed (in the form of a matrix -- ex: http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/4517/17743163.28/0_54108_6ffd7748_XXL.jpg ) on the back cover of every "math" (5mm square-ruled as opposed to "language" wide-ruled) student's "thin" notebook (I think, each "thin" notebook had 24 or 36 pages but I may be wrong about the exact numbers). "Thin" notebook was always single-subject, supposed to be used for classroom and homework exercise only, it was graded after every assignment and discarded after being filled, so students wouldn't lug around old dirty notebooks with obsolete content. Same style of notebook was used in all years from 1 to 10 (later 11), so that table at the back of the notebook was constantly present in the student's life until graduation.

Multiplication by 0, 1 and 10 was studied as a special case, and multiplication by numbers higher than 10 was supposed to be calculated and never memorized.

I honestly don't know how it works in US, but apparently it's different.

If you don't want your search results filtered by US, use Yandex or alternatively Baidu.

Yes, if you rather have your search results filtered by Russia or China. Yeah, communist shadow filtering where you can't see the invisible hand hiding sites is SO much better than most US court filtering that are open enough to actually be published, and not themselves censored.

Yandex and Baidu are completely independant search engines.

Maybe on Bizarro World, not on Earth. Independent from aggregate results of other engines, but not independent from censorship. Baidu might possibly the most heavily filtered site on the planet.

If you don't want your search results filtered by US, use Yandex or alternatively Baidu.

Let me reword that:
Americans, if it is uncensored speech that you are looking for, then ditch the American service provider and use this Russian one. Or this Chinese one.

If you don't want your search results filtered by US, use Yandex or alternatively Baidu.

There is also European StartPage / Ixquick, but it's more for privacy. It aggregates results from Google and other search engines, so US censors still apply. Yandex and Baidu are completely independant search engines.

Sadly, this is what US has become.

>>>because in the future the phone will be my credit card

Oh man, I hope not. Otherwise this is the future we'll be facing: http://video.yandex.ru/users/sotniko-aleksand/view/142/

Darn it's in Russian. Well basically it's a Sci-Fi Channel episode of Sliders where everyone is a number and no one talks to real people, except through online chat rooms. You can not do anything but what Data Universal (equivalent to Google) let's you do and based upon your Google-determined preferences.

Let's keep the cash and credit cards separate from the people that have ~100,000 pieces of data about us.

Google is the first and so far the only ones to do that

Google was the first to make it a production-quality feature, in 2007. On the other hand, Live Maps (now Bing Maps) had a publicly accessible demo of a similar thing in 2006 (the link in the article still works, but the UI is really painful to use).

Once Google released Street View, and it became quite a success, others have followed, so it's not really the only one providing this. Their coverage is still superior, though.

Russian police always has been corrupted. This video is not surprised me. The russian police head has fired Dumovsky at sunday, and no way exists for Dumovsky to live and work in Russia. Try to figure out that salary of major of police is about 300-400 $. Dumosvky has a clear conscience and he can't accept any bribes. But he can't live on his salary, he can only survive. I've read http://dymovskiy.ru/images/kharakter.jpg... Dumovsky isn't failure person. He could continue working at police, but... this video has broken his career.. If you said something wrong about Putin in russian internet, police can find out your ip address, come to your house, hurt and jail you. It's not joke, it's legal situation now... But anyway, a lot of people are discussing and arguing about the problem. You can use yandex blog search to understand state of russian community. http://blogs.yandex.ru/search.xml?text=

You need to use Yandex in Russia, anyway.

I always see the 'child porn' label as a potential to easily shut anything down that disagrees with big brother (not that I'm saying in this case they're not guilty). But who's going to admit to knowing it's true??

"Oh yeah I visited a bunch of their child porn sites.. I mean.."

Plus, if you check out the Google cache of the site at the bottom it was designed by vane.ru .. AND just out of interest their email on their nominet is..

ikomov@yandex.ru

There already such service operating for years. Local search (initially. now... you know..) service engine providing users with downloadable map app which can optionally use device's GPS to submit data and view traffic density based on that.

1. That's a well known-fact. Several expeditions conducted by USSR have not found any remains except for small spheres of molten glass and rock (consistent with aerial explosion).

2. Ok, Russian is my native language, so I searched for this 'foundation'. Here is the original news: http://www.radiomayak.ru/tvp.html?id=87757&cid=

This foundation is called 'Fond Tungusskogo Kosmicheskogo Fenomena' in Russian. So I've searched information about it in the most popular Russian search engine (it understands Russian morphology and works much better than Google): http://www.yandex.ru/yandsearch?text=%D2%F3%ED%E3% F3%F1%F1%EA%E8%E9+%EA%EE%F1%EC%E8%F7%E5%F1%EA%E8%E 9+%F4%E5%ED%EE%EC%E5%ED+%F4%EE%ED%E4

This is the report about the initial "discovery" of this stone: http://www.membrana.ru/articles/misinterpretation/ 2004/08/10/223900.html

One of the first entries: http://www.newslab.ru/news/174070/print - basically, this "foundation" was being kicked out of a museum.

After that, there was exactly ZERO publications in reliable magazines about this discovery. For me, this smells of pseudoscience.

Can you give me another source than the "100 questions and answers"? Anything pulled from that book hardly qualifies as statistics. Take, for instance, the sentence you quoted: " According to UNESCO, Soviet Union published 5 times as much translated literature as United Kingdom". Five times as much -- of what? Translated titles, or books printed?
I am afraid I can't. Finding good statistics on Soviet Union online is difficult and getting my ass to a large library would take too much time. I concede that the authors may have picked a more flattering indicator, but I don't think they needed to lie about that.

I didn't say it was exotic. It was simply perceived as such, because the number of titles was very small, especially compared to the present situation.
27% compared to 45% is not small.

It was one of the quirks of the situation -- if you're locked in, everything that comes from the outside world seems good to you.
This seems true. The illusion of greener grass on the other side of the road.

This doesn't make it OK to ban them.
Every decision is a compromise. If there are social and political reasons to ban a book (because the author wrongly attacks the Soviet system) AND the book sucks, then the decision to ban the book is more justified than banning 1984 (which actually wasn't about the Soviet Union).

Examples, please? (I find my knowledge lacking in this area)
Just click randomly on the people in that list. It's written right there. It looks like most of the guys there were dissidents, whose books were not published because they were just attacks on the Soviet system. I mean, I can certainly understand why a book titled "KGB revealed" or something (it's in that list) would not be allowed in the USSR.

Your first point is impossible to argue because there aren't, to my knowledge, any reliable statistics, as officially, there was no censorship in the Soviet Union, meaning that there was no reason to keep official records of it.
There were official laws about what kind of books can't be brought into Soviet Union. These included pornographic books, books that promoted hate and violence and books that attacked Soviet order. See this search, for example. Of course, the question of whether a book meets these criteria is never easy. The lists of samizdat literature (like the one you provided) can also serve as a good indicator, as well as the books published after the 1990. To this day I am not aware of a significant number of books that were prohibited in the Soviet Union. Clearly, if there were many of them, we would know it by now.

The fact that censorship is widespread is extremely relevant. We can't blame Soviet Union for what is common practice (e.g. Canada, the US, the UK, France and many other "democratic" countries have lists of "prohibited items").

The third point is actually a supporting point for points 4 and 5 - yes, indeed, the top 100 classic books are probably published in every country.

As for 4th and 5th points, please take your time, I'd be interested to hear what you think about them.

As fascinating as that culture is to me, the ends don't justify the means.
In this world the ends always justify the means. The correct interpretation of this saying is that a cost-benefit analysis is usually required, you can't outright justify any bad means with a positive end.

It is fundamentally wrong to say "X is wrong, because X required limiting freedom Y". You always need to consider the benefits and the costs.

Yandex search engine -- http://www.yandex.ru/ -- always brings better results in Russian web. They search only russian nets and domains and this lets them index everything in Russian. Google will never enter this niche and local search engines will be always better than universal system.

that's a very reasonable way of doing it, but i wonder if maybe making the location bar a different colour as FireFox does for secure sites might be a better - in the sense of more obvious - solution.

it's kind of funny, though, how it is essentially our (as in the mostly-north-american-and-western-european readership of slashdot)'s lack of familiarity with the writing systems of the rest of the world that are getting us into this particular pickle.

Wouldn't rendering the characters in question as black-on-red in the status and location bar be a more effective solution? Or the entire background changes to red to warn the user that the characters they can read aren't the "actual" characters in the domain name?

Pink, not red, to help the color-blind. But still, how would a pink background help people living in Eastern Europe distinguish a legit mixed-Latin-and-Cyrillic IDN from a phishing mixed-Latin-and-Cyrillic IDN? Take Yandex.ru for instance; an IDN alias for the domain would probably use the Cyrillic letter Ya (which resembles a reversed Latin R) and Latin letters N, D, E, and X.

No, but Yandex, the main Russian search engine does. Most are in Russian, though...

Yandex

Will e-mail you soon. That address would be MikeXpop@yandex.ru right? Thanks so much. Have a nice day.

But the big news is that our friends (job stealers? (-;) in India have announced that the Indian site Rediff has announced the launch of Rediffmail 1 GB (gigabyte), giving virtually unlimited storage space of 1 gigabyte to all its free email users in India and worldwide

Doesn't matter much for most of the Slashdotters, but if you happen to read Russian (or always wanted to learn that language), Yandex Mail, which is part of Yandex, Russia's largest Web portal and search engine, announced unlimited mail storage space with maximum letter size of 10 MB and unlimited attachments (as long as the message with all the attaches stays below 10 MB).

Basically, they will just keep buying more hard drives as you grow your message store.

Yandex is the leading Russian search engine, a technological, social and commercial innovator on par with Google. Yandex had a webmail service for years now. And in regards to usability, unobtrusiveness and usefullness their webmail is lightyears ahead of GMail.

In the settings you can turn off all advertisments on webmail pages and turn off the obligatory text signature promoting the mail service (like all other webmailers have). Why did they do that? The user survey showed that users don't want ads while they are reading their e-mail and find it annoying and obtrusive.

Personally, I don't use their service, purely because I want a good e-mail address and nothing beats name.surname@mail.ru, which I luckily have.

screenshots here, for six bucks a month not too bad

Sorry guys, I didn't do a fine link.
So for those that don't wanna follow the MS recommendations about links usage (type url by hand), or are too lazy to copy/paste, here are the screenshots

Their English website is here.

The link to the English site on their Russian web page (as linked in the Slashdot article) - is broken.

At the risk of being nationalist, I think that's actually a peculiarly American attitude, encouraged by your absurdly over-litigious society.
Let me start by saying that I am Russian and I've never been to the US. :) And while your comment about the American society certainly has merit, "Who is to blame?" is one of two fundamental questions in Russian culture. The second is, of course, "What shall we do now?" :)

Returning to the topic at hand, I think that blame should result not in a lawsuit, but in some actions to remedy the situation. The article you linked actually hints at a solution - the judges (the patent examiners) should raise their voice and complain to the society about litigious bastards (in our case, excessive patenters). Such problems cannot be solved within the system, we need to look from aside, identify and fix the weaknesses. Still, I am not sure there is enough rationality in today's world to solve such problems before they become really serious. :(

1) Windows OS is much more prevalent on the net than any other kind of Windows. So a content-neutral search engine should find the OS-related links first.
2) MSN actually finds some Windows OS - related pages - Windows Media Player, Tablet PC, WinXP for Tablet PC and others. The problem is that the most relevant page (Windows Family Home Page) is not listed first.
3) Information about Satyajit Ray and Jupiter is not terribly relevant to "windows" search term. Heck, on the page about Ray the word is included only once in the ALT parameter of one of the images. The page about Jupiter is marginally better because "windows" is used in the title, domain name and one link (to the "Windows Team"). How on Earth is that considered more relevant than the main Windows page is a mystery to me.

P.S. BTW, most search engines suck at general searches, like "windows", including Google. Links to WinZip, WinAmp and Adobe Acrobat probably shouldn't be included on the first page. Still, the biggest advantage of Google (in addition to "it just works" concept) is moderate amount of ads, clearly separate from search results. I've been using only Google and Yandex (A "Russian Google" - a quality and innovative search engine, also with cool minimalist page) and already forgot about the nightmare of "sponsored links"...

http://toys.r.us ? I would make it a backwards 'R,' but my keyboard got stuck.

Given that the Cyrillic letter whose glyph looks like a reversed Latin R ('', charentity Я) says 'ya' in Russian (see the TETIS story and ndex.ru), the correct hostname would be toys.ya.us.

It's worth noting that Yandex, the tzar of Russian Internet search has, apart from the main portal-like facade, got a search-only back entry, which is the prettiest minimalistic search page i've ever seen.