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Let Me Tell You…

Posted on February 6, 2010 - by Venik

Sukhoi Stealth Fighter’s First Flight

Defense Featured Russia
Sukhoi Stealth Fighter’s First Flight

As many of you already know, last week the Sukhoi T-50 stealth fighter prototype – Russia’s long-awaited answer to Lockheed-Martin’s F-22 – completed it’s maiden 47-minute flight from the manufacturer’s test airfield in the Russian Far East. The single-seat aircraft features low-observable geometry, two widely-separated engines with 3-D thrust-vectoring nozzles,  internal weapons bays, all-movable angled [...]

Posted on January 21, 2010 - by Venik

Oracle vs. MySQL

Computers Economy Featured Society
Oracle vs. MySQL

Sun Microsystems – the creator of Solaris operating system and manufacturer of my favorite computers – is being acquired by Oracle – the maker of the world’s leading commercial database software that works best on Sun servers. This seems like a good deal for both Oracle and Sun. Unfortunately, this merger will be very bad [...]

Posted on October 7, 2009 - by Venik

Your Savings and the Decline of the Dollar

Economy Featured Personal Society
Your Savings and the Decline of the Dollar

About a year ago I wrote about the plans Russia and other oil-producing nations have for breaking the tie between the price of oil and the value of the dollar. For years Russia and OPEC countries have been tiptoeing around this issue until the recent massive collapse of the US banking industry forced their plans [...]

Posted on October 1, 2009 - by Venik

War in Georgia: Reviewing EU Findings

European Union Featured Georgia Russia
War in Georgia: Reviewing EU Findings

As some of you may have heard, the international fact-finding mission (IIFFMCG) organized by the EU to investigate the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia has finally released its final report. As was expected, most of the blame for starting the war went to Georgia. Russia’s “fault”, according to the investigators, for the most part [...]

Posted on September 16, 2009 - by Venik

UN Finds Israeli War Crimes

Defense Featured Middle East
UN Finds Israeli War Crimes

The report by the UN fact finding mission on the Gaza conflict released on September 15 brings to light numerous war crimes committed by Tzahal against Palestinian civilians. A few quotes from the UN report:
The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes and possibly, in some respects, crimes against humanity, were committed by the [...]

Posted on August 22, 2009 - by Venik

Victims with Guns

European Union Featured History Society
Victims with Guns

Tomorrow’s seventy-year anniversary of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact is giving some historians and journalists pretending to be historians an unbearable urge to write nonsense. The Pact and, most importantly, its secret provisions are blamed by the Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians for the years of “Soviet occupation”. This was a difficult period in the history of [...]

Posted on August 7, 2009 - by Venik

Happy Anniversary, Misha

Featured Georgia Russia Society
Happy Anniversary, Misha

Tweeter celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Georgian-Russian war by setting it’s Web servers on fire. (For those of you with long-term memory problem, here is a brief recap of the events.) The Unix gurus at Tweeter’s datacenter blamed the downtime on unspecified hackers unleashing a DDoS attack. According to some networking experts interviewed by [...]

Posted on August 3, 2009 - by Venik

Finland Pushes Putin’s Buttons

Featured Former Colonies Russia Society
Finland Pushes Putin’s Buttons

As any family feud, this story has many ins and outs. Paavo Salonen from Finland married Rimma from Russia, they had a son – Anton – and they got divorced. Rimma’s older son from first marriage Nikita, who is now 19, lived with his stepfather Paavo in Finland. Rimma was living with her younger [...]

Posted on July 28, 2009 - by Venik

Loose Lips…

Featured Russia United States
Loose Lips…

Newspapers in America and Russia are busy busting Joe Biden’s chops for taking lead from Sarah Palin and going Maverick on relations with the Kremlin. It is not that Biden said something that the Russians didn’t already know: Russia’s economy and population are both in decline and long-term prospects are not exactly rosy. Depending on [...]

Posted on July 15, 2009 - by Venik

Talking to Taliban

Afghanistan Featured NATO Russia United States
Talking to Taliban

Coalition losses in Afghanistan continue mounting. Most casualties are sustained when troops are at their bases or on routine patrol missions. Recent reports suggest that the coalition is short on operational helicopters. Available fleets of attack helicopters and ground attack planes are stretched thin providing cover to supply convoys and ground patrols. The overall situation [...]

Posted on June 3, 2009 - by Venik

Medvedev vs. Putin

Featured Russia Society
Medvedev vs. Putin

A small scandal erupted in Russia’s Karelia region over the decision by a local newspaper to reprint the article from The Vancouver Sun critical of Medvedev. Editors of the Iskra – a small entertainment paper named after Lenin’s famed underground revolutionary newsletter and a relative newcomer to the Russian newspaper market – in a desperate [...]

Posted on May 17, 2009 - by Venik

Pipeline Business

Economy European Union Featured Russia
Pipeline Business

The EU continues waging a losing battle for its energy independence from Russia. Gazprom, hit hard by the global economic recession and dropping energy demands, may be skating on thin ice, but it is still well ahead of the EU.
Following the August war with Georgia, Russia moved to consolidate its gains in the region and [...]

Posted on April 30, 2009 - by Venik

The Road to Afghanistan

Afghanistan Featured NATO Russia United States
The Road to Afghanistan

The expedient defeat of NATO-sponsored Georgian army last August by the Russians left many hardliners in Washington and Brussels itching to respond. NATO’s decision to break formal contacts with Russia was a testament to NATO’s own political weakness. To add to the Alliance’s humiliation, the economic crisis forced the West to seek improved relations with [...]

Posted on April 24, 2009 - by Venik

Silver Lining

Defense Featured Russia
Silver Lining

State Duma – the lower house of the Russian Parliament – voted over the objections of the Communist Party to adopt the redesigned red star marking for military aircraft. The new design is similar to the old one, but features a smaller red star surrounded by a thin blue border. Unexpectedly, the new legislature was [...]

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Computers Russia Sideline

Novaya Gazeta and DDOS Attack

The Register, among others, reports that the Web site of one of Russia’s leading independent newspapers – the Novaya Gazeta – came under a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Currently the newspaper’s site is unstable. The reason I even noticed this news item is not because I am a big fan of Novaya Gazeta. It is [...]

Georgia Russia Sideline

Delusions in Tbilisi

Recently Russian online news service Lenta.ru published a Q&A session with a well-known Georgian political and military analyst Mamuka Areshidze, who is known for his anti-Kremlin attitudes but is also somehow not a particularly big supporter of Georgian El Duce. In other words, Areshidze is supposedly a moderate, a centrist and so his take on [...]

Afghanistan NATO Russia Sideline

Russians in Afghanistan

AP’s recent “Safety of Russian planes in Afghanistan questioned” by Catrina Stewart is exactly why female journalists should stick to writing about Gucci purses, chihuahuas, and SUVs. After some, no doubt, extensive research on the subject of military transport aviation, this broad came to the conclusion that the reason NATO keeps hiring Russian cargo aircraft [...]

Georgia Sideline

Saakashvili’s War

Entirely in line with his suspected drug abuse problem, Saakashvili is now waging war of words on the Wall Street Journal. In Georgia’s President Vows Changes (by Andrew Osborn, WSJ 2009-07-20) the following quote appeared:
“He also called the hopes of Georgia joining NATO “almost dead.” “It’s tragic,” he said. “It means the Russians fought for [...]

Computers Personal Sideline

Bluehost.com Web Hosting Problems

Bluehost.com is a large Web hosting provider based in Provo, Utah. It advertises “professional Web hosting” and claims to be “specializing in customer satisfaction”. Yesterday I learned neither of these claims is true. Originally, I selected Bluehost.com over my other top picks – Site5.com, Hostway.com, and my own old Sun E3000 server sitting in the [...]

Sideline Society

Buy a Microscope

A rather sad story on CNN tells us about a teenage girl from Washington who for many years has been suffering from an undiagnosed chronic bowel inflammation. For eight years she suffered from severe stomach pain and other serious symptoms, but her doctors were unable to identify the decease.  To make the long story short, [...]

History Photos Sideline

Reading Airshow, 2009

The Mid-Atlantic Air Museum (MAAM) is membership supported museum and aircraft restoration facility located at the Carl A. Spaatz Field, the regional airport serving Reading, Pennsylvania. The museum, founded by Russ Strine, the current President, collects and actively restores historic war planes and classic airliners as well as rare civilian and military aircraft. Many of [...]

Economy Sideline Society

Swiss Humor

The IMD – a Swiss business college situated on the shore of Lake Geneva popular among Russian nouveau riche – recently published a glossy report ranking “competitiveness” of national economies.
Reading the preamble to the report one may be very impressed by the advanced methodology used by IMD’s researchers. Everything looks very proper and scientific. It [...]

Russia Russian History Sideline Society

Russia’s New Policy on Historical Revisionism

The Wall Street Journal is commenting on Russia’s new policy to counter attempts at historical revisionism (“Russia Frames New Policy on History“, by Andrew Osborne, WSJ, May 19, 2009). According to WSJ’s hand-picked collection of opinions, Russia is trying to move back to the Soviet practice of tightly managing the official, state-approved version of history [...]

Photos Russian History Sideline Society

Photos: 2009 V-Day Celebrations in Russia

WWII V-Day, traditionally celebrated in Russia on May 9, is the most significant holiday in the country, rivaled only by the New Year. The government upped the anty this year by throwing the biggest military parade since the Soviet days, with more troops, tanks, and aircraft. The next year’s parade, commemorating 65-th anniversary of history’s [...]

Photos Russian History Sideline Society

Photos: Russian and Soviet Posters, part 4

The fourth and last part of the gallery featuring commercial and propaganda posters from the Soviet days and the time of the Russian Empire. Political and advertisement posters were a highly developed form of art in Russia and the Soviet Union. My favorite period is definitely the 1890-1930 Russian modernism with its avant-garde and supermatism [...]

Photos Russian History Sideline Society

Photos: Russian and Soviet Posters, part 3

The third part of the gallery featuring commercial and propaganda posters from the Soviet days and the time of the Russian Empire. Political and advertisement posters were a highly developed form of art in Russia and the Soviet Union. My favorite period is definitely the 1890-1930 Russian modernism with its avant-garde and supermatism movements.  The [...]

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