I am not an active user of the core Y! services, but I’ve got a Flickr and Del.icio.us. Though they are important parts of my everyday online life, I definitely will have to go off if MS would be there. At least, that’s good that I’ve not purchased Flickr Pro account yet, so they will not get my hard-earned cents!

Who knows a good photohosting service with possibility of import all shots from Flickr?

Dear Sir,

I’m glad to know that you deal with home furniture. We can offer you various style sofas in leater, fabric, PVC,PU etc. We have engaged in this field for more than 20 years in good reputation. We export our sofas to all over the world.

I have no doubts, they found me on SOFA (Simple Ontology Framework API) project web-site :)

Me: This microwave has very annoying, shrill beep. I hate it! I gonna break it and cut that damned beeper off.
My wife: Don’t be surprised but there is a button sequence which makes the owen silent.

Probably, I have to take a rest.

Now he is a network administrator in Lebanon. He refused to leave it after Israel’s attack and now his daily job is to revive permanently destroyed communications to provide internet under bombings in the distressed country.

I decided not to leave the country and to hold on there as long as possible. When I told my friends and colleagues I was about to evacuate, I was just frightened to see despair in their eyes. They have been forsaken by all parties. Hizbollah has their own goals. The government, like our “orange” one, is clueless and they are only beating one another. The world community worries only on their own hassles, pipes, belongings and doesn’t care about dying civilians…
I knew also I’m responsible for to provide internet for more than 20000 families. My assistants have been blocked in the regions of massive bombings and unable to do anything because of electricity and communication breaks. They relies on me and they have helped me when I was in trouble myself…
I’m really feared but I cannot forsake them. I fear of that wicked hostile bombards with a chemical weapon which is hardly avoided. I fear that after the humanitarian crisis the country will be a crowd of criminals and a hotbed of epidemies. And after all, there are my wife and 2 y.o. daughter in Ukraine…

(my translation, the original post is here)

God bless you, Denis.

See also:

• NuclearCat’s homepage
• NuclearCat’s blog on LiveJournal (in russian)
• His photos of Lebanon war
• “Internet under bombings” forum thread (in russian)

And

• Consider signing Ceasefire Now petition

Added:
Somebody says that winning the shoot-out is a matter of chance. I agree – and I always imagined France as a team of good luck and fortune, rather than of technique and other rationalistic stuff. And this unexplainable power was focused through one known man. I was sure that magic should repeat again and France must win until that shameful incident. After it, I clearly got that they had no chances anymore.

Am I kinda mystical? I think, not more than the people who believes that Italian victory was not “real” because “there was a roulette”.

I was a fan of German team. Yeah, it was easy for anyone who was there in June and infected by that crazy atmosphere of black-red’n'gold fun. But not only – I enjoyed by German football – very modern, intelligent, stylish and gracious. And after all, it is always a great show – the real football of XXI century.

The yesterday game was maybe the most interesting and dramatic show of this Mondial. Italians are the powerful team and it looked like a battle of peers but my sympathy was on German side. At the last minutes, after two hours of the struggle Italians seemed for me to be a little bit tired while Germans still were in good form and they never lost in shoot-outs, you know, but… Bah – one! Bah – two! Two goals during just two last minutes! It was really shocking and unbelievable.

Danke, Deutchland. Viva Italia!

Portugal:0, France:1

Before this game I had no idea who was my favourite. I knew Portugal was great but I knew also France as a team of magical surprises which seems to be laid in the right sock of Zizu the Wizard. I still remember 1998 and my pack of beer which I lost as Brasil lost the World Cup, so I esteemed Portugal but would not bet on them anyway especially after France became the “killers of Brasil” again and reassured their status of magicians.

But in this game they managed without any magic and Zizu hasn’t had to dive into his sock. Frankly, Portugal played bad. Simply bad. It was not an easy victory for France, but it was undoubtlessly well-earned.

This poster is designed using Adobe Photoshop 7.0 run on Linux operating system with Wine technology. The wine in the glass is real and had been used for its purpose after photosession.

© 2006, me
If you are a Wine project member, you are welcome to use this poster but let me know, please.

© me 2000

These guys are the True American Patriots, Republicans, supporters of George W. Bush and extreme morons. I have nothing against right-winged people but I noticed long time ago that the rightwing political views are very often accompanied with hard mental diseases. I should say that it is not US-specific, but an universal phenomenon which is ignored by psychiatrists, alas.

The first clinical post is titled “Linux: European threat to our computers“:

Look at any modern computer and you will see that the whole thing is the product of American brilliance. For example, this rugged IBM laptop I am using was designed and built by an American company.

Yeah, and it is called Lenovo ;-)

I’m talking about a project called ‘Linux’, something you may not have encountered, but might do some day.
It’s a computer program that was initially developed in Finland as a means of circumventing valuable copyrights and patents owned by an American company called SCO Group
…
A generation of computer users might get use to accepting foreign software hand-outs rather than paying for a superior American products. If only the danger were just to our economy:

These days computers control everything from TV stations to battleships; Our crucial information and defense infrastructure is built on computer technology. If we allow this cancer into our networks, there is no knowing what the effect might be on our infrastructure, but that is just what liberals are trying to do.

The guys are simply unaware that Linux works for their whole networks for ages. They even didn’t know that their web-server was on Linux, until somebody pointed to this fact in the comments. It seems there was a great turmoil and then they started to lie they had been moved to Windows:

I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me, since many of you probably never would have visited this website if known that it was actually Linux hosted.
Just to let you know my friends, in the next days the website might be offline on an hourly basis but I am sure you might find that the website will be much better hosted in the future: Faster, more secure and first of all, I am not contributing to this strange Russian operation system called ‘Linux’.

Bah! I didn’t know that Linux is the “Russian operation system”, thanks! What a courtesy for my homeland! But I remember you told before that it comes from Finland? Is it the same country? Oh, I forgot that Finland was a part of Russian empire until 1917! Ok :-)

[Updated 05/24:] In fact, they finally had been moved to Windows/ASP server. But when they wrote this, they lied – indeed, their blog still was on Linux/Apache/PHP.

[Updated 05/24 again:] No, OMG, of course it is not so! I had been just cheated by their masquerade with “.aspx” filenames! How the WordPress engine might work on ASP??? :-D FORGERS!!!

And guess what software Osama Bin Laden uses on his laptop?
If you guessed it was Linux you would be 100% right. Osama uses Linux because he knows designed to counterfit DVDs, curcumventing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and defraud companies like Disney.

I don’t know what OS is really used by Osama (I’m not sure he uses the computers at all), but I know who were his sponsors when he started the carreer. Ask the father of your beloved president.

BTW, have you seen those guys in T-shirts labelled “rm -rf /bin/laden” on the streets of America after 09/11? And guess what software they use?

And an advice from patriots of the great country of Freedom:

If you see a company using Linux, it may be that they have not paid for this software. Report them to the Business Software Alliance who have the legal authority to inspect any company’s computers for illegal programs like Linux.

It sounds not so funny for those who knows what it really is.

“In 1927, the penal code of the Soviet Union was changed drastically. The update of the penal code turned the country into a police state, full of informants, who were derogatorily called stukach (??????, literally “knocker”). According to Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code), everyone was obligated to report all “anti-Soviet activity”, including any expression of disagreement with the policy of the Party, even in casual jokes. This policy resulted in significant growth of Gulag camp populations as those who failed to report their relatives or friends were often themselves reported on. State-sponsored propaganda and mandatory (officially voluntary) participation in the Pioneer Movement helped to indoctrinate Soviet youth to follow the example of Pavlik Morozov, a young boy who reported his own father, a kulak.“
(From Wikipedia: Enemy of the people)

Fortunately, there were the hundreds of healthy people blamed the authors for extreme stupidity and ignorance. Then they tried to get bold and make an “objective proof” of Windows advantages in another article called Linux and Windows compared: The Facts. But the crippled brains were impossible to produce anything but another cretinism:

Some readers of the ShelleyTheRepublican.com blog complained that my recent critique of the Linux computer program was unfair; They claimed that I was ignorant and therefore unqualified to review their product, moreover they stated that my opinions were biased therefore untrustworthy.
…
For starters my credentials; I am a former IT manager from a major city in Oklahoma. I am also vice-president of IT for our regional Prayer Team. Some years ago I’m proud to say that I graduated as a Microsoft Certified Engineer; I have a wide understanding of both technical and business computing issues. I am sure you will agree that I am exceptionally qualified to speak on this subject.

Sure, mister: come on, fire it up.

As for “bias”, I am not a “Microsoft Fan-boy”? or any of the hundreds of more offensive things I have been called. I do however admit an admiration for the company that gave us the modern computer and invented both the Internet and the world-wide web.

“She believed, for instance, having learnt it at school, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. (In his own schooldays, Winston remembered, in the late fifties, it was only the helicopter that the Party claimed to have invented; a dozen years later, when Julia was at school, it was already claiming the aeroplane; one generation more, and it would be claiming the steam engine.)”
(George Orwell: “1984″, Chapter 5)

Where would we have been without Microsoft? Perhaps typing obscure Russian commands into a barely comprehensible command-prompt on a Chinese made computer.

It is 90% of chances that your computer (even if partially) is Chinese (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaisia) made (and remember Lenovo again). And I’m so proud for Russia – you really love it!

Imagine also where would you have been without George Bush! Perhaps working on Chinese rice plantations, irrigating the Arabic deserts or breeding the white bears in Siberia. Awesome!

Naturally we tested the latest version of both operating systems. For Windows we chose the 2003 edition, available at almost every computer retailer in our country. Finding the latest version of Linux proved a challenge in itself:

I agree, it is a big challenge if there are only about a dozen of popular distributives having not more than few hundreds of mirror download servers.

We had been told that the newest version of RedHat Linux was version 3.0, which for a “flagship” product was surprisingly hard to find. When we did locate it, we were astonished to be told that it was “quite old” and that RedHat no longer provided any level of technical support for it.

I agree with you again – if you looked for a Linux distro in a museum of archeology, it is hard to find there anything but RH 3.0 (BTW, a coeval of Windows-3.1) when the latest version actually is 9.0 :-) Call to Microsoft and try to get support for MS-DOS 3.30..

When we opened the shrink-wrap box we were astounded to find that it contained a large set of floppy-disks. I cannot imagine what Redhat were thinking in this age of DVDs; still this would be a step up from the magnetic-tapes upon which FreeBSD is normally supplied (Free BSD is an older kind of Linux).

No comments about FreeBSD magnetic tape…
FreeBSD is an older kind of Linux? Ok – then you have to admit you lied about foreign roots of Linux. FreeBSD comes from an American university (Berkeley), you know.

The GUI seemed garish and hard to use. It was a woeful mish-mash of primary colors and clashing visual styles. We had become accustomed to Microsoft’s visual sophistication. The crude Linux desktop was a shock to our poor eyes.

As at the screenshot, if the guys were managed to spoil the default X look with their own wild yellowness, they also were possible to set up nicer UI colors by their taste.

The Linux installation did not include a web-browser,

This is what an American court demanded of Microsoft.

but according to the manual one could be “easily” installed using Linux’s RPM utility. After spending half an hour trying to decode the “man page”, we were able to install the latest version of Netscape Navigator, the new browser from Firefox.

There is a company called Firefox and it produces Netscape Navigator browser. Ok.

[An image of a stupid MS-Agent characters] Most commonly used productivity tools are not available on Linux; For example, this program uses Microsoft Agent technology which has not yet been ported to Linux.

We Linux users, prayering for it will never be happened. Fortunately, it seems there are no idiots who would wish to port the noxious and moronic design decisions.

Had it not occurred to the makers of Linux that their users might wish to use the Internet?

Linux is a network-oriented system from its origin. It was the first OS who had built-in full stack of internet protocols.

Now what can we say of the Windows browsing experience? Many of you will be familiar with Internet explorer. Millions of Americans have grown accustomed to it’s ease of use, slick presentation and universal compatibility;

But what about Netscape?
[The screenshot of jumbled web-page is followed]

Please find the MSIE version of the same year that Netscape you used (2.0?) and try to look at the same web-page.

As expected, this browser lacked many of the basic features that Microsoft’s users take for granted. For example, it was incompatible with “Active X”, an exciting technology from Microsoft that allows “plugins”? to be instantly loaded.

Thanks God again, the Linux browsers will never have those exciting technology for viruses and spyware.

On Windows, these are seamlessly downloaded and installed in the background, usually without causing any interruption to the user;

Yeah, these are seamlessly and silently downloaded, installed, and for instance, stealed your credit-card number or cracked your whole system down some day :-)

Lacking any official support channel, we turned to something called ‘IRC’ for help…
The #linux channel, seemed to be a venue of immorality; I would not wish my wife or children to use this service. It appeared to be some sort of pick-up venue.

We soon gave up expecting to find any help at all; I expect that this is what any Linux user who is not fluent in C++ will have to do eventually.

I just imagined how the people on IRC channel responded to your arrogant stupidity. I guess nobody would wish their children to read that :-)

You did not need IRC. If you only were not such the nuts, you could simply describe your problem in Google and immediately get the tons of possible solutions without being morally insulted.

…It is much less capable than Windows. In fact it omits features that were standard in Windows back in 1998; For example Linux has no built-in anti-virus or anti-spyware software. …You cannot even buy popular utilities like Norton Security to compensate for this fact.

Can you imagine that Linux has no antviruses and anti-spyware simply because it is insensitive to the viruses and spyware?

There are no tools for common tasks like defragging a hard disk. God knows what you would use to send a fax or make a website. You cannot even get Front Page for Linux.

For what you need defragmeting? You just love it so much? Please imagine again that Linux does not need defragging just because its filesystem is not so stupid to allow fragmentation of a hard disk. And ask the web-designers – who uses FrontPage for serious web-sites?

It’s an absurd to suggest that great companies like Google and IBM might have had anything at all to do with this mess.

Nevertheless, they do.

Of course, this review is somewhat incomplete; Linux is defficient in many more ways; For example it does not feature something called Digital Rights Management; It certainly seems that Linux users have chosen to become a 2nd class citizen compared to users of more mainstream operating systems;

Do you really guess that the freedom from an immoral fascistic spyware technology would make someone a 2nd class citizen?

That too is outside the scope of this review, but please be reassured that we will return to it soon enough.

Keep it up, guys, you are great! I’m waiting for continuation!

P.S.

And as for our methods of evaluation: They are based on exactly the same bench-tests used by PC Magazine, which is the world’s most trusted IT journal.

[Updated 05/24:]They are very productive people! A continuation is already here – read their another delirium called “A True History of Linux“. Cheers!

(As a variant there might be a question how to fix his computer hardware)

The talker is frustrated – he thinks I’m lying because I don’t want to help him. In the best case he concludes: “Ok, he is bad programmer” and stop further talking. In the worst case he is getting curious why I don’t know Windows and there starts a quite idiotic talk where I’m trying to tell about my work with terms understandable for “non-computer” people. I hate it.

Another idiotic talk:

- Maybe you’re a hacker? :-) (sounds like a joke)
- Hmm.. A kind of. (I just forget what the word “hacker” means for the people who learned about it from the mass-media)
My collocutor looking at me as at alien.
- And you really can crack a bank?!

So, in mass vision the programmers are the people who

• has a comprehensive knowledge of Windows
• can fix any computer defect
• the most skilful of them are “the hackers” and they can crack the banks

And a very minority remembers that “a programmer” comes from “to program”…