#russian technology

[shelf-days]

Короч, я купил телефон на Авроре, нас всего чуть больше трёхста в стране и мире)

Настроил почту — уже не плохо, жить можно.

Патриотизм, технологический суверенитет, руку на сердце, да, да, да! Дааааа! Ро-сссси-яяяяя! Ро-ссиии-яяя! Россия! 🇷🇺

Но это все оставим для обзорщиков и патриотов.

Я же провел настоящий тест, уделил внимание на то, на что действительно стоило обратить внимание:

Да, тест пройден!

[navalpost]

Detecting Submarine will be Availible with Propeller Trace It may be the hardest issue to detect and identify submarines during multi thread sea operations. Because solution should assure both to detect the "silent hunter" and to prevent mutual intervention.

[defenseupdatebd-blog]

MAIN NUCLEAR Reactor Work Started: Bangladesh’s Ruppur Nuclear Power Plant (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M7-LCZ_ypo)

[newstfionline]

Russian science is amazing. So why hasn’t it taken over the world?

By Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe, Jan. 4, 2015

The dramatic collapse of the Russian ruble last month cast a stark, unflattering spotlight on the economy of one of the world’s most important countries. In recent years Russia has become almost a petro-state—a nation of roughly 140 million people, many of them highly educated, whose wealth comes mostly from the blunt-force industries of resource extraction, and whose economy rises and falls on individual fluctuations in the price of oil or natural gas. When the price of oil started to slide, the ruble was suddenly vulnerable.

Other growing nations, like China, India, and Brazil, have diversified, building wealth from a wide base of technology and manufacturing. You can see this as you walk down the aisles at your local Best Buy, where the shelves are stocked with computers made in Chengdu and hard drives from Thailand, and again when you drive down the street, alongside cars made in Germany and Korea. But Russia has thrown off no such great global technology products. It’s unthinkable that you’d seek out a Russian laptop, or make a call on a Russian cellphone, or watch a movie on a Russian flat-screen TV.

The MIT science historian Loren Graham has spent years trying to understand how this possibly could have happened. What makes it so startling, Graham says, is that Russia isn’t a technology backwater—in fact, Russian scientists have been responsible for some of the most important scientific advances of the 20th century. Among their achievements, they invented lasers, did pioneering work on computers, and even came up with the idea of fracking—all of which were later developed and commercialized in other nations.

The ongoing inability to turn ideas into commerce has proved to be a profound problem for Russia—and ultimately for the rest of the world as well. The longer this massive nuclear power is economically dominated by resource oligarchs, rather than a stable, independent business sector, the longer the developed world will have to put up with it throwing its geopolitical weight around in unpredictable ways.

Today, Russia’s leaders are starting to acknowledge the importance of this economic gap. In his annual State-of-the-Union-style address, delivered in early December, Vladimir Putin declared that it was imperative that the country he has led for the past 15 years break its “critical dependence on foreign technology.” So far, efforts have largely taken the form of centralized initiatives, including one in the city of Skolkovo, which Kremlin officials have been trying—with the help of MIT—to turn into a Russian version of Silicon Valley.

But Graham’s findings suggest that this may not be enough. “Putin says, ‘We must diversify our economy, and we will do that,’ ” Graham said recently. “Well, to do that...they have to make all kinds of changes to their legal system, their patent system, the position of their investors. Technology doesn’t take off by itself. It has to have all kinds of supporting ingredients.”

Before a visit to Russia after the publication of his book last year, Graham spoke to Ideas by phone.

IDEAS: How would you describe Russia’s relationship with technology?

GRAHAM: There’s an amazing thing about Russia—I don’t know any other country that displays this characteristic—and that amazing thing is that for over 300 years, they’ve had wonderful technical and scientific ideas, and yet, they get almost no economic benefit out of them. They cannot translate ideas into commercial products.

IDEAS: Why not?

GRAHAM: I think Russia makes the mistake, and is making it right now, and has made it for a long time, of thinking that the secret to modernization is the technology itself. So they keep going after the technology—they’re doing that with MIT right now in Skolkovo. They think that if they can get the latest big thing, the latest new technology, that they’re in like Flynn. But actually it won’t do anything for them, because the characteristics [of] a society that are necessary for commercial success in technology do not exist in Russia—and those characteristics are social and legal and political and economic. The political leadership fears strong entrepreneurs who get rich because they fear that they’ll be competitors.

IDEAS: You’ve been studying Russian science for over 50 years. Have you heard this complaint from Russian scientists for a long time?

GRAHAM: I often heard Russian scientists say, you know, “All my good ideas get robbed! You Westerners steal them from us!” But there is, in the Russian scientific community, the belief that business is dirty. And that you should not demean yourself by stepping out of the world of ideas...and in Russia this is reinforced by the fact that there is a lot of corruption and so, to go into business is, in an intellectual’s mind, the same as getting into the dirty realm of crime, corruption, and wheeling and dealing.

IDEAS: Do you have a favorite example?

GRAHAM: A beautiful example is the laser. The laser is fundamental to our modern economy. We all use them—we use them in our cameras, printers. Everyone uses lasers all the time. But the laser is a fairly new technology—it was developed in the ’50s and ’60s, and two Russians got the Nobel Prize for inventing it! There was an American [who received the Nobel] too, Charles Townes—but two Russians, Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov, got the Nobel for it. Now, let’s ask, who is making the money off lasers today? There isn’t a single Russian company selling lasers on the international market that has any significance at all. Charles Townes, meanwhile...as soon as he developed a laser, even though he wasn’t a businessman—he was your typical physics professor—he said, “Hey! I think someone could make money off this! I’m not a businessman, but I’m going to get my slice.” So he immediately took out a patent on what he developed, and later he sold that patent to a business, because though he himself did not want to run a business, he still had a sense of what he had on his hands. And the Russians did nothing like that—in fact, they couldn’t in the environment in which they lived.

IDEAS: Why not? Were efforts to commercialize lasers squelched in Russia?

GRAHAM: They weren’t squelched—they never really got going. I interviewed Prokhorov—it never entered his head to start a company. And even if it had entered his head—there was no patent system, there were no investors, he couldn’t have an IPO. All the things that go into making technology economically successful were missing. It was worse then, because it was still the Soviet Union. But it’s not much better now—there’s no real investor community. The angel investors that invest in high technology in Silicon Valley, around Kendall Square, and all that—that doesn’t exist in Russia.

IDEAS: Are ordinary Americans different from ordinary Russians in their attitudes toward innovation?

GRAHAM: One of the characteristics of American culture is that successful entrepreneurs become almost cult figures—I mean, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates. These people are held up in popular culture as role models, and they have almost iconic status. There’s no one like that in Russia.

IDEAS: But don’t Russian scientists end up on stamps and so forth?

GRAHAM: Sure, they get celebrated on stamps—but they get celebrated as scientists. They don’t get celebrated as technical entrepreneurs. There’s a big difference between someone who works in a laboratory and gets all kinds of accolades, but doesn’t do anything that affects the economy.

IDEAS: Are there exceptions?

GRAHAM: The exceptions tend to be in software. Software is easier to make a go of because it’s an intellectual product, not really a material product—it’s something you create with your mind. And if we’re talking about products of the mind, the Russians are pretty good at those—think about the literature and the music and so forth. What they are not good at is inventing a material thing and manufacturing it and making a success of it—that’s what lasers require. It wasn’t enough to just invent it.

With software, for one thing, you don’t run into corruption, whereas if you want to try to build something and manufacture something that requires a factory in Russia, or a storefront for that matter, you’re going to be visited by someone who says you really need protection and unless you pay me, your business will be trashed.

IDEAS: How much of this is simply the result of the Soviet Union being a system with no private enterprise?

GRAHAM: The hangover of the Soviet Union is important, but it’s not the whole story at all. In my book, I talk about the same problems in the Tsarist period—particularly in the 19th century. And the example I often give there is electric lighting. There was a man named Yablochkov who developed electric lights. Yablochkov went to Western Europe and he illuminated the avenues of Paris and London. That’s when Paris got its nickname that it’s still called today—“The City of Lights.”

IDEAS: That sounds like an example of taking an idea and putting it into practice.

GRAHAM: Right. But then listen to this: The Russian government persuaded Yablochkov to come back to Russia after he got rich in France—and to do it in Russia. He came back to Russia, started a company, and went bankrupt—he couldn’t find investors! He couldn’t even get the hotel he was living in to install his lights. They preferred gas lights.

IDEAS: Was fracking really developed in Russia?

GRAHAM: It’s a very little known story. In the 1950s, Russians developed the idea of fracking, and they published articles about it. And then what happened? Nothing. They didn’t use it. These articles appeared in academic journals. They didn’t appear in business journals, because there really weren’t any business journals! So Americans developed fracking, you know, 30 years later!

And now there are American companies over in Russia—Chevron, Exxon, BP—who are teaching the Russians how to successfully do fracking even though the Russians developed the idea.

IDEAS: Do you see Russia’s current leaders trying to fix this problem?

GRAHAM: I think [some of them] do realize that Russia needs to base its economy much more on what you’d call knowledge industries and much less on natural products, like oil and gas. They know that. And also there is private business in Russia now....But there are still plenty of obstacles.

IDEAS: How important is the failure to commercialize science to the way Russia is today more broadly?

GRAHAM: I think it’s very significant. There are people in Russia who say—it’s a hyperbole but it’s a fair statement—that Russia’s just Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons. Russia, right now, despite 300 years of trying to industrialize and modernize, it’s an economy that’s primarily based on oil and gas. It’s a tragedy, and...the Russian leaders keep thinking that the way to solve the problem is by government edict—you know, create Skolkovo, and so forth. I would say that the failure of Russia to adequately use the talents of its scientists and engineers is one of the important reasons why Russia has not been able to make the transition to democracy. Because the government keeps thinking, we’ve got to modernize—but the way they choose to solve the problem just drives the problem deeper.

[newstfionline]

Russia Battles Online Foes and Freedoms

By Benjamin Bidder, Der Spiegel, Aug. 10, 2012 The reserved Russian businessman who recently moved his team into a loft in London's Soho district, between the gay bars and esoterica stores, is driven by an ambitious goal: He wants to make his Internet startup the next Facebook, he says, "the next $100 billion company."

Born Andrey Vagnerovich Ogandzhanyants in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, he now goes by the name Andrey Andreyev, which is easier for investors to pronounce. From his offices in London, Andreyev oversees Badoo, a growing online-dating and social-networking site.

Badoo has over 3 million users in Germany and 157 million globally, with around 100,000 more joining each day. The site is half social network along the lines of Facebook and half dating service, with both website and smartphone app employing GPS to locate nearby users interested in getting a drink, flirting or even starting an affair.

Singles use Badoo to search for love, unfaithful spouses seek out adventure and prostitutes look for new clients. Andreyev's site serves the role of a nightclub, except that no one has to strip and dance on the bar to get attention here. Instead, users can pay a few euros to have their picture displayed to other users, a business model that has helped Badoo rake in $150 million (€122 million) in annual sales. Andreyev himself seems to follow the same communications policy as a pimp might--he doesn't like to talk about his business.

Andreyev is a good example of both the successes and the problems faced by Russian Internet entrepreneurs, whose creativity and cool-headed pursuit of profit are stealing a share of the market away from American behemoths such as Google and Facebook--and doing so with the Kremlin's blessing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB agent, clearly enjoys seeing the same power dynamics play out in European cyberspace as once did in Europe itself. Just as Washington and Moscow divided the Continent into spheres of influence during the Cold War, today, American and Russian companies are battling for dominance of the Internet. Market research shows that 16 of the 20 most popular websites in Europe are American. Not one of those top 20 is German, French or British, while the remaining four are all Russian. Indeed, the IT boom is the Russian economy's most notable success since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Putin has welcomed Russia's rise to become a major digital power, and he's happy to see Russian Internet companies chipping away at America's dominance. At home, though, Putin fears the Internet for its role as a place where resistance is fomented against his government. Within Russia, he keeps IT firms under the control of state-owned enterprises and a small circle of loyal oligarchs.

He also hastily implemented a controversial Internet law last week that the Kremlin pushed through the Duma, Russia's parliament in mid-July. The law forces Internet providers to use web filters, a new infrastructure that makes it possible to introduce a broad program of censorship at any time.

The law is part of Putin's push, three months after his return to the Kremlin, to put the rebellious Russian population back in its place. A trial began last Monday against members of the punk band Pussy Riot, who had sung protest songs against Putin in a church. And, last Tuesday, a public prosecutor brought charges against Russia's most famous blogger, Alexei Navalny, who may face a decade behind bars.

Given these circumstances, it's not all that surprising that people doing business in this environment tend to be cautious. Banker Alexander Mamut, said to be worth $2.1 billion and the owner of blogging platform Livejournal.com, which is popular in the US as well, avoids interviews as he is wary of overly political questions. Yuri Milner, a major investor with Facebook, prefers to talk about his oversees business deals rather than about his Russian online empire, the Mail.ru Group, whose pages are visited by around 70 percent of all Russian Internet users.

Milner's most important financial backer is Alisher Usmanov, Russia's wealthiest man with a fortune worth $18 billion. Usmanov's wife, Irina, coaches Russian Olympic rhythmic gymnasts. Usmanov owes his wealth to business deals in the gas and steel industries, but also to his political connections. In 2006, with Putin's blessing, Usmanov bought the newspaper publisher Kommersant, where he has been known to act directly in the Kremlin's interest. In December, when Kommersant's influential and independent-minded newsmagazine Vlast ("Power") printed an image of a ballot on which an angry voter had written "Putin, f… you!" in large red letters, Usmanov fired Kommersant's editor-in-chief the very same day.

Another major player in the Internet industry has its headquarters in a futuristic new building in downtown Moscow. Arkady Volozh, CEO of the search engine Yandex, has a panoramic view from his office, with the golden domes of the Kremlin glinting in the distance. The initial public offering of Volozh's search engine on Wall Street in 2011 raised $1.3 billion.

Yandex is the only comprehensive, global search index other than Google and Microsoft's Bing. This made it all the more important to the Russian government to ensure its influence over the search engine. Sberbank, the giant state-owned savings bank run by Putin's former economic minister German Gref, holds a so-called "golden share" in Yandex, which gives it the right to block any sale of more than 25 percent of the company. The Kremlin doesn't want the search engine to fall into foreign hands. The company is "of strategic importance," Volozh says, just like Gazprom, pipeline operators or telephone companies. Every day, 19 million Russians visit the Yandex site, which also displays news. This year, for the first time, the company reached more Russians than the country's biggest TV channel.

Yandex has 3,500 employees, nearly twice as many as it had just two years ago. With a 60 percent market share, the search engine is the market leader within Russia, outstripping Google. It hopes to show up the American giant elsewhere, as well. In Ukraine, for example, the Russian company has boosted its market share from 18 to 25 percent.

In September 2011, the company expanded beyond the borders of the former Eastern Bloc for the first time. Yandex hopes to win away up to 20 percent of Google's market volume in Turkey by drawing users with new functions, such as a search feature for Koran verses and traffic alerts for chronically congested Istanbul.

The new office on the Bosporus is meant to be a foothold for the leap into the global market. Yandex wants to take on countries in which Google holds sway and users are eager for alternatives to the Californian giant--Brazil, Thailand, Poland and "Germany would fit as well," Volozh says. Yandex started feeling out the German market this June, initially as a partner of MetaGer.de, a search engine run by the University of Hanover. "Yandex has hits that Google would never find," MetaGer.de's Wolfgang Sander-Beuermann says in praising the Russian search engine.

Yandex makes $179 million in profit from $622 million in annual sales, roughly the same profit margin as the gas industry giant Gazprom, and the market is far from saturated. In the second quarter of 2012, profits saw a year-on-year growth of 76 percent.

Yandex's triumphal advance represents the success of Russia's new economy. "Runet," a term used to describe the Russian segment of the Internet, has long provided a place where IT pioneers, such as Volozh, could experiment largely undisturbed by competition from America. Amazon and eBay preferred to focus on financially strong markets in Europe and Asia, while Google found itself struggling with the Cyrillic alphabet and the pitfalls of Russian grammar.

Before moving to London, Andrey Andreyev created a Russian forerunner to Badoo in Moscow, as well as an online advertising company that Google was interested in buying for $140 million in 2008. The Kremlin nixed that deal, wanting "Runet" to remain Russian.

The Internet has become a significant power factor in Russia. Last year, the country overtook Germany as Europe's largest Internet nation, with 70 million people from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok surfing the net. When the Kremlin once again used fraud in parliamentary elections held in December, the opposition struck back online, posting videos that showed the manipulation taking place. State-run television hid the existence of these videos, but one clip--showing a representative of Election Commission No. 2501 filling out ballot after ballot himself--was viewed around 2 million times on Youtube.

One particular blogger left his mark on that election campaign. Lawyer Alexei Navalny, 35 at the time, leveled online accusations of corruption against politicians and high-level government employees, calling Putin's United Russia "a party of crooks and thieves." Navalny struck a nerve with voters fed up with corruption and cronyism. Despite ballot-rigging on a massive scale, United Russia lost 12 million voters, and its overall support dipped below 50 percent.

Putin's party has been out for revenge ever since. In late July, access to Navalny's website was blocked, supposedly by accident. Now the blogger must appear in court to defend himself against charges that he misappropriated public funds in 2009 while working as a governor's adviser. If convicted, Navalny faces up to 10 years in prison.

The general climate, both in Russia and online, has grown harsher since Putin took over the presidency from Dmitry Medvedev in May. As president, Medvedev liked to be photographed with an iPad in hand, he kept a blog and he presented himself in his Sunday speeches as the Internet's greatest protector.

As recently as December, Putin also lauded the Internet as "free and enormously democratic." But that was nothing more than campaign rhetoric. Since the beginning of August, the new Internet law has made it possible for authorities to block websites without a court order. The Kremlin officially says it wants to fight online child pornography. But the technology Russia's Internet providers are now acquiring resembles what censors from China's Communist Party use to block sites that don't toe the party line. This method, known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), makes it possible to block websites and to monitor chat programs, such as the one from popular provider ICQ.

The Kremlin's efforts to battle the Internet's influence are only fanning the flames of conflict with Russia's ambitious and increasingly confident IT sector. Yandex, for example, protested openly against the new law because it "does not fulfill the stated objective of protecting children, but can theoretically be misused."

In few other countries are social networks as influential as in Russia. Russian users spend an average of around 10 hours a month on such sites, nearly twice as much as the global average. Some hardliners call for shutting down Russia's largest Facebook clone, VKontakte.ru, on the grounds that it allegedly serves as a platform for child pornography. Security agencies dislike that the site provides Putin's opponents a forum for planning mass rallies. The Kremlin fears a scenario such as unfolded during the Arab Spring, when Facebook and Twitter became the demonstrators' most important channels of communication.

VKontakte has nearly 110 million users throughout Eastern Europe--and a stubborn boss. With his pale features, Pavel Durov, 27, even looks a bit like Neo, the cyber-rebel from the "Matrix" trilogy. This winter, when the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia's domestic security agency, demanded that Durov shut down certain forums in which tens of thousands of Russians were arranging to meet for massive demonstrations against electoral fraud, the head of VKontakte resisted publicly. "I don't know where this will end," he tweeted. "But we're still standing."

Durov must also proceed with caution since 40 percent of his social network belongs to Usmanov, the Internet magnate with the close ties to the Kremlin. Still, that hasn't stopped Durov from penning a manifesto that calls for Internet freedom--and for high penalty taxes on oil and gas corporations, the economic pillars of Putin's system. Durov hopes this will help overcome the country's natural resource dependency. His manifesto reads like a declaration of war by the new Russia against the old one.

[made-in-russia]

Robots to marry and reproduce in Russia?

Reuters / Toshiyuki Aizawa

Russian robots are set to prove they are no strangers to human emotions. The first-ever marriage between a loving couple of robotic creatures is scheduled to take place in Moscow.

There will be no banquet in honor of Apitcompych and Fiolenta  – but they will be wearing wedding gowns.

What they cannot live without is energy, though. Now, instead of exchanging wedding rings, the newly-weds will have their flash cards plugged into each other’s sockets.

In fact, the bridegroom, Apitcompych, has a real man’s job, working as an administrator at a computer equipment store. He sorts the goods, communicates with the customers by e-mail and Skype, and finds friends on social networks.

The robot actually met his fiancée on Facebook. When Cupid shot a love arrow for Apitcompych and Fiolenta, the couple immediately decided to put an official stamp on their relationship. Many wonder, whether they are in such a hurry because Fiolenta is expecting.

Whatever the reason, the forthcoming robotic wedding is meant to serve as a role model for young people who wait too long to settle down and start families, often opting for ‘virtual love’ on the Internet .source

[made-in-russia]

Practice Shoot In Primorye